Once Upon a BLUE Moon - No one could see the color blue until modern times

[zorgon]

Once Upon a BLUE Moon - No one could see the color blue until modern times

KEVIN LORIA
FEB. 27, 2015, 6:07 PM




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

It's about the way that humans see the world and how until we have a way to describe something, even something so fundamental as a color, we may not even notice that it's there.

Until relatively recently in human history, "blue" didn't exist, not in the way we think of it.

As the delightful Radiolab episode "Colors" describes, ancient languages didn't have a word for blue — not Greek, not Chinese, not Japanese, not Hebrew. And without a word for the color, there is evidence that they may not have seen it at all.

How we realized blue was missing

In "The Odyssey," Homer famously describes the "wine-dark sea." But why "wine-dark" and not deep blue or green?

In 1858 a scholar named William Gladstone, who later became the prime minister of Great Britain, noticed that this wasn't the only strange color description. Though the poet spends page after page describing the intricate details of clothing, armor, weaponry, facial features, animals, and more, his references to color are strange. Iron and sheep are violet; honey is green.

So Gladstone decided to count the color references in the book. And while black is mentioned almost 200 times and white about 100, other colors are rare. Red is mentioned fewer than 15 times, and yellow and green fewer than 10. Gladstone started looking at other ancient Greek texts and noticed the same thing — there was never anything described as "blue." The word didn't even exist.

It seemed the Greeks lived in a murky and muddy world, devoid of color, mostly black and white and metallic, with occasional flashes of red or yellow.

Gladstone thought this was perhaps something unique to the Greeks, but a philologist named Lazarus Geiger followed up on his work and noticed this was true across cultures.

He studied Icelandic sagas, the Koran, ancient Chinese stories, and an ancient Hebrew version of the Bible. Of Hindu Vedic hymns, he wrote: "These hymns, of more than ten thousand lines, are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely any subject is evoked more frequently. The sun and reddening dawn's play of color, day and night, cloud and lightning, the air and ether, all these are unfolded before us, again and again ... but there is one thing no one would ever learn from these ancient songs ... and that is that the sky is blue."

There was no blue, not in the way that we know the color — it wasn't distinguished from green or darker shades.

Geiger looked to see when "blue" started to appear in languages and found an odd pattern all over the world.

Every language first had a word for black and for white, or dark and light. The next word for a color to come into existence — in every language studied around the world — was red, the color of blood and wine.

After red, historically, yellow appears, and later, green (though in a couple of languages, yellow and green switch places). The last of these colors to appear in every language is blue.

The only ancient culture to develop a word for blue was the Egyptians — and as it happens, they were also the only culture that had a way to produce a blue dye.

If you think about it, blue doesn't appear much in nature — there are almost no blue animals, blue eyes are rare, and blue flowers are mostly human creations. There is, of course, the sky, but is that really blue? As we've seen from Geiger's work, even scriptures that contemplate the heavens continuously still do not necessarily see it as "blue."


Is the sky really blue? What does that mean?

In fact, one researcher that Radiolab spoke with — Guy Deutscher, author of "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages," tried a casual experiment with that. In theory, one of children's first questions is, "Why is the sky blue?" So he raised his daughter while being careful to never describe the color of the sky to her, and then one day asked her what color she saw when she looked up.

Alma, Deutscher's daughter, had no idea. The sky was colorless. Eventually she decided it was white, and later on, eventually blue. So blue was not the first thing she saw or gravitated toward, though it is where she settled in the end.

So before we had a word for it, did people not naturally see blue?
This part gets a little complicated, because we do not know exactly what was going through Homer's brain when he described the wine-dark sea and the violet sheep — but we do know that ancient Greeks and others in the ancient world had the same biology and therefore same capability to see color that we do.

But do you really see something if you don't have a word for it?

A researcher named Jules Davidoff traveled to Namibia to investigate this, where he conducted an experiment with the Himba tribe, which speaks a language that has no word for blue or distinction between blue and green.


