What’s the point of seeing in colour? Kasey explains all in great blog.

What’s the point of seeing in colour?

 

Or, more specifically, why do we see in trichromatic color? (trichromatic is the 3 color slider that you sometimes see on the computer and by changing the percentage of red blue and green you can make any colour.)

Or, even before that, why are we sight-based creatures at all? Most smaller creatures are in fact smell-based creatures. An example of this is the aphid. When one aphid is in danger it starts to release chemicals which other aphids pick up through their noses and that warns them that there’s danger nearby and so they should run. A downside to this is that some predators started to pick up on this smell too.

So, there’s the downside of evolutionary counter-parts but we’re predators – why on earth would we need a defensive system? If anything this would be advantageous to us. Right? In short, no. The bigger the creature, the harder it is for them to pick up and give off these smells. Take dogs for example – they have huge noses but still need to be almost touching the other dogs with it to smell their greeting.

So what other system, with minimal change, could we use to give quick warning and other communication? Some people would say hearing but that also requires speech or an equivalent which would mean more effort and a longer time to evolve.

Our solution was colour. The early mammals we evolved from could already see dichromatically so it was a short jump. To start with it was mainly to see red so that we could detects others’ moods better (skin flushing from anger or blushing) or to detect the freshest, ripest red fruit. Admittedly these are both just theories, as it happened to far back for us to say with absolute certainty but it would make sense.

But, what happened to the afore-mentioned danger? If this was meant to help us detect danger it’s not really done anything yet – or has it? Colour can also alter our mood, reaction speed and even sleep cycles.

So, danger. The best example of this is when we see blood. This makes us produce adrenaline and the fight or flight response but the deep red would also change our brain’s reaction speed, quick decision making and impulsiveness – the things that would give us that edge in a fight or when trying to lose your predator.

Unfortunately, a lot of people have caught onto this and so colour has become a hugely important part of marketing and how to easily sell your product. Once again using red as an example, a company with red signs (such as Target) promotes singular, small impulse buys with the colour supporting that by changing how the brain thinks. Also, it’s estimated that by the company logo and its color pallet alone the decision on whether you will by their product is 62-90% made even before we have actually seen the product.

That is only a tiny glimpse of the power of colour and there are many other effects colour has on us but I’m going to close with a few of the mood altering qualities/ first impressions of a person that colour creates. Just remember that each colour can do a thousand different things (OK, maybe a slight over exaggeration) and this list will only show a few of them – of course some colours can have a different meaning depending on what culture someone is from.

A fun exercise to do is find a few meanings for a colour and try to think why we perceive them this way e.g. purple representing royalty, or superiority because it used to be hard to get purple dyes.

Kasey Douglas, Year 10.