Seeing the world in color
As you walk through the produce section at your local grocery store, you see bright red apples. What a beautiful sight, right?
Well, what if I told you that the red apple you see is actually not colored red? Yes, that’s right.
The color you see is not actually the color of the object.
Ready to find out why?
Let’s get talking.
First, let’s talk about light. Light (yellow squiggle in the illustration) is reflected off items or objects, but there is some light that is absorbed into the item. The light that is reflected off the object is your bread and butter. That light enters your eye through the cornea, which is the outside layer of the eye and the black curve on the illustration.
Next, the cornea bends the entering light towards the next layer of the eye called the pupil (purple oval). The pupil contracts and expands to control the amount of light that hits the next part of the eye, the lens (green oval).
You may have heard that someone’s pupils are dilated, which means that they are allowing a lot of light to hit the lens in the eye. A more common example of this is when you enter a dark room. Your pupils will dilate to get the most amount of light to hit the lens, which is why you are able to see in a dark room after letting your eyes adjust to the darkness.
Next, the lens will focus the light on nerve cells in the back of the eye called the retina, pink line at the back of the eye in the diagram .
I know this is a lot to digest, but stay with me! I promise this is where it gets interesting.
The retina, or nerve cells in the back of the eye, contains cells called rods and cones. The rods are sensitive to light exposure and cones are responsible for color perception. We, humans, have three types of photopigments: red, green and blue. When light enters the eye through the process I described above, these photo pigments in the cones are activated and communicate to the optic nerve at the back of the eye which sends the signal to an area of the brain called the visual cortex and, BOOM, we see the color.
The main takeaway that I want you to understand about this complicated process is that the color that you perceive an object to be is actually the only color that it is not. The color you are actually seeing is the color that is reflected off the object and back at you, while the other colors are absorbed into the object.
Now, in my opinion, the coolest part of our color world is what happens when we have objects that are white and black. The visual spectrum, or the colors we see, are the typical colors of the rainbow: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.
If that’s the case, then how can we see white and black?
For a white object, all of the colors are reflected back at you and nothing is absorbed.
For a black object, all of the colors are absorbed into the object and nothing is reflected back.
This is more of a random thought of mine, but imagine what the real colors of a zebra are…
I am hoping that this doesn’t cause too much turmoil in how you think about the world around you, and I hope this will spark some interest in something that most of us take advantage of: seeing the world around us, especially in color.
As always, reach out with questions.
Stay humble,
Emily
