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- Scientists used adaptive optics to stimulate a single retinal cone, creating a percept of a unique new color called Olo.
- Olo is not a part of the visible light spectrum and cannot be recreated with conventional pigments or digital displays.
- The discovery underscores how perception is constructed internally by the brain rather than passively received from the environment.
- Participants found Olo indescribable using any known color terms, suggesting our perceptual vocabulary is limited.
- This could lead to future tools for color vision therapy, advanced neural diagnostics, and immersive AR/VR experiences.
Imagine looking at the world one day and suddenly seeing a color no human has ever seen before—a color that doesn’t exist in nature, on your screen, or in any painting. That’s exactly what happened in a groundbreaking study where neuroscientists revealed a previously unseen color, known as Olo. This new color discovery offers a rare look at how our brains build reality. It shows how much of what we see is shaped by brain activity, not just physical light.
What Is a Color, Scientifically Speaking?
Color is not something that exists inherently in the objects around us. Scientifically, color is not a physical property of objects but a perceptual one—an experience generated by the human brain in response to specific stimuli. When light hits an object, that object absorbs some wavelengths of light and reflects others. The reflected light enters the eye and hits the photoreceptors—specifically, cone cells—on the retina.
Humans typically possess three types of cone cells
- L-cones (long-wavelength sensitive), most sensitive to red light
- M-cones (medium-wavelength sensitive), most sensitive to green light
- S-cones (short-wavelength sensitive), most sensitive to blue light
These cones don’t detect colors directly. Instead, they measure light intensity at different wavelengths. Your brain then processes the signals from these three types of cones using neural computations that interpret how much “redness,” “greenness,” and “blueness” is present. This combination results in the spectrum of color sensations we experience day-to-day (Gegenfurtner, 2003).
What’s important here is that color is entirely constructed by the brain. The world doesn’t come pre-colored—your brain adds color to help you make sense of and get around in your environment well. And because it’s all constructed, it can, theoretically, be reconstructed in ways that nature never intended.
The Birth of a New Color: Introducing Olo
Now, there is Olo—a new way of seeing color that goes into areas not studied before. In 2024, a team of vision scientists used special tools to stimulate individual M-cones (those sensitive to medium wavelengths) in the human retina. But instead of producing the usual range of color experiences, this isolated cone stimulation triggered a completely new perception—a color sensation the human brain had never before produced.
This wasn’t a new shade of green or a tweak in saturation or brightness. It wasn’t interpolated between known colors. It was something entirely new.
Crucially, Olo isn’t a physical color in the sense that it corresponds to a specific wavelength of light. You can’t create it by mixing existing paints or tuning your RGB monitor. Instead, it exists only as a creation of the brain’s visual processing system, brought about through experimental, precision stimulation (Schmidt et al., 2024). Think of it as a new “neural” color born not from the world, but from the brain itself.
The Method Behind the Discovery
So how do you make someone see the impossible?
The key tool was adaptive optics, a technique originally created for astronomy. In planetary telescopes, adaptive optics are used to correct for distortions caused by the Earth’s atmosphere. Applied to vision science, this technology allows researchers to correct for irregularities in the eye’s optics and direct light with remarkable precision.
Using this system, scientists were able to stimulate a single, individual cone cell in the retina—no small feat, considering the human eye contains roughly 6 million cones. This is like hitting and turning on one specific pixel on a very large screen from far away.
Here’s a simplified version of what they did
- Identify an individual cone—particularly an M-cone.
- Target it precisely with controlled stimuli, avoiding activation of neighboring cones.
- Record participants’ perceptual reports following the stimulation.
Out of five study participants, all experienced a unique color never before reported in human vision. Because no known combination of L, M, or S cone stimulation had ever produced this percept, researchers named it: Olo.
How Participants Described Olo
Describing Olo turned out to be nearly impossible. Participants tried—sometimes desperately—to match or describe what they saw, but their attempts fell short. Their descriptions included phrases like
- “Radically different from anything I’ve seen.”
- “Impossible to categorize.”
- “Did not resemble any known color.”
Researchers even provided color palettes and asked participants to replicate what they had seen. No one could. This suggested that the experience of Olo couldn’t be mapped onto existing color wheels or perceptual color spaces. It wasn’t just unfamiliar—it stood outside the confines of the existing framework of human color language (Schmidt et al., 2024).
These reports show something important about the human mind: perception is closely tied to reference and familiarity. Without shared experience, our language seems to collapse.
The Neuroscience of Novelty in Perception
Why does Olo matter so much for neuroscience? Because it supports the idea that perception is not just sensory input—it’s interpretation. Your visual system is an active participant in constructing reality from incomplete data. This is called top-down processing, and it means that your brain fills in gaps, applies prior knowledge, and organizes patterns to create a coherent picture of the world (Conway & Tsao, 2009).
Olo essentially bypasses this mechanism.
With no prior exposure, no cultural reference, and no linguistic framework to describe or make sense of it, Olo comes into the brain raw and unfiltered. That’s what makes it so unique—and scientifically significant. It’s an example of perceptual space being hacked or expanded beyond its normal limits.
