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- The brain builds color perception using cone cells and neural pathways.
- Other species see colors beyond human sight, proving color isn’t the same for everyone.
- 84% of languages put colors into categories in a similar way, suggesting biology plays a role.
- Culture and language can greatly change how people understand color.
- AI can spot wavelengths but cannot feel color the way humans do.
When you look at a red apple, is the redness part of the apple itself, or something your mind makes up? The question of whether colors are real things outside us or experiences just in our minds interests scientists, philosophers, and artists. Let’s look at how color perception works, the role of biology and culture, how color science connects these ideas, and why knowing this is important now.
What It Means for Color To Be Objective or Subjective
At first, colors seem like real things outside us: objects reflect specific wavelengths of light, and our eyes pick them up — simple, right? That’s the objective idea, suggesting that colors match up directly with things you can measure, like wavelengths. But another strong idea is that color doesn’t exist without the person seeing it. Instead, it’s made in the brain when we process light. This means colors are subjective experiences that are different for each person.
In modern color science, these ideas aren’t seen as fighting each other. Instead, they work together. Physical properties start the process, but without our brain’s interpretation, “colors” as we know them would not exist.
How Your Brain Constructs Color Experiences
Color starts for you the moment light goes into your eyes. The retina at the back of your eye has special light-sensing cells called cones
- S-cones see short wavelengths (~440 nm), linked to blue.
- M-cones sense medium wavelengths (~535 nm), linked to green.
- L-cones react to long wavelengths (~565 nm), linked to red.
When an object reflects light, these cones take in specific parts of the spectrum. They turn light signals into electrical signals. These signals travel through the optic nerve to parts of the brain like the visual cortex, where they are understood as the colors we experience.
Without this complex setup in the body, light waves would just be that — different energy waves, with no color. Color perception connects physical signals and what we see and feel.
Wavelength, Light, and the Illusion of Objectivity
Light is something you can measure objectively. Different types of light waves — like ultraviolet, visible light, and infrared — have wavelengths and energy levels you can measure. For humans, the visible spectrum goes from about 400 to 700 nanometers.
But, seeing a wavelength like 480 nm as “blue” is not a quality of the light itself. It’s something that happens because of human perception. The link between how long a light wave is and what color we call it isn’t built into the light itself. It’s added by our eyes and brain.
Other creatures show how flexible color perception is. Bees see ultraviolet light. Pigeons can have up to five types of cone cells. And mantis shrimp have 12-16 types of light sensors. To them, the world probably looks very different. This shows that colors aren’t fixed parts of objects. Instead, they are experiences tied to how biology shapes what we see.
How Language and Culture Shape How We See Colors
Culture doesn’t just affect how we talk about color. It shapes how we see it. In an important study, researchers found that the Himba people in Namibia tell the difference between types of green much faster than English speakers. But they have trouble telling blue and green apart (Kay & Regier, 2007). In the Himba language, they have detailed words for different greens. This affects how well they notice small color differences.
Without a name for a color, people are slower to recognize and put it in a group. This fact supports the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” which says that language shapes thinking. Color perception isn’t only about wavelength and cones. It’s also affected by culture, the situation, and language.
Universal Patterns Behind Color Categories
Even with big cultural differences, there’s a surprising amount of similarity in how different groups put colors into categories. According to a study that looked at nearly 1,000 languages, 84% of languages group basic color words around colors they see often, like black, white, red, yellow, and green (Gibson et al., 2017).
Scientists think these universal patterns happen because of a mix of things in our biology, like how our eyes see certain light waves, and things in the environment, like needing to tell ripe fruit or plants you can eat from others. So, while names and boundaries vary, the basics of color science suggest that changes over time have pushed us toward similar color groupings.
How People Differ in Color Perception
Color isn’t even seen the same way within just one culture. Differences happen for several reasons
- Color Vision Deficiency (Color Blindness): This affects about 8% of men and 0.5% of women from Northern Europe. Most cases happen because of changes that affect how the M-cone or L-cone works.
- Tetrachromacy: Some people, usually women, have four types of cones. This lets them tell the difference between much smaller color shades—maybe millions, in theory.
