How Color Works

Science doesn't have a good explanation for why we sense color, yet it is everywhere and affecting us all the time. But why should minutely different wavelengths of light have such an impact on our moods and motivations?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff you Should Know from House Stuff Works
dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh
Clark with Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry and it's
Stuff you should Know color and technicolor. Yeah, which is

(00:23):
really something. It's tea technical or yeah. Yeah, imagine what
it was like back then. Oh, Man debut just melting
people's eyes out. Bad. Probably good, You're like, wow, how
are you doing? I'm great. I'm glad to hear that. Yeah,
how are you going? I'm good. I'm tired, but I'm good.
I gotta particularly to study. Oh yeah, you get up

(00:46):
early to make the cheese? What? Oh? You know, it's
just a saying kind of make Wait wait, who's saying, yeah,
make the cheese, make the sausage, make the doughnuts, of her,
make the donuts. You never make the sausage. You don't
want to see how the sausage just made. Just pick anything.
Make the cheese. I don't think so. The cheese milk

(01:09):
a cow. People get up early for that, so I
guess there's that association. Have you ever milk to cow? No?
Have you know? I was talking to Emily about that
the other day because uh. We went horse riding, and
I'd never ridden a horse before. Oh yeah, it's pretty neat. Huh,
it's my new favorite thing. Yeah, it was amazing, how
awesome it was. Did you jump over anything on the horse? No?
But we like, you know, trotted up a hill. Did

(01:32):
you shoot a bow and arrow? No? Almost fell off though.
And yeah when he trotted up the hill, I got
like kind of loosened saddle, as they say. I was like, whoa, Okay,
well that's exactly what you should have said, is whoa.
Well no, he was going uphill, so I had to
just keep on trucking. Really yeah, I didn't want to
stop him. Good for you, man, he was carrying a load.
I felt bad for the horse. I'm sure he was fine,

(01:54):
Yeah he was all right. Yeah. What was his name? Um? Oh? Man?
Now I'm kicking myself like a horse because I called
this horse by his name the whole day and now
I can't remember Calvin. I thought we'd bonded. I guess
I was just pretending. That's cool. The horse probably can't
remember your name either. And he took a big dump

(02:17):
they do that, right, and then just stopped and I
was like, what are you stopping for and I was like, oh, oh,
you're lucky even stop sometimes they just walk and do that. Really,
all of the ones on our little ride stopped to poop,
which I thought was maybe I'm confusing them with another
animal humans just walking poop at the same time. Anyway,

(02:37):
it was my favorite new thing. I loved it. That's cool, man,
I felt buried at home. What color was the horse?
One of the spotted ones, which I love, man. I
was hoping you're gonna say, like blue or red or
something easy. You smashed the table. Let's go with blue. Okay, blue,
It was a blue horse, So allow me to explain
why your horse appeared blue. Okay, As Newton figured out,

(03:01):
that horse is not inherently blue. There's nothing inherently blue
about that horse. It's all in our perception because color
technically doesn't exist. It exists in our minds. Well, yeah,
the perception of color does exactly. But like an apple
isn't just there's nothing in the apple that's red, exactly chucking.

(03:21):
There's nothing in your horse that made it blue. What
happens is that color is basically our perception of a
specific wavelength of visible light that's right invisible light is
just part of the electromagnetic spectrum that includes everything from
microwaves to radio waves to gamma raise to um ocean waves.

(03:44):
Not quite, but visible light is part of that wave pools. No, no, no,
just those things that I said, Ok, so um along
that spectrum is this very narrow little slice that's visible
light and invisible light, which we see as like white light, sunlight. Yeah,

(04:07):
it is the presence of the rainbow, which are called
the spectral colors. On one end, you have the short wavelength,
which is blue. On the other end, you have the
h long wavelengths, which is red technically violet. On the
the other side, well, red has a bunch of different names.
When you start reading in the color, well, no blue

(04:28):
on the blue side, it's like starts at violet. But
we don't perceive it very well. Oh well, I'm talking
about what humans can see. Yeah, and then everything else
is in between, right, and what's in what's really in
the middle, like yellow maybe it seems like yellows kind
of in the middle. Yeah, we just think you tell me, well,
on the other end, beyond violet, you've got ultra violet,

