🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole #3: The Color in Your Head Might Not Exist

I want you to do something before we start.

Pick something near you that has a distinct color.

Your shirt.

A coffee cup.

A blanket.

A book.

Whatever.

Look at it for a few seconds.

Really look at the color.

Now look away.

Don’t cheat.

Try to picture the exact color you just saw.

Not blue.

Not green.

Not red.

The exact shade.

Got it?

Okay.

Now look back at it.

Is that actually the color you were picturing?

Because this week’s rabbit hole started with a question that seemed incredibly simple:

How well do we actually remember color?

And apparently the answer is:

Not nearly as literally as I thought.

Which is how I ended up reading research papers about whether the color in my head is lying to me.

Because apparently even remembering the color green couldn’t just be simple.

Your Brain Apparently Has a “Close Enough” Button

When we look at a color, it feels like our brain should be taking a little mental screenshot.

That’s blue.

Save.

We’ll need that later.

Except that’s not really how color memory seems to work.

In experiments where people see a particular color and later have to reproduce it, their memories can shift toward the more typical version of the color category it belongs to.

So instead of your brain perfectly preserving:

that exact green

it may be hanging onto a combination of the actual shade and:

GREEN.

Researchers have found evidence that these categories can bias what we remember. Our memories aren’t necessarily storing a perfect copy of the color we originally saw.

Basically, your brain may remember:

GREEN.

Meanwhile, the actual green is standing in the corner screaming:

“BITCH, I WAS SAGE.”

And honestly?

Rude.

But this is where it starts getting interesting.

There Are a Lot of Colors and We’re Out Here Calling Them Like Eleven Things

Think about how many versions of green you can recognize.

Mint.

Forest.

Olive.

Emerald.

Lime.

Sage.

Seafoam.

Kelly green.

Chartreuse.

And those are just the ones we’ve bothered naming.

Color itself exists along continuous dimensions, but our brains are really fond of categories. Research into categorical color perception has found that the boundaries we use to separate colors can influence how we distinguish them. The relationship between the colors we physically see, the categories our brains create, and the words we use for them is complicated—and researchers are still arguing about parts of it.

Which creates a weird problem for memory.

If I show you one particular shade for a few seconds and then take it away, you have to hold onto something that isn’t actually in front of you anymore.

And your brain likes shortcuts.

So you may lose some of the exact shade while keeping:

purple.

Or:

green.

Or:

blue.

Which means two people could look at the same object, walk away, and later disagree about exactly what color it was.

And neither one necessarily has a perfect little photograph stored in their head to settle the argument.

They’re reconstructing it.

You Don’t Necessarily Remember the Color. You Remember What Color It Should Be.

Imagine a banana.

What color is it?

Yellow.

You probably didn’t have to work very hard for that one.

You’ve seen enough bananas in your life that banana = yellow is already sitting comfortably inside your brain.

And apparently those associations can get involved in how we deal with color too.

One particularly interesting experiment asked people to adjust images of familiar objects until they appeared gray.

If memory had nothing to do with what people were seeing, you’d expect them to stop at neutral gray.

They didn’t.

For familiar objects strongly associated with a particular color, people tended to adjust the image slightly toward the opposite color before they thought it looked gray—as though their knowledge of the object’s usual color was still influencing what they saw.

So if the object was normally yellow, the brain seemed to be bringing a little bit of yellow to the party whether anybody invited it or not.

Which is fascinating.

Except—

Of course it couldn’t be that simple.

Later research has questioned how consistently that effect appears and found that it doesn’t necessarily reproduce the same way across different objects and experimental conditions.

And THAT is exactly the kind of thing that gets me.

Because the answer isn’t:

Your brain automatically paints bananas yellow.

It’s more like:

What you see, what you know, what you expect, and what you remember may all be interacting in ways we’re still trying to untangle.

Great.

Can’t even trust the banana.

Apparently Some Colors Stick Better Than Others

Then I found another study that personally offended me.

Researchers ran several experiments looking at memory for objects and their colors.

They used four:

Red.

Blue.

Yellow.

Green.

And memory for the colors wasn’t equal.

Across the experiments, red and yellow tended to be remembered particularly well.

Green?

Green did poorly.

As someone whose favorite color is green:

Excuse the fuck out of me.

😂

Now, this doesn’t mean we’ve discovered some universal law declaring green the world’s most forgettable color.

Memory depends on what you’re looking at, what you’re being asked to remember, attention, context, shade, associations, and a whole pile of other variables.

But the experiments demonstrate something I hadn’t really thought about before:

Remembering an object and remembering the color attached to that object aren’t necessarily the exact same memory problem.

You can remember what you saw without perfectly remembering exactly what it looked like.

Which sounds obvious when I say it like that.

It did not feel obvious before I fell down this rabbit hole.

And Then Language Walked Into the Room

This is where I almost lost the plot completely.

Because if our brains categorize colors…

what happens when different languages don’t divide colors into exactly the same categories?

The visible spectrum doesn’t come with labels.

There isn’t a little line floating through nature that says:

BLUE | GREEN

Humans did that part.

And different languages haven’t necessarily drawn all of those lines in exactly the same places.

That has made color a fascinating testing ground for a much bigger question:

Does language affect the way we perceive the world?

There is evidence that the color categories and labels we learn can influence how we distinguish and organize colors. But that’s very different from saying someone literally can’t see a color because their language doesn’t have the same word for it. The relationship between language and color perception is considerably messier than that.

So now the innocent question:

“What color was it?”

has somehow become a question involving vision, memory, categories, language, expectation, and culture.

This is why I can’t Google anything like a normal person.

So…What Color Was It?

And this is where my perfectly reasonable question completely fell apart.

I started with:

How accurately do we remember colors?

Now I’m thinking about the fact that our eyes receive light.

Our visual system processes it.

Our brains organize colors into categories.

Objects come with learned associations.

Language gives us words for those categories.

Memory has to hold onto the information after the original color disappears.

And then, sometime later, we confidently announce:

“It was green.”

Ma’am.

There were approximately seventeen things happening between the green and that sentence.

😂

None of this means color isn’t real.

And it doesn’t mean we’re all wandering around inside completely separate color universes where your red could secretly be my green and we’ll never know.

That’s an entirely different rabbit hole, and I am not going down there today.

I have boundaries.

Sometimes.

What this does show is that seeing something and remembering seeing it aren’t the same process.

Memory isn’t a perfect recording.

It’s a reconstruction.

And color gives us a really simple way to watch that reconstruction get messy.

That wall you swear was darker?

Maybe it was.

That shirt your friend insists was blue when you remember teal?

Well…

That extremely specific shade of green you’re convinced you can match at the store without bringing a sample?

Good fucking luck.

So go back to the object I told you to look at in the beginning.

Look at it again.

Really look.

Because a few seconds ago, when it wasn’t in front of you anymore, you weren’t necessarily holding its exact color inside your head.

You were holding your brain’s reconstruction of it.

And those aren’t always the same thing.

Well.

That answers the question I started with.

Unfortunately, it has also given me about twelve new ones.

See you down the next rabbit hole.

—Destiny

P.S. What completely random question should I fall down the rabbit hole with next?