- Lighting and Context Cues: The light around an object and the situation trick the brain into changing how it sees colors. This is part of something called “color constancy.”
Even if there are no biological differences, people might not agree on how to describe colors. This is because human brains naturally “fill in” information based on what they’ve experienced, what they expect, and the situation.
‘The Dress’: Color Perception Gone Viral
In 2015, a photo of a seemingly simple dress went viral and caused a big debate around the world was it blue and black or white and gold? The reason for the confusion was how people saw the color under unclear light.
Your brain tries to fix for the light based on what it expects about the surroundings. If you saw the dress as being in shadow, your brain ignored the blue colors. This made the dress look white and gold. If you assumed bright, natural light, you saw blue and black. It showed clearly how color perception comes from the brain working, not just from the light waves going into your eyes.
Emotional Links to Color
Colors aren’t just things you see. They hold feelings.
- Red can make heart rates go up and signal danger.
- Blue tends to calm people down, lowering how worked up they are.
- Green often stands for growth or safety.
But the feelings we tie to colors are also shaped by culture. In Western countries, black often means sadness or death. But in China, white traditionally means sadness. Because of how we developed and what culture teaches us, color links become deep parts of how people think. They affect how we feel, act, and even make choices.
Despite Differences, We Match Colors Very Well
With all the ways color is subjective, it’s amazing that humans mostly agree on colors when things are set up the same way. This consistency is thanks to color constancy—the brain’s ability to keep seeing the same color for an object even when the light changes.
Without color constancy, everyday life would be messy: apples might look green indoors and red outdoors. Instead, your visual system guesses the light and changes how you see color. This makes your view of an object’s “true” color stable.
Why Color Science Remains Difficult
The study of color has complicated problems in philosophy and science. Instruments can measure wavelengths and energies exactly. But two people might still experience those measurements differently.
Researchers like Conway et al. (2010) stress that to understand color, you don’t just need to figure out the physical signal. You also need to understand how the brain’s setup and higher thinking shape what you experience. Because it connects the real world outside and what people experience inside, color science is especially complex.
Color perception likely happens because of
- Physical light interacting with the eye’s structure.
- Brain calculations to figure out what the senses are getting.
- What the person has experienced before.
- Cultural and language systems.
So, even with the best technology, we’ll never completely pull apart objective colors from subjective experiences.
Philosophers Still Argue About Color
Two main groups lead the talks among philosophers
- Color Realism: Colors exist out there in the world as basic parts of objects.
- Color Subjectivism: Colors show up in our minds when we experience things.
Many current philosophers and scientists who study the mind like an idea in the middle, called “pragmatic realism.” They agree that colors are based on outside properties (like wavelengths and how light bounces off things). But they also say that the conscious experience of color—what it “feels like”—is truly subjective.
So, asking “are colors objective” might miss the main point: colors happen where the physical world and the mind meet.
The Future: Can Artificial Intelligence ‘See Colors’ Like Us?
Artificial Intelligence can be built to “detect” colors by measuring pixel values. But whether machines can “see” or “experience” color like humans do is a deep question. Today’s AI doesn’t have feelings or personal awareness. This makes its “color perception” based only on data.
As technology gets better, building things that act more like human color processing could improve how we use it in medicine, self-driving cars, and technology for people with disabilities. But the gap between just processing something and actually feeling it is still there. This shows how mysterious and amazing human consciousness is.
The future of studying color perception is where different fields meet: brain science, mind science, artificial intelligence, and even philosophy. This shows again that answering “are colors objective” is as complex and bright as colors themselves.
References
- Gibson, E., Futrell, R., Jara-Ettinger, J., Mahowald, K., Bergen, L., Ratnasingam, S., … & Conway, B. R. (2017). Color naming across languages reflects color use. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(40), 10785–10790. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1619666114
- Kay, P., & Regier, T. (2007). Color naming universals and evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 104(19), 7585–7590. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0701644104
- Conway, B. R., Chatterjee, S., Field, G. D., Horwitz, G. D., Johnson, E. N., Koida, K., & Mancuso, K. (2010). Advances in understanding color vision mechanisms. Vision Research, 51(7), 576–598. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2010.09.012