(04:50):
and beyond red you've got infrared. Yeah, these are things
we can't see. No, we can't. Some animals can, remember
they think monarch butterflies are able to migrate all the
way to Mexic co Um using ultra violet detecting ultra violet.
I remember that. Yeah, man, that was a good episode. Amazing.
So this, this band of light, this visible spectrum, contains

(05:11):
the spectral colors which we perceive, right. And for a
very long time, everybody just thought, well, that apple's red,
but that horse is blue. That's just how it's born.
There's nothing that can be done about it. And then,
like we said, along came Newton, and Newton said, no,
something weird is going on here. Like you said, color
doesn't really exist. It's in the eye of the beholder,

(05:33):
almost literally, right, um. And the reason why an apple
seems red or your horse seems blue are because of
natural chemicals found in say the skin of the apple
or the hide of the horse, that are called pigments.
So in an apple, specifically, it's anthro cyanins that make
it red. In in the case of a carrot, it's carotenoids.

(05:55):
In the case of grass, it's chlorophyll. And these pigments
had the cape ability of absorbing some wavelengths of light
and reflecting others back. And the wavelength that it reflects
back are the colors that we perceive. That's right, And
that's if it's an object that is opaque. Well, yeah,

(06:16):
that's a big one right there. Apples are pretty opaque. Yeah,
I would say, so that's your Superman maybe yeah, he
it's invisible see through apple. Oh yeah he can, Candy,
I get your joke now. So yeah, with an opaque
object where light um doesn't pass all the way through,
some lights reflected back. So in the case of anthra cyanons,

(06:39):
this pigment absorbs all the other wavelengths of light except red,
and it reflects red back, and so red is reflected back.
So what you see when you look at this apple
with all the red light reflecting back at you is
a red apple. That's how we perceive color in the
world around us naturally. And if it's transparent, uh, it's

(07:02):
not reflecting that light but transmitting it. So it depends
on the color of light that's passing through it instead
of reflecting back to you. And again it's that chemical makeup.
It's it operates in sort of the same way. Um.
It's just not like in an apple skin. Let's say, yeah, exactly.
But it all comes to do It comes down to
basically pigments or whatever natural chemical or mineral that either

(07:28):
absorbs or reflects certain wavelengths of light. That's right. So
here's the thing, though, Chuck, Like that can happen all
day long, and as long as there's not a human
or a monkey, or a dolphin or a dog, because
dogs are not color blind, that's right. They see different
colors than we do, but they're not color blind. I
always wonder how they do this tests ah, animals. Yeah,

(07:51):
that's a good question. I mean, I'm sure it's pretty
easy to find out, but I just didn't have time
to look into it. I'm with you. Yeah, this is
like in massive black hole of information. Like you could
just keep going and going and going with colors such
a huge expansive topic that we could just do nothing
but color episodes for the next several months if we

(08:13):
wanted to do do. You want to kill me, I may
not make it through today's. So you're doing great. This
is fine. This is great, Chuck. It is a very
like big subject, Yes it is, man, We're just we're
providing a brief overview of it. That's right. So um,
Like I was saying, things can reflect color all the time,
but as long as there's not something there to perceive it,

(08:36):
is there any Is there really any color there? Well
that's a philosophical question, but there's an answer to it,
and the answer is no. If the tree falls in
the woods and no one's around to here, it doesn't
make annoyance. No. Actually, my my opinion on that one
is yes, okay, but with color, Um, yeah, it doesn't
exist without being perceived. I think it sound to me

(08:58):
is different things. It's a bit of the brain melter.
But I see what you're saying. Okay. So um. That
leads you to the question of how do we see color?
And that wasn't figured out until the eighteenth century, and
it wasn't proven, I think, until the sixties. And there
were a pair of guys who were a dynamic duo
if I've ever heard of one before, And what were