Namibian tribe member participating in a research project.

When shown a circle with 11 green squares and one blue, they could not pick out which one was different from the others — or those who could see a difference took much longer and made more mistakes than would make sense to us, who can clearly spot the blue square.

But the Himba have more words for types of green than we do in English.

When looking at a circle of green squares with only one slightly different shade, they could immediately spot the different one. Can you?


Vidipedia/Himba Colour Experiment  - Which square is the outlier?

For most of us, that's harder.

This was the unique square:


Vidipedia/Himba Colour Experiment

Davidoff says that without a word for a color, without a way of identifying it as different, it is much harder for us to notice what is unique about it — even though our eyes are physically seeing the blocks it in the same way.

So before blue became a common concept, maybe humans saw it. But it seems they did not know they were seeing it.

If you see something yet can't see it, does it exist? Did colors come into existence over time? Not technically, but our ability to notice them may have ...

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

[zorgon]

25% of the people have a 4th cone and see colors as they are

Yes ArMaP This IS about COLOR



Given the sudden interest for the color of dresses and vision, here some of the fascinating findings we did recently.

The color nuances we see depend on the number and distribution of cones (=color receptors) in our eye. You can check this rainbow: how many color nuances do you count?




You see less than 20 color nuances: you are a dichromats, like dogs, which means you have 2 types of cones only. You are likely to wear black, beige, and blue. 25% of the population is dichromat.

You see between 20 and 32 color nuances: you are a trichromat, you have 3 types of cones (in the purple/blue, green and red area). You enjoy different colors as you can appreciate them. 50% of the population is trichromat.

You see between 33 and 39 colors: you are a tetrachromat, like bees, and have 4 types of cones (in the purple/blue, green, red plus yellow area). You are irritated by yellow, so this color will be nowhere to be found in your wardrobe. 25% of the population is tetrachromat.

You see more than 39 color nuances: come on, you are making up things! there are only 39 different colors in the test and probably only 35 are properly translated by your computer screen anyway

It is highly probable that people who have an additional 4th cone do not get tricked by blue/black or white/gold dresses, no matter the background light

Sources: Diana Derval, The Right Sensory Mix: Targeting Consumer Product Development Scientifically, Springer 2010


https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/25-people-have-4th-cone-see-colors-p-prof-diana-derval

[ArMaP]

Saying that people could not see blue because they didn't have a word for it is stupid, not knowing how to call something doesn't stop us from seeing them.

PS: I see 32 different shades on that chart.

[The Seeker]

i believe it is possible that the eyes of the ancients couldn't distinguish as many colors; i count 36 bars in the color graph; what say you?

seeker

[space otter]

well I can see 44 different color bands....

so what does that say.?

that I don't fit in any of these categories either...

OR

they are just tryin to mess with ya.....or maybe they can't count

bwhahahahahahah

whatever





here play with this for a while
http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-well-do-you-see-color-173018

I do believe ArMaP posted it way back...

I just re did it and got an 11   0 is perfect
I think I had a 9  before.. sigh.. old age creepin in...sigh

[thorfourwinds]

i believe it is possible that the eyes of the ancients couldn't distinguish as many colors; i count 36 bars in the color graph; what say you?

seeker

Welcome back, old friend...32 here...but we not be a Magician.   

[zorgon]

well I can see 44 different color bands....

so what does that say.?

That you cheated and counted width on the trick wider bars   I see 39 easily though the two wide light green ones tend to blur into one

that I don't fit in any of these categories either...

Well your an otter so weird is expected

BTW New York City lifted the ban on FERRETS which allows minks weasels and OTTERS now as well

[burntheships]

34 give or take one or two.

[zorgon]

PS: I see 32 different shades on that chart.

