What is Color? Part 2: Why royals wear purple

Are there new colors you could see? And why are they impossible to imagine before you’ve seen them? Can you lose your color vision? And what does any of this have to do with linguistic color terms, why the military likes colorblind people for a particular task, and why Eagleman suggests that the cultural history of Thailand was influenced by one single, unknown neurodivergent?

Episode Audio

Episode Video

More Information:

By staring at a “fatigue template” for 20–60 seconds (a square in the left column), then switching your gaze to the target field (middle column), it is possible to view “impossible” colors. Figure from Wikipedia.

Do you see blue or green? This viral test plays with color perception

Eagleman DM. Visual illusions and neurobiology. Nature Reviews Neuroscience. 2001 Dec 1;2(12):920-6.

UC Berkeley News: Scientists trick the eye into seeing new color ‘olo’

Some information on tetrachromacy (and why all the websites that claim to test it aren’t valid)

For more on color and language, check out Ep 28: Does your language shape your thinking? (with Lera Boroditsky)

For more on synesthesia, check out Episode 4: Do the Northern lights make noise, and why did Pythagoras think 5 was a male?

and see my book Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia

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"David Eagleman offers startling lessons.... His method is to ask us to cast off our lazy commonplace assumptions.
- The Guardian

"David Eagleman is the kind of guy who really does make being a neuroscientist look like fun."
- New York Times

"What Eagleman seems to be calling for is a new Enlightenment."
- Sunday Herald

"[A] neuroscientist and polymath."
- Wall Street Journal

"A popularizer of impressive gusto...[Eagleman] aims, grandly, to do for the study of the mind what Copernicus did for the study of the stars."
- New York Observer

"Eagleman has a talent for testing the untestable, for taking seemingly sophomoric notions and using them to nail down the slippery stuff of consciousness."
- The New Yorker