(09:20):
their names? Well, Thomas Young he was I thought he
was kind of the main guy. Had never heard of
the other guy, Herman von Helmholtz. Yeah, Thomas Young. Um.
What I read was that he was the first to
propose the trichromatic theory basically that we see everything through red, green,
and blue channels because that's how our eyes pick up

(09:41):
on color. Yeah, because we have specialized cells in our
eyes called cones, right, and I think we have something like, um,
a hundred million or some ridiculous amount of rods. And
rods are the things that we see in like fine detail,
black and white typically, right, cones are color perceiving sy
and each cell is specialized. You either attuned to wavelengths

(10:05):
that red, green, or blue. Yeah, you have way more
rods than cones, about a hundred and twenty million rods
in each eye and only only about six million cones
in each eye. And those cones are concentrated mostly in
the front of your retina in the middle, right, which
is why you don't see color periphetally quite as well,
that's right. So, um, these cells are attuned to different wavelengths, right,

(10:30):
The long wavelengths are red, medium is green, and short
is blue. Like you said medium was yellow. No, that's
in the middle, okay, right, so medium is not in
the middle, well as far as our RGB goes, okay, Yeah,
And so with these cells, chuck, if you're looking at

(10:50):
your blue horse. What was his name, Calvin the Blue Horse.
So if you're looking at Calvin the Blue Horse, you're
getting a lot of information on from short wavelength light,
not so much at the longer medium wavelengths, right, And
so there's probably a little bit it's not a true

(11:11):
blue horse, right, which would mean that it was a
totally saturated blue, which is only that blue wavelength, true
blue wavelength. Coming to your eyes, there's probably a little
bit of green, a little bit of red. And so
all the cones in your eyes are getting all of
this information at once, and they're reporting to your brain

(11:31):
via electrical impulses about the quality of the wavelengths of
light that they're getting. And so your brain takes it
and basically becomes a color mixer and creates the color
blue that you're seeing. Calvin ass that's how we detect color.
And from the R and the G and the B
you can put together. Supposedly, the Commission on Illumination, a

(11:58):
European Commission on illumination back in one determined that humans
can see something like two point three eight million colors. Oh,
it's such a hundred million, now, is it? Because I've
seen all over the place in this findings are the
ones that people say, this has the best science behind it. Yeah,

(12:19):
now I'm sorry. Ten million Okay. The other thing about
the c I E Is that people say, well, this
was only under certain types of illumination. I think three
different types of illumination, so it is entirely possible if
you change the intensity or whatever, you're going to have
brand new colors. So ten millions reasonable. That's a lot
of colors that we can see all from the red,

(12:41):
the green, and the blue cones coming together and your
brain adjusting them and seeing, oh, well that's um burnt sienna.
Did you Yeah, this sort of the go to joke color, right,
it is a pretty jokey color. It's a good one.
Uh yeah, it's pretty amazing. Ten million colors, or let's
say it's two million, if you're going by you know,

(13:05):
naming convention. Shall we talk about some of the characteristics
of color. Yeah, but let's take a break first. It
is getting heavy, all right, so if you um actually

(13:33):
you can do this on your modern television as well.
But it seemed like most TVs now kind of come
fairly set up. But in the old days, when you
have those little wheels to try and get that color right.
It was. You know, you might have noticed things that
said hugh and intensity or value or tone and all
that stuff. Those are all color characteristics, and hugh specifically

(13:57):
is um. I mean, that's basically what the color is.
It's not the lightness of the darkness. It's you know,
it's the greenness or the redness or the blueness that's
the hue. Yeah, it's it's what you can interchange that
word with color. Yeah, exactly. UM. I like how they
refer to as the identity of a color sounds kind

(14:19):
of personal. Uh. The intensity is how pure it is
so um. Like we said, most colors are mixes, you know,
they bleed one way or the other on the wavelength.
But in its purest form a single wavelength um, which
is really rare, that would be the purity or the
intensity of the color. Um. You're not gonna see that
very often though. No, And I was wondering, like, that's

(14:41):
pretty cool. There's some physics labs somewhere that can produce
pure saturated green, like unadulterated green or unadulterated blue. There
is there has to be. Yeah, probably that is gotta
be really something to see to know you're looking at green,
like think but green, I would like to see that sometime. Yeah,