That is interesting

Back at ATS one of the problems we had with anomaly hunting was GRAYSCALE SHADES

Many people can not see or separate many shades of gray   Sure eyesight, glasses, monitor type, computer type and a closed mind all played a role when people could only see "Blurry Rocks"

But many tried to see what some of us could see without effort/

At the 2007 UFO Convention we went to with ATS we had a huge blowup of Copernicus Crater.  There were two people looking at it... one a skeptic who saw only blurry rocks and a LLNL physicist who, like us could spot them with a glance. So here was this Physicist scream at the skeptic...  "Man how can you NOT see this? It's as plane as the nose on your face!"

It seems while certain people can spot anomalies instantly (all artists I have ever known can) others cannot make it out. Only a small few ever change over  like The Borg at ATS who one day caught the scale and saw what I saw  and from that point on saw the rest.

Conditioning? Power of suggestion? No  he simply was able to wrap his mind around the scale and then was able to see

For that reason I used COLOR a lot  not to cheat an anomaly, but to high light it  For the simple reason that some people see it better in other colors  I will post a 'ghost' in a bit to illustrate

But here is one...   from Copernicus in the early days of John's moon thread that started all this

Now when I first posted this I used a pale purple so as not to over power the color  I can see it fine but I discovered that many who cannot see gray scale also cannot tell pale purple from gray



For comparison here is the clip as large as possible from the original negative without scaling



And here it is in a sepia tone



These variation in color make it a lot easier for many people to see the objects  Thing is that you need to grasp the SCALE in your nine and you will see them too

I would like to do a  rehash of the Copernicus mine  but maybe in sections so its not a giant 1000 page thread   I will do that as I revamp those pages

One of my favorites and easiest to spot on the big picture by almost everyone is this one below. Now on many copies of this Copernicus image the left side is cut off, leaving this thing unseen... but it is there in the copy from John. Called this "Control Valve" based on a similar shaped structure at an Earth mine. The black line across is a strip joint

Original gray scale




Purple tint...

[Pimander]

I agree that the way we see influences the discussions about potential anomalies.

When I did the RAF selection tests I scored poorly at image analysis.  I just could not see things other candidates could in pictures.  I scored higher at other types of analysis and I actually performed better making decisions under pressure than I did without pressure.  I had the profile of an air traffic controller, fighter controller or intelligence analyst.  What would you choose?

So ArMaP can't see colours as well as some of you.  I can see that being ammunition for debates about anomalies. LOL 

[ArMaP]

So ArMaP can't see colours as well as some of you.  I can see that being ammunition for debates about anomalies. LOL 

That's one of the reasons I prefer greyscale images. 

More seriously, for some reason those that do professional colour work on their computers have hardware systems to keep the colours well calibrated. Some of the cheaper monitors cannot even show the right colours.

[Shasta56]

I saw 38 color variations.  Cats and Otters rule!   

Shasta

[ArMaP]

I saw 38 color variations.  Cats and Otters rule!   

Shasta

After looking at the image in an image editing program I think there are only 38 different colours on that chart, as the RGB value for two of the pink(ish) bars is the same.

PS: today I could see 35 different shades. I suppose that shows I shouldn't be straining my eyes at 2:00 AM. 

[Shasta56]

You really should be watching the inside of your eyelids at 2:00 a.m.

Shasta

[adomaniac]

Saying that people could not see blue because they didn't have a word for it is stupid, not knowing how to call something doesn't stop us from seeing them.

PS: I see 32 different shades on that chart.

I don't think it's stupid at all. Why would they have words for every other color we know of, yet leave blue out? On top of that, there are plenty of colors in the spectrum that we cannot currently see. We don't have individual names for those colors, because we can't see them.

Further, there's plenty of precedent for humans evolving the ability to see more colors. There is research which shows that women are genetically inclined to see colors better because they were traditionally the gatherers in previous eras, and the women who could differentiate between shades of berries (i.e. poisonous red VS edible red) were more likely to survive.