You Are What You See: How Colour Shapes the Human Mind
Jun 21, 2021
6 min read
In a new book about colour, Adam Rogers finds that the simplest things can mess with your mind.
Written by Adam Kovac
Illustration by Allan Matias, based on a photo by Jenna Garrett
Colours are simple.
After all, it’s among the first things we’re taught as humans begin toddling around and piecing chunks of baby gibberish into intelligible words. Blue, red, yellow - these are among the first things our youngest can begin to identify, the subjects of countless tiny books, built for little hands and brightly shaded to capture bright, young eyes. We learn about them in kindergarten through hands-on experimentation - mix blue with yellow and you make green. Red and blue make magenta. Swirling our three primary colours together can make an infinite variety of hues, a principle that dates all the way back to Newtonian times. We all know this because it’s one of the first things we’re taught.
On the other hand, colours are infinitely complicated and everything you thought you know about them is wrong.
That’s the conclusion that Adam Rogers reached after researching and writing his book Full Spectrum: How the Science of colour Made Us Modern. Rogers, a senior correspondent for Wired magazine, spent years diving not just into the applications and science of colour, but the greater philosophy of how what we’re capable of seeing affects our interpretation of reality.
“When people talk about colour, I think we’re often talking about a whole suite of different things,” he says.
“If you read something about colour when you’re a kid in elementary school, it’ll talk about colour in terms of the Newtonian spectrum… (But you can also be talking about) the basic physical operating system of the universe, like electromagnetic energy, subatomic particles, the quantum effects of photons.”
Rogers’ fascination with colours goes back 20 years, to when he first learned about titanium dioxide, a mineral that can be turned into a white pigment that “transformed how human beings make colour.” Titanium dioxide replaced the previously widely used white pigment, which was made out of lead, which is deadly to humans.
“I got really taken with that idea that there was this essentially invisible and unknown to me at the time, material that made the world look the way it did,” he says. “I got really interested in that, which got me interested in what the colour white was and why that was useful and why it was useful in a physiological sense and a philosophical sense.”
But that simple, yet perplexing question - what is white? - led him down a rabbit hole. It’s not like Rogers is alone - as he jokes in his book, many a stoned college student has lazed about pondering whether what they see as red is the same as what anyone else sees as red. What sets him apart is that instead of reaching for another Dorito, Rogers dove into that line of inquiry and discovered just how much humanity’s interaction with light waves and photons has affected what our species has become.
“We are made of the same stuff that we’re perceiving. This isn’t solipsism, this isn’t the world is a simulation and how am I perceiving that simulation. Our bodies are made of the same things we’re trying to perceive and make a sense impression of.”
As part of his research for his book, Rogers ended up in some wild places. Among them was the facility where Pixar movies are transformed from concept to actual images on the screen.
Back in the 1990s, Toy Story changed filmmaking - it was the first full-length feature film to be entirely animated on a computer. Looking back now, the story and voice-acting holds up (come on, who doesn’t love Tom Hanks?) but the images on the screen seem undefined and crude. But over the past few decades, the team that’s made follow-up hits like Cars, Wall-E and Up have perfected the art of moving our emotions by manipulating pixels. With no real actors to work with, Pixar has learned to use computer generated colour to touch its audiences. Rogers discovered the company has developed technology so cutting edge, that its using the human mind itself to imply the existence of colours they never actually show.
“If you spend enough time with people who work with colour or who study colour as a science, near the end of the conversation they’ll start to say ‘You have to understand, things don’t really have colours.
There’s no such thing as objective colour, there’s only physical interactions and the colour gets assembled in your mind,” says Rogers. “When I say Pixar might be able to induce the perception of a colour that isn’t actually there on the screen, that colour in your head is no less real than the ‘real’ colours on the screen.”
Of course, the technology that a company like Pixar, owned as it is by a behemoth like Disney, has access to is far beyond what the average person can expect to experience. But increasingly, that isn’t the case.
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Technology like quantum dots is becoming more and more common. Soon, we will all be living in a world that is more vivid, more bright - more colourful. And it’s made possible because it turns out, all that stuff we were taught as kids about three primary colours isn’t true.
“Screen makers now are talking about maybe adding a fourth primary, so another colour, another wavelength of light coming off those pixels, to expand the overall gamut, so you can see more colours than the screen is capable of doing. I think that’s pretty cool.
“There have been attempts to do it with phosphors, there’s been attempts to do it with quantum dots, there have been attempts to do it with straight ahead LEDs. I don’t know which technology is going to get there, but I get the sense some screens are going to do more than red, green, blue (the primary colours used for computer screens).”
Of course, there’s the risk we could end up like Rodgers - after years spent totally immersed in colour for his research, he’s become sort of like a gourmand who suddenly finds himself in a fast food restaurant - the options he’s weighing just don’t live up to what he’s used to. “While I was reporting the book, I kind of looked up and was like ‘Now I have to buy all new screens.’ I had to buy a UHD monitor, I had to buy a big 4k UHD TV, I got a different phone. And now all these screens look terrible to me, now that I know I’m not actually seeing an accurate representation of what the people who made the images wanted me to see. Now that I know it, I can’t unsee it.”