(15:04):
and I have, UM, I'm not color blind, but I
have a more difficult time picking out other cues in
a color, whereas Emily is really good, like when picking
out paint colors, like that gray has this and this
and this and it, and I'm like, really like I
see gray. Well, supposedly a lot of people have a
color deficiency. I might have a slight color deficiency, and

(15:26):
a lot of people don't realize that. Well, yeah, so
a lot of people don't realize that they think that
this is this color just looks like this and thinks
everybody sees it that way and this in the case,
and then it comes from a conversation where they're like, well,
wait a minute, what do you mean you see a
distinction between those? Well, but yeah, but in my case,
it's hues. It's not like I see a completely different
color or you know, black or everything just looks gray.

(15:51):
I did UM a brain stuff on color blindness. It
is pretty interesting. Yeah. I went to UM research that
one time for a show, and it would just like
bent in my mind so much. I'd quietly file it away,
so I'm sure you'll pick it next week. Color blindness, Yeah, Um.
Value is the lightness or darkness of a color, and
that's basically has to do with light. Um, the energy

(16:13):
of the light that makes it up. Yeah, and the
value is um, so he was. There's really just kind
of a finite, very finite number of colors of hues, right. Um.
And you think of like primary colors, which we'll talk
about soon. Um. But when you adjust something, when you
adjust them the value of it, that just creates a

(16:37):
whole new range of colors. So if you add a
little black to a color, what you're doing is shading it. Yeah.
If you add white, you are creating a tint. And
then if you add black and white gray, you're toning it. Yeah. Right,
And I think people interchange those words without understanding what

(16:57):
they mean. Yeah, but they are definite distinct things, and
um that we should probably say. There's a lot of
really neat sights on the internet. Pantone is a really
good one, um, where you can go look at color
wheels and things like that and see the distinction between
these things and be like, oh, you mean pastels. That's
another word for a tone. Yeah, And it's a lot

(17:21):
of people get really get into it because it's the
basis of printing and art and photography, and like every
every sort of art form, well not every art form,
but many art forms boil down to color. So if
you go to art school, you're gonna study color pretty deeply. Yeah,
you know, and one of the things you're gonna study

(17:41):
is color theory. And color theory is based on the
idea that certain colors can contrast one another, certain colors
complement one another, certain colors should never be used together.
And not that it's just you know, um, your instructor
says saying these colors don't go together. It's not just

(18:02):
search his opinion. These are objective facts as far as
color theory goes, and it's all based on um. These
the idea that all colors fall into one of two categories.
You have additive colors and subtractive colors. Yeah, and there's
a couple of I mean, there's two distinct applications for
both of these. If you're talking about a computer screen

(18:24):
or or a television, that's that's using light, so it's additive. Um.
If you're talking about paint or photography, that's subtractive, right,
So you can think of it this way. With additive colors,
you're starting with black and you're adding light to it,
and ultimately, when you add all these additive colors together,
you're going to have white. With subtractive colors, you start

(18:47):
with white, and when you add all these colors together,
you're ultimately going to have black. And they subtract by
absorbing one another's colors. Yeah, that's another color mind bender
two because with subtract active color, you're still adding colors,
but it's not additive, right to wrap your head around that. Yeah,
but there's there's subtracting wavelengths by combining colors and absorbing them, right, Yeah,

(19:12):
it takes a hue out. So a really good example
of subtractive colors is if you take um cyane. Cyan
absorbs orange red, right, So if you take cyane and
you mix it with yellow, you produce green. And the
reason that cyane and yellow produced green, it's because the
cyane absorbs the red light and the yellow light. The

(19:36):
yellow absorbs blue violet, and so the only color that's
not subtracted or absorbed is green. So green is produced
from these other pigments absorbing all the other wavelengths, and
with an additive coloring, additive pigments, it's it's quite the opposite.
You have um light combining to form new colors. Rather

