Why do people see different colours?

Why do we see
the shoe and the dress differently?

It looks like the internet is baffled again by the simplest

of things – a shoe.
This, of course, is not the first time people have been
debating the colour of a clothing item as last year we were all
wrapped up in the white/gold or blue/black dress debacle
[deɪ'bɑːkl] провал and now we have the shoe. Is it pink and
white or grey and mint green? Who knows? Well, the person
who originally posted the photo of the shoe assures us that
the physical shoes are actually pink and white but hundreds
of people have been saying on social media that they can see
the shoes as grey and mint green.

It was the dress that captured the attention of the

masses last year with many people saying they see it as
white and gold and others saying it is blue and black,
however, the original poster showed other pictures in which
the dress is definitely blue and black.
 But what is the actual reason for the difference in
perception of these colours? It is down to a variety of factors
such as lighting, phone/computer screen display, brains
interpretation and type of sight. There is no reason for
absolute sure, but some photographers have come out to say
that it’s all down to white balance.
What is white balance?
White balance is a feature that many photo editors and
photographers will be familiar with and it refers to the
action of removing colour casts from a photo so that an
object that is physically white, appears white in the photo.
The reason a colour may look different in a photograph than
it is in real life is down to the colour temperature in the
environment when you were taking the picture. If a colour
temperature is ‘cool’ it means there will be more blue tones
in the photo, if the colour temperature is ‘warm’ there will be
more yellow tones in the photo. The dress may have
appeared blue with the colour cast, but after white balance it
can appear white.
 You could say it is down to people’s eyes, seeing as we
all have varying ['veərɪ] ratios соотношение of red to green
cones in our eyes which cause everyone to perceive colour in
their own way, but usually in very subtle ['sʌtl] тонкий
differences.

How green is my valley?

Our colour vision starts with the sensors in the back of
the eye that turn light information into electrical signals in
the brain – neuroscientists call them photoreceptors. We
have a number of different kinds of these, and most people
have three different photoreceptors for coloured light. These
are sensitive to blues, greens and reds respectively соответственно,
and the information is combined to allow us to perceive the
full range of colours. Most colour blind men have a weakness
in the photoreceptors for green, so they lose a corresponding
sensitivity to the shades of green that this variety helps to
distinguish.
At the other end of the scale, some people have a
particularly heightened sensitivity to colour. Scientists call
these people tetrachromats, meaning “four colours”, after the
four – rather than three – colour photoreceptors they
possess. Birds and reptiles are tetrachromatic, and this is
what allows them to see into the infrared инфракрасный and
ultraviolet spectra. Human tetrachromats cannot see beyond
the normal visible light spectrum, but instead have an extra
photoreceptor that is most sensitive to colour in the scale
between red and green, making them more sensitive to all
colours within the normal human range. To these individuals,
it is the rest of us who are colour blind, as while most of us
would be unable to easily distinguish an exact shade of
summer-grass-green from Spanish-lime-green, to a
tetrachromat it would seem obvious.
Behind blue eyes
My worry about your inner perception of the colour blue
is a facet of the basic isolation that is part of the human
condition. Even if we think we can really know other people,
we cannot be certain of that knowledge.
Historically, psychologists have adopted a stance called
behaviourism, which acts as if questions about inner
experience are irrelevant. This approach states that if you
call my blue "blue", and you can always tell it from red, and
if we both know it is the correct colour for the sky, my eyes
and the Smurfs, then who cares what the inner experience
is?
There is a lot of mileage ['maɪlɪʤ] in this perspective,
but maybe there is also some wisdom in trying to convince
ourselves that the difference between our inner experiences
is real, and does matter – and, in fact, that some difference
is inevitable. We use common words, and use them to refer
to shared experiences, but nobody can see the same sunset,
merely because perception is a property of the person, not of
the sunset. Because there is something that it is like to be
you, and your “you-ness” is unique, we are certainly seeing
different things when we talk about looking at something
blue, if only because the act of seeing incorporates feelings
and memories, as well as the raw light information arriving
at our eyes.