Colour Theory

Do we see colours in the same way? Researchers have a surprising answer.

Horizon - Do you see what I see? Documentary

Dr Beau Lotto
Colour is an illusion. It is designed to help us see what we want.
Does age, gender, nationality have an influence?
Can colours change your perception of time?
White, Red and Blue. White is the control to compare red and blue.
150 people must stand in pod bathed in colour for a minute (they have to count). Turns out that a minute in the blue pod lasts 11 minutes longer in the red pod. Red may slow time down, because of arousal. And blue speeds time up.
The colour red - deeply rooted. conflicting emotions: love, danger.
Colour does not exist. It is a figment of the brain.
Colour arrangements that people make can be predicted. This is because of natural history.
People feeling more powerful can see changes in light and colour better.
People of different sex, age, status receive colour differently.
The way we feel makes us see colour differently.
Th colours that we say first, that are hardwired into our brain - can not change. But we see others differently.

Boxing, wrestling - Red and Blue do not win equally in 2004 Olympics. Red won over two thirds.
In a manipulated film, judges favoured the red player. Manipulating the way that the players are perceived by the judges. Red could make you a winner.

Football teams believe in the superstition that wearing red makes you a winner.
Dr Ian Greenlees
Does wearing red make you feel stronger and seeing it make you feel threatened?
If testosterone rises, the red-wearer becomes more aggressive.
Cal-ter-sol? is suppresses a it is a marker of stress and they are feeling confident when wearing red.

Megan Sims - colourblind.
Red, green and blue wavelengths of light.
Can see colour in low light.
Matches colours to shades of grey. Learned about colours through comparison.
Links colours to deep emotions. Deeply embedded with how we make sense of the world.

Prof. Russel Howard
Reds and browns used in restaurant. Warm, relaxing, hungry.
Cells in human eye- photosensitive ganglian. Regulates body clock. Levels of arousal, alertness. Sensitive to only one wavelength of light - blue. Colours shape how we feel.

Mark Hensman - Lighting Director
Used blue lighting in a restaurant makes everything else look more blue.
Made people perk up as the night drew in.

Wizard of Oz - goes from black and white to technicolor. Has a strong effect on audience.

Single-cells at the beginning of the Earth waited till dawn and dusk to capture sunlight to gain energy because of harmful UV Rays.

Red / Green developed from fruits. Expanded from blue and yellow.

Blue and yellow are the first colours we knew, we had to learn our association with red and green.
We are born with calmness and happiness - but learnt the emotions connected to red and green.
All colours are not equal.
Red - lipstick, passion, pleasure, pain - things we have learnt. Learnt how to function more successfully.

Colour constancy.
A banana is always yellow because we know that bananas are yellow.
Our brain creates colour by drawing on knowledge of what things should look like.

Anna Franklin
Newborns do not have colour vision. Takes the first three months to develop.
11 colour categories. Sorted differently pre and post language?
Infants could already be dividing colours pre language.
The way we learn language and process colour is linked.

The Hinba
ochre symbolises the earths rich mud and blood which resembles life.
They think that water is white, and that the sky is black.
Zoozu - red blue, green, purple
Vapa - white, yellow
Borou - reds and blues
For them, they can differentiate very similar colours a lot easier.
They do not have different words for green and blue, so they struggle a lot more when differentiating between them.

Jules Davidoff
Words for colours become imported into different languages.

Colour is created in your brain from your language, memories, moods.