(20:01):
than absorbing, you're adding to it. Yeah, and like the
apple is an example, like we said earlier, of a
subtractive color system um and again, like a TV screen
would be additive. I think we I think we got that. Yeah,
I mean it is mine bending a little bit. Some
of the stuff, you know, I have to read like

(20:21):
ten times and then it sinks in. But the the
reason that all colors can be turned into either additive
primaries or subtractive primaries is that these are the six colors.
Of these they're the six spectral colors. They're the rainbow colors, right,
So additive primaries are what red, green, and blue the

(20:43):
correct Yeah, and then the subtractive colors are cyan yellow
and um magenta ye I was gonna say magenta. They're
almost like bizarro colors. They're the bizarro world. Primary colors.
When you think of primary colors, you think of like
the the what red, yellow, and blue, because ye, red, yellow,

(21:09):
and blue were the traditional primaries and they still are.
But um when it comes to like painting and printing.
They've been replaced with cyan, magenta, yellow and black. K. Yeah,
when you go to your clubhouse printer, Yeah, that's what
you're gonna be seeing C M K. Or you can
select r G B as well, red, green and blue.

(21:31):
So Crosby stills Nash and Young, right or Crosby Stills
in Nash. Yeah. Okay, that's the difference. That's a good
rule of thumb. Man. All right, So we mentioned primary
colors just a second ago, and then we have our
secondary colors, green, orange, and purple hues would you get
from mixing the primary colors, and then you have something

(21:52):
called tertiary colors, which is this furthering the color hues
by mixing primary colors with secondary colors. Right, So the
six tertiary colors and the two sets of primary colors
or the six secondary colors, I think in the two
sets of primary colors form the color wheelers twelve colors

(22:13):
in the color wheel, and tertiary colors are the ones
that you'll hear like blue, green or red violet. Yeah,
it's like literally named the two colors, and color naming
is another rabbit hole that you can go down. There's
a site. Um man, I wish I'd written it down,
but it's if you type in like who names colors

(22:34):
or color naming or something like that in Google, like
one of the one of the first page entries is
the site that you go through and um, it shows
you different colors and you write what you would name
that color? Interesting, butter yellow or something like that, right,
and the whole well that was the as far as
I got. Mike Well, I would call it butter yellow.

(22:57):
Hungry had other things to do. But um, you can
go through and just I think it's like two enter
twenty different shades that they show you, colors that they
show you, and the the the whole purpose of all
this is to find some sort of commonality to create
universal A universal naming convention for colors makes um because

(23:18):
you know, there is a lot of distinction among languages
for naming colors. But at least one study that I
found decided that all colors universally for societies that do
recognize individual colors, rather than these are just warm colors
and these are cool colors, which is universal. Um. The

(23:40):
more primary the color, the shorter and easier to remember
the name of it. Is like across culture, so not
all cultures will call it blue. But what a culture
is going to have like another like short monosyllabic name
for that color, for the same thing that we would
call blue. That's pretty interesting just because it's easier to understand.

(24:02):
It's just it's basic, like colors appear to be basic universally.
All right, I think we should take another break and
maybe come back and talk a little bit about how
colors can complement each other and live in harmony and
what that all means to us. Okay, all right, we're

(24:39):
back were Uh So we talked about the different uh
primary color, secondary, and tertiary. And there's also something called
complementary colors, which are basically contrasting colors that make a
neutral color when put together, and they are really far
apart and hugh as far apart as they can be.
And there if you look at the color wheel there

(25:01):
on the complete opposite side from one another, right um.
And when you place them next to each other, then
their hue is like, uh, I guess it's just more
robust looking. Yeah, because they complement one another, right um. Yeah,
complimentary doesn't necessarily mean like, oh, they look great together.
Under all circumstances. So, um, some complementary colors like red

(25:25):
and green, if you play them next to each other
in the same intensity and the same size, it's another one.
You are going to have what's called an eyesore. I
have a shirt like that. It's just too much equal
amounts of bright red and bright green. Trying to think
of that shirt. It's just a Christmas shirt? Is it retired? Well,
it's it's a holiday shirt. Um. But the whole point

(25:50):
of having colors and using colors together isn't just like, well,
these two are opposite the color wheel, so I'm gonna
use them in equal amounts and equal intensity and everything
will be right. You have to achieve what's called color harmony. Um.
And in doing that, you want to choose different um,
different shades or different tones or different tints, and also

(26:10):
different amounts at once. So like you're going to use
a bunch of red and a little bit of green
as an accent. That would be much more harmonious than
equal amounts of intense red and green next to each other. Yeah,
and again this is um. When we say it's not
a matter of taste, that's like picking something out as
a matter of taste. But again, these are like scientific rules.