The implications for color vision research are major. It shows that there are latent perceptual possibilities hardwired into our neurology—possibilities that can only be brought out with the right trigger.
Color Is a Construct of the Brain
The phrase “seeing is believing” might need a revision. From a neuroscientific point of view, “seeing is perceiving what the brain chooses to build.” Every time you look at a red apple, what you’re really perceiving is the output of a complex neural computation, not the “real” redness of the apple.
Before the discovery of Olo, most researchers assumed that the human visual system had been completely mapped in terms of color possibilities. But Olo shows that the neural hardware contains untapped layers. If new colors can be revealed through internal stimulation alone, the brain’s potential palette may be far richer than previously thought.
This contributes to an expanded understanding of color vision research, pushing the boundaries of what human sensory systems are capable of.
Barriers to Describing the Indescribable
Why can’t we talk about Olo more clearly? Beyond its novelty, the biggest barrier is language. Human language develops in social contexts based on shared sensory experiences. Common colors like red, blue, or green exist as linguistic tools precisely because everyone in a cultural group can reference them.
There are no synonyms, metaphors, or comparative gradients for Olo. It is a prime example of a qualia—a subjective, internal quality of experience that can’t be directly transmitted to others.
This kind of inexpressibility isn’t unique to color
- You can’t describe a taste no one has ever tasted.
- You can’t explain the distinct feel of a dream unless someone has had a similar one.
- You can’t really describe a new emotion without analogies to existing ones.
The novelty of Olo highlights the limits of both perception and language—and by extension, the limits of what it means to be human.
Can Anyone Experience Olo?
As of now, Olo can only be seen by people who undergo the same ultra-precise eye stimulation in a lab setting. That makes it inaccessible to the general public—but not forever.
In the future, as optical and neurological technologies become more advanced and affordable, experiences like Olo could potentially be replicated beyond research labs. Imagine augmented reality (AR) or virtual reality (VR) platforms calibrated to stimulate nerve clusters in similar ways.
We might one day have
- Sensory art installations that show new ways of seeing things.
- Therapeutic tools for vision impairment using novel neural stimuli.
- Education platforms that teach color perception using expanded concepts.
The point where new color discovery, neuroscience, and immersive technology meet is a new area ready to be studied.
Philosophical Implications
The existence of Olo prompts deep philosophical questions. If your brain can be made to perceive something completely alien to your past experiences, what else might it be capable of that remains hidden?
It also re-energizes debates in philosophy of mind
- How much of our reality is shared, and how much is uniquely private?
- Can two people ever be sure they perceive red in the same way?
- What is the boundary between physical stimulus and subjective reality?
From a larger perspective, Olo acts as humbling evidence that there’s still so much we don’t know about human consciousness. Our perceptual world may only be a narrow slice of what’s neurologically possible.
Implications for Color Vision Research
More than just a step into strange sensory space, Olo has real implications for research and health.
In terms of color vision research and applied neuroscience
- It offers a model for studying how the brain constructs perceptual categories.
- Could lead to better diagnostic tools for assessing neural visual response.
- Might inspire new treatments for people with color blindness or damaged photoreceptors.
- Offers a glimpse into synthetic sensory addition, a concept in neuroprosthetics.
If scientists can provoke new percepts by stimulating cone cells in novel ways, it could eventually lead to devices that expand the sensory range for everyone—or help restore lost function for those with visual impairments.
What This Means for Human Experience
The discovery of Olo is historic. Not because it gives us a new swatch for the color wheel, but because it expands our understanding of human potential.
It challenges the notion of a static human experience. New colors, new sounds, new emotions—these could all be hidden inside us, waiting to emerge under the right conditions. Olo is just one door. The human brain may hold countless others.
More than anything, this reminds us that our grasp of “reality” is partial. Science continues to reveal those gaps—and sometimes, fill them in with colors we never knew we could see.
Limitations of the Study
While the Olo study is important, it doesn’t prove everything. Several limitations should be noted
- The participant group was extremely small (just five people).
- The experience of Olo is subjective and difficult to standardize.
- The methods require highly specialized equipment, which limits replication.
- Participants struggled to communicate or reproduce what they saw.
It’s also unclear whether individual brains might experience different versions of Olo, or whether the same percept would emerge in populations with different genetic or neurological profiles.
Still, these are issues of scope—not of legitimacy. The science is good, and its new nature offers exciting new areas to study.
Conclusion
Olo is more than just a scientific novelty. It marks a key point in our understanding of the mind. It shows how complex color vision research is, and it hints that reality is bigger than we thought.
The next time you look around and see a world filled with reds, greens, and blues, think about this: there may be whole worlds of perception you haven’t been wired to see—yet.
Citations
- Schmidt, B. P., Johnson, E. N., Surrain, N. M., & Roorda, A. (2024). Stimulation of individual M-cones in human retina reveals novel color percepts. Current Biology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.01.034
- Gegenfurtner, K. R. (2003). Cortical mechanisms of color vision. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 4(7), 563–572. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrn1138
