A few years ago I was thinking about colour and how strange it would be to be colour blind, or never see colour at all. Then I started thinking about how you would communicate colour to someone who had never seen it, you can’t say “it looks like what an orange tastes like”, that would make no sense. After I was done abusing my brain with those thoughts, I took it one step further and started wondering if everyone sees colour the same way. Take a strawberry for example, I see it as red, but you might see it as what I would call purple, but you would still call it red, because that’s how you see it, neither of us would be wrong because that’s how our brains interpret that colour. But, how would you be able tell if someone else sees colour differently than you? We both say the strawberry is red, and we just assume we see the colour the same way.

I see a red strawberry, and so do you, but what you call red I would call purple.

You might say that if I saw colours differently than you do then the colour harmonies in something like a painting would be out of whack. But, if that’s how you had always seen colour it would be totally normal. Take this Van Gogh painting as an example, I see it one way, you see it another way, both of us think it’s a beautiful piece of art because it depicts what we see in the real world. However, if either of us saw it the way the other person saw it, it would be a totally different painting with a completely different mood.

What I see and what you see are drastically different and have drastically different moods, but we would both see it and feel the same way about it because it’s normal to us.

Well it turns out I’m not the only crazy person thinking about this. I stumbled across Inverted Spectrum on Wikipedia, which explains a similar idea where someone may see inverted colours. Kind of like seeing the world like a film negative (remember those?). It would be hard to detect because it’s normal to the person with the distorted vision. They say that it should be detectable because “there are more perceptually distinguishable shades between red and blue than there are between green and yellow, which would make red-green inversion behaviorally detectable.” I won’t pretend to fully understand what that means, but why would anyone get tested if they had no idea anything was “wrong”.

Now that I’ve messed with your head, I’ll leave you to ponder that and think about how you would determine if someone saw colours differently than you do.