(26:31):
You can't just throw two colors together and say that
looks great or that they're harmonious. Um. I mean, I
guess you could, but you'd be wrong. You would surge
would be like, you're wrong. This is objective stuff. And
then with complimentary colors. Getting back to that, there's this
really cool thing that they bring up called retinal fatigue.
So you can do a little experiment at home that's

(26:52):
kind of blows your mind, but it really illustrates how
color works pretty well. If you look at a bright
red spot for about a minute, um, your retinas are
going to soak in all that red, all those cones
are And then when you go immediately and look at
a white surface, uh, you're gonna see green briefly, not forever, right,

(27:12):
And the reason why is because your red cells have
just been basically overstimulated and they're gonna respond weekly to
the information that they're getting from that white, right, and
your blue and green cells are gonna be functioning just fine,
so they're gonna easily overwhelm your red cells. And so
what you'll see is this ghost image of like a

(27:33):
cyan square. Yeah, which is why, uh, and the reason
why it is because red is the complement of green
will always be that opposite. It doesn't just like randomly
pick out a color. I know, And if you start
adding all this stuff together that there are objectively complementary
colors that you see when you see too much of
the opposite one, doesn't it all seem to fit so

(27:58):
cleanly together that you're almost like, what is going on here? Like?
What is color? Why do we see color? Yeah, it's
a really good question, and evolutionary biologists have not been
able to explain it fully. Yeah, I guess I really
never thought about that because there's well, I mean, there's
probably some evolutionary benefit, right, like green things are generally

(28:20):
good to eat. Yeah, but green is also the the
kind of a universal color for disgust or sickness or illness,
like you're green because you're green around the gills or
something like that. Green is often like the color of rot.
But it's true, I mean, it's both. So how how
do we evolve to understand the nuanced And I mean clearly,

(28:45):
if we didn't evolve to see in color so that
we could do this, we have as a byproduct of it.
But we can very easily tick off whether something is
healthy for us dangerous. Um. We we get a lot
of information about an object in our environments, quality and
desirability based on its color. It's almost like a shorthand

(29:07):
that our brains pick up. Yeah, And part of that
is because we're conditioned after years of using green for
go and green for safe passage, and like red or
orange for hazard signs and stop signs. So part of
that's conditioning. But as far as like going back many
many years before we made stop signs, I have no idea. Yeah,

(29:28):
you know, it really makes you wonder. And even like
the idea that pink is for girls and blue is
for boys, that's a fairly recent development. Prior to I
think the early twentieth century, it was the opposite. Did
we ever do that as a show or didn't? It
was too short? I think we did, like a video
one or something. Didn't we maybe I seem to remember that,
But it was the opposite until like the the interesting Yeah, yeah,

(29:53):
that's interesting totally. Is that's why you rock your pink shirts? Well, yeah, right,
that's exactly why that action. So getting back to harm
harmonious colors, uh, if they are side but and This
is if you're like picking out colors in your house
or whatever. If you're not very good at it, there
are a few hard and fast rules. Um, colors that

(30:13):
are and get your little color wheel out is really handy.
If they're side by side, Uh, they're gonna harmonize well. Um.
And like we mentioned, colors directly across from one another.
Complimentary ones also go well in the right proportions because,
like you said, the size of it makes a big difference.
They point out in the article. I don't if you've
ever seen someone who's like painted their room red, like

(30:35):
in college, you know, some stupid room hate would do that.
It's an assault on your senses because you're not used
to seeing that much red. But maybe an accent wall
in a shade of red matched with a complimentary color,
you would want it red and green room though it
gets green as complimented or red. No, but you could

