What is color? Part 1: Why hunters wear orange

Why do birds and bees choose different flowers? Why do mammals’ eyes seem to be optimized for moving around at night, and what does that have to do with hairless humans getting angry? What does any of this have to do with road signs, camouflage, mantis shrimp, the sun, the dress that broke the internet, and women who can see more colors than you can?

Episode Audio

Episode Video

More Information:

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.

Changizi MA, Zhang Q, Shimojo S. Bare skin, blood and the evolution of primate colour vision. Biology letters. 2006 Jun 22;2(2):217-21.

SUBSCRIBE AND LISTEN ON:

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

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

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

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

"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

"David Eagleman may be the best combination of scientist and fiction-writer alive."
- Stewart Brand

"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

Wednesday is Indigo Blue

Sum

The Runaway Species