Incredibly, there are no colors in the world around us. Color is just an illusion created by the brain, which does not exist in physical reality.
Look around you. From the very birth you are surrounded by an illusion, an "additional reality", which, being a good adaptation, is so familiar that, like air, it is absolutely invisible to us.
For example, a person shows a rainbow as if only to himself: its existence is associated with the peculiarities of human vision and depends on conical photoreceptors in your eyes - for other living beings that do not have such cone-cones, a rainbow does not exist at all. Thus, you are not just looking at the rainbow - you are creating it.
Let's give the floor to Erwin Schrödinger, Nobel laureate in physics, one of the founders of quantum mechanics, better known to the general public thanks to one cat: “If you ask a physicist what, in his understanding, yellow light is, he will answer you that these are transverse electromagnetic waves, whose length is approximately equal to 590 nanometers (nm). If you ask him: "where is yellow here?", He will answer: "in my picture it is not at all, but when these vibrations fall on the retina of a healthy eye, the person who owns this eye has a feeling of yellow."
However, the sense of color cannot be explained in terms of the objective picture of light waves available to physicists. Visual illusions, color dreams with closed eyes, and people who are able to see color with other senses are proof of this.
Optical illusion
Visual illusions reveal some aspects of how vision works. If you stare at a point in the center of a black and white image for 15 seconds, then the picture takes on colors.
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Let's take a look at another illusion. In Russian it is called - running light green circle, in English it sounds more interesting - lilac hunter or Pak-man illusion. It is based on the Troxler effect.
What is unusual here? Moments later, in place of the disappearing purple spots, a green spot appears, worn in a circle. But it doesn't exist in reality! Electromagnetic waves from the spectrum range of 500-565 nanometers do not physically fall on the retina. It is as unusual as if we were hearing the melody of a song without sound vibrations coming into the ear to the eardrum. And if you concentrate on the cross, then the purple spots disappear altogether.
Here's a static shot from the
Concentrate on the center of the picture. After a while, the blurry color images will disappear and turn into a solid white background, thus disappearing. The picture is not a gif. Here, on the contrary, the electromagnetic waves responsible for colors get into our eyes, but we stop seeing colors.
If you look at the central tiles of the cube on the top and on the side facing us, you can see that in the first case the tile is brown. In the second - orange. This is our perception of reality. But the physical reality is that these two tiles are one and the same.
Colored numbers
“I told my father: I realized that in order to write the letter 'R' all I have to do is first write 'P' and then draw a line down from its hinge. And I was so surprised that I could only turn a yellow letter into an orange letter by adding a line,”wrote Patricia Lin Duffy, writer and synesthetic.
In some people, irritation of some sense organs causes both sensations specific to it, and sensations corresponding to another sense organ. This phenomenon is called synesthesia, which is translated from Greek as joint feeling. That is, a person can look at moving pictures and still hear sound. Or for him, each number or letter can have its own color, as in the picture below. Colored numbers are the most common type of synesthesia. By the way, I wonder what Patricia will see if the orange P for her is written in light green ink?
That is, it is not at all necessary that the color be associated with a certain length of the electromagnetic wave. Color can be generated by sound vibrations, and sound, for example, by certain animation.
Nobel laureate in physics, Richard Feynman said, "When I see equations, I see letters in color - I don't know why." Yes, he was also a synesthetic.
James Vannerton tastes words. He tastes New York like a boiled egg, and London tastes like mashed potatoes. And the other person, McAllister, sees the music. His hearing and vision areas react to sound. It is amazing that he is blind since he was 12 years old: "When I hear music, multicolored flashes appear before my eyes, it seems to me that I see even more beautiful colors than sighted people."
And so, in order to check whether people are lying and whether they are crazy, such tests have been developed as in the figure below. There are many fives and twos printed on the sheet. An ordinary person is looking for two for a relatively long time, for him all the numbers look the same. A synesthetist doesn't need time to look at each digit. He immediately sees a red pyramid formed by twos.
The phenomenon of color
Scientists conducted experiments on the perception of illusions by artificial neural networks (ANNs). The perception of the illumination of the selected point depended on the surrounding structure, on the context in which it was located. Previous experience and stereotyped perception also influenced the formation of the illusion. For example, people see a face as convex not only when it is really convex, but also if it is the back of the mask, that is, a figure concave inward.
We live in our own informational reality. Color is just an illusion created by the brain, which does not exist in physical reality. Depending on expectations, context, mental models, the brain can arbitrarily change the colors of objects. What would be difficult to imagine if color were a real physical phenomenon.
Colors are a specific form of language. When we see one color, we see something indefinite, dependent, something like one word in a language. The interpretation of this "word" occurs if we place it in a "sentence" and its context. And electromagnetic waves are apparently entities presented for us in two hypostases, existential, as part of physical reality, and denotative, like ink spots on paper, formed into meaningful configurations for us, words that have meanings as part of informational reality.
By the way, even if the nature of color in our minds is revealed, the question arises, why are the colors exactly as we see them? This is due to our structure, or could it be somehow randomly chosen in the course of evolution, how were these letters randomly chosen for the alphabet? How does it feel to see the world in ultraviolet or gamma?
It also follows from this that our world, apparently, is not only not colorful, but also soundless. And to the question whether the sound of a falling tree in the forest is heard if there is no one nearby, you can give an answer. No, not heard. Physics is preserved. The tree falls, air vibrations spread. But the sound is born in the brain of the observer.