(30:56):
conceivably say, um, use the complementary color for like the
trim or something like that. Yeah, exactly, Um. And then
tents and shades and tones of the same color are
always okay together. It's never gonna clash. But um, you're
just gonna have to mess around with like how much
of one compared to the other and what places your

(31:17):
eye Yes, no, and so again Surge is is saying like, no,
there's objective truth as to complementary colors and harmonious colors,
but there is also personal preference. And this is kind
of like the thorn in the side of the whole
idea of color psychology that people use colors to manipulate

(31:42):
other people into, like buying a product or whatever. Study
after study keeps finding that color preferencing color symbolism is
extremely personal. It's based on past experience, on your upbringing,
on your culture. Like for example, here in the West
we wear black from mourning. Yeah, well, in the East,

(32:06):
white is the color from mourning. So there's a lot
of culturally bound ideas about color too, which keeps it
from being like universally symbolic or whatever. But that being said,
there are some that just from being exposed to it
time and time again, like a red stoplight that you
come to um identify symbolically with other stuff. Yeah, and

(32:27):
colors will also affect everyone differently mood wise, but there
are some generalities there too. Um Like blue is generally
a soothing color that will calm you down. Um too
much though could actually have the opposite effect, like too
much blue on some people, or can really depress you.
What blue can I wonder if that's why they say

(32:50):
you're blue? Yeah? Yeah, I mean think about we describe
our world like that, green with envy. Blue means you're
down in the dumps. Red means are angry? Yeah, red
faced or red neck? Wait, that's different. It's a little different.
Warm colors, reds and yellows. Um can also lift the
spirits if you're less excitable. Um. And they say that

(33:15):
most people want to just strike a balance though, between
the cool and the warm, right, And that's when it
comes to like personal preference. Yeah, but the idea behind
this is that a lot of people don't realize this
is going on, that they're being affected by color, even
though they are. That it's on a very unconscious level. Yeah.
And it also depends a lot on light, like how
much light a room has coming into it, because you're

(33:36):
gonna because sunlight is different than artificial light, your shirt's
gonna look at different color outside in the sun as
it might. Uh. And I remember when we did the
TV show, there was a lot of um with colors
and stuff. You know, things would look different outside than
they would under studio lights. Right. Well, what's neat though,
is we humans have developed this trick called color constancy, where, um,

(33:59):
if you look at something, even if it's in the
shadow or in the sunlight, it should conceivably look like
different colored things because of the illumination. But to us,
we're still like, no, that's still green, just because there's
you know, shadow blocking it now, I still see it
as green. It doesn't make any sense, and it's kind
of perplexed. Um. I guess, uh biologists for a while

(34:23):
trying to figure out what this is, or neurologists, and
they figured out that yes, it is in the brain. Um.
And there was this one guy who had some sort
of brain damage, I think from an electric shock, and
he also went for all intensive purposes blind but he
could still see color, but he didn't have color constancy.
So they figured out that this guy was detecting wavelengths

(34:45):
of light color even though he couldn't see anything. He
could see colors still, but color constancy wasn't there. So
they figured out, well, that means that it's a trick
of the brain. Very neat, it's very cool um. They
also ing up in the in the House of Works
article something. I think it's pretty interesting how certain because

(35:05):
of conditioning, certain colors can just appear to be wrong.
Like if you were to pull up and see a
green stop sign, it would freak you out. Or the
example the Houston here is if you cracked an egg
and there was a green egg yolk um, that would
be really freaky too, because you're just so used to
that yellow. You know, you'd think, well, this is disease
or something, yeah, or dr seust you know, uh what

(35:30):
else you got? Did you look at that thing on
pigment I did. There's some wacky ways people have made pigments, yeah,
I mean pigment um. As far as making paint in things. Uh, Now,
they're synthetic, synthetic, you know, like they're synthesizing laboratories, which
makes sense. But throughout all of history, up until they
started doing that, they were actual, uh, real things in

