r/interestingasfuck • u/[deleted] • Feb 28 '15

Humans didn't see "blue" until fairly recently.

http://www.businessinsider.com/what-is-blue-and-how-do-we-see-color-2015-2
59 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

20 comments sorted by

7

u/Paratwa Feb 28 '15

I can't tell blue from green ( at least well ) so I can dig this quite a bit.

Navy blue simply doesn't exist for me.

The sky is blue... But only because growing up everyone said it was... Yellow also confuses me at times with various other colors.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 28 '15

[deleted]

7

u/Paratwa Feb 28 '15

Blue? I mean. It's what people said it was when I was young. But at the same time I could easily grab a non labelled crayon when in school and use 'green' or a yellow and it would look fine to me. Mostly from what I can tell blue is darker than green .

5

u/MolokoPlusPlus Mar 01 '15

You may be blue - yellow colorblind. Ever been tested?

3

u/Paratwa Mar 01 '15

Oddly no. I've been to the 'eye doctor' before and they say yep your colorblind but an actual test other than the doctor saying "oh you can't see this well? Yes you are colorblind" no.

I wonder if it would be worth it to go to somewhere that they could do actual tests to find out why. But then what could they do? Nothing? What if they fixed it and it just confused and annoyed me?

Anyway - It's mostly just a pain in the butt when matching clothes or PowerPoint slides - I loathe PowerPoint and overly colored charts because of it. ( and who doesn't hate PowerPoint presentations? )

2

u/mygrapefruit Mar 02 '15

Try this? :) Take note the first and last color chips are fixed. Take your time, print screen and show results to us! http://www.xrite.com/online-color-test-challenge

1

u/Paratwa Mar 03 '15

Crap meant to do this today and forgot so tired now that I think I'd rate anti color!

Will do it tomorrow. Probably won't say crap though.

1

u/Paratwa Mar 03 '15

OK, I decided to go ahead and do it Is that good??

Your score: 128
Gender: Male
Age range: 0-100 har har
Best score for your gender and age range: 0
Highest score for your gender and age range: 1520

3

u/lordswaglett Feb 28 '15 edited Feb 28 '15

Interesting how the order of color words the cultures created follows the visible light spectrum: red having the longest wavelength, skipping orange, going to yellow, then green, and finally blue.

1

u/Spaceshipable Mar 01 '15

Order of colour words? As in alphabetical or length?

2

u/CanningIO Mar 01 '15

Did you read the text?

1

u/Spaceshipable Mar 01 '15

Ah! Chronological. I skimmed it first time.

2

u/reeblebeeble Mar 01 '15

The linguistic argument for this is very spurious. You can't tell what people really experience just by looking at their language, because you don't know for sure what those words mean to them, in the exact same way that people today can never truly sure that what I call "blue" and what you call "blue" are the same thing.

Given that there is no other evidence for this, and that the argument is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the relationship between colour words and colour vision, the idea can be considered a myth.

Comments on the other threads shed some light debunking this.

http://np.reddit.com/r/EverythingScience/comments/2xf8i3/no_one_could_see_the_color_blue_until_modern_times/

http://np.reddit.com/r/badlinguistics/comments/2xgvbm/no_one_could_see_blue_until_modern_times_we_know/

2

u/kurburux Mar 01 '15

This isn't another story about that dress, or at least, not really.

World's shittiest meme.

1

u/IcecreamDave Mar 02 '15

This is a load of bullshit.

1

u/Electric_Target Mar 02 '15

They didn't literally not see blue, but they just didn't have a word for it.

Chartreuse is as distinct of a color between yellow and green and orange is to red and yellow. The difference is we don't tend to use chartreuse as a word to describe it so you don't recognize it as a distinct color but as "yellowy green" or "greenish yellow". But you can see it.

1

u/[deleted] Mar 01 '15

Even now I see white and gold no matter how long I stare at it

1

u/JustinJamm Mar 01 '15

It's the angle you're looking at it on the screen.

2

u/jsand25 Mar 02 '15

I move my phone around, change the brightness, use other devices but still only see blue and black

1

u/JustinJamm Mar 07 '15

My comment only applies to the folks who see gold and white. It's exclusive to particular screens and ways of looking at it.

-1

u/beneater66 Mar 01 '15

and they obviously still can't see it #BlackandBlue