(35:53):
the ground and on the earth that they would grind
up into powder. Um. In the case of blue, there
was a semi precious stone called, or there still is
called Lepis Lazuli that was found all over the place
in Afghanistan. And that's how they made blue. Um Azure
or azure right, is a blue mineral of copper. So

(36:15):
all of them, uh, most of them have a few
different ways they can make it. Um red. I think
we've talked about cinnabar before. The mineral is where you
get vermilion red and carmine. Carmine is bright red and
that comes from aluminum salt of carminic acid. So it's
just crazy that they found all these things in the

(36:37):
world to make. And I know blue is the toughest
one because you don't see blue very much in nature. Um.
I think blue is the one you will see least
in the primary colors as far as nature goes, like
some insects, but like there's no blue food. Um, yeah,
that's true. Blue horses, No, Well, what about mine? My

(36:58):
favorite was India Yellow, where they would feed cows nothing
but mango leaves and then collect their urine and then
boil it down, then filter out the concentrated muck and
then make balls out of it. And there was the
basis of your pigment. It's pretty cool stuff. So those

(37:18):
are just a few. If you really get into pigments,
and you can like go crazy trying to figure out
where they all came from. Definitely, And um, I mean again,
this is like really just the surface of color. There's
so much to it, and um, I strongly advise you
to go out and learn more about it. Color it's everywhere.
How about the one last factoid? Why is the sky blue? Oh,

(37:41):
it's a good one. Guy's not really blue. No, it
shouldn't really have any color. But the angle of the
sun coming down on the upper atmosphere um encounters things
like water, vapor, and other tiny particles, and they tend
to scatter blue wavelength light more than the other colors, right,
so that it's just bouncing around at all points, which

(38:02):
is why the sky is blue. It's say, like noontime.
But while the sky is blue at noontime over here,
it's say sunrise or sunset to the east or the west.
And since all that blue light is getting scattered over
you where it's noontime in the in the east of
the west, those reds and yellows and pinks are making

(38:23):
it all the way there and the blue is not,
which is why sunrise and sunset it tends to appear reddish,
whereas like mid day appears blue yeah, which is it
makes total sense. And when your kids ask you why
is the sky blue? You can tell him. You can
tell them like the real reason you can be like
color does not actually exist. It's all lie. Good luck
with that, go to sleep. If you want to know

(38:45):
more about color, just type that word in your favorite
search engine or how stuff works. That common and will
take you on a wild ride. And since I said
wild ride, it's time for listener mail. Uh. I'm to
call this something I've never heard of before. Precocious puberty.
Uh you ever heard of that? Yeah, we talked about it,

(39:06):
did we early puberty? Okay, did we talk about that?
I guess this is in girls, So maybe that's why
got you surprised me. I'm a long time listener, and
thanks for helping me in my commute every day. Really
enjoyed and giggled my way through the episode of male puberty. Um,
thanks so much for mentioning precocious puberty. Well, there you
have it. I was diagnosed at age two after my

(39:29):
mom came to wake me before school one day. Now
before preschool. This is a lady. Uh, And she had
started her period at two years old, and as you
can imagine, my mom was terrified. It took a long
time to get a correct diagnosis since it is pretty rare.
My treatment started out as daily shots that my mom
gave me at home UM that then went to weekly, monthly,

(39:53):
and annually as a year's progressed. I also had intermittent
stays in the hospital for testing. Poor kid. I know.
Treatment was stopped when I reached twelve years old, essentially
pressing play of my puberty that have been on pause
for almost in years. Let's let's see that's cool treatment. Yeah,
I mean it's amazing that they figured out how to
stall puberty. Yeah, they're like, stay stay, Okay. I have

(40:17):
only hazy memories of this, of course, as I was
a child, but I do remember that missing UM shots
caused quite a bit of pain since my body was
growing out of control. Essentially never been able to find
out what the long term effects might be. But I've
had a pretty decent health into my adult life and
I'm now thirty one years old. Awesome, So thanks a lot.
And that is from Lauren in California. Well, thanks a lot. Lauren.

(40:38):
Appreciate that we love hearing from people with real life
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If you want to let us know about your real
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(41:01):
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