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Hello viewers of Half as Interesting and welcome to something that will completely worthless
for those of you who are colorblind.
But to make it up to you, here: I got you this gift card to Red Lobster.
Enjoy!
So, colors are basically the way our eyes interpret certain wavelengths of light.
Generally, speaking, we’re only able to see light that’s between 380 to 700 nanometers
in wavelength, with wavelength variations determining color—for example, we interpret
light with a wavelength of 500 nanometers as blue.
There are also a ton of other types of light that we can’t see—for example, we interpret
UV light with a wavelength of 100 nanometers as skin cancer.
As you go to longer wavelengths, there are infrared, microwave, radar, and radio, and
as you go to short wavelengths there are ultraviolet, x-rays, gamma rays, Ray Romano, and Ray Donovan.
But this little band in here is the visible light spectrum, which you might also recognize
by its nickname, Roy G Biv, or its given name Royland Grindlewald Biverston Jr.
Now you may be wondering, “how do my eyes know which colors are which?”
Well, in the back of your eyes, you’ve got rods and cones.
The rods do… something, but the cones do a different thing: sense color.
You’ve actually got three types of cones: long cones, which are stimulated by red light,
medium cones, stimulated by green light, and short cones, stimulated by blue light.
But as you’ve probably noticed, unless you’re looking at the flag of Karelia or the three
worst Power Rangers, you usually see more than red, green, and blue.
That’s because the cones can also pick up more than just their one pure color, as this
graph shows.
So when you see yellow, that’s your long, red cones picking up some stimulation, and
the medium green cones picking up some, and your eyes put that together, and see yellow,
which is the wavelength between red and green.
But now let’s talk about magenta: that purplish-red color that you mostly know from T-Mobile ads
and the hair of manic pixie dream girls—but if you look at the light spectrum, you’ll
notice that magenta isn’t on it.
There is no wavelength for magenta—and that’s because magenta doesn’t actually exist.
You see, magenta is what you get when your eyes see both red and blue light at the same
time, stimulating your long and short cones.
Normally, you’d think that when that happens, your eyes would average the wavelengths, and
you would end up in the middle, seeing green.
But wait: your eyes know you aren’t seeing green, because your green cones aren’t being
stimulated.
But we had to see something, so our eyes panicked and just made up magenta.
That’s right: magenta is just like your girlfriend who goes to another school—it’s
a figment of your imagination.
But magenta is actually one of the least interesting pieces of color confusion out there, because
even though there’s no wavelength for it, we still see magenta all the time.
The weirder, cooler, spookier side of color theory comes via so-called impossible colors:
colors that theoretically exist, but that we can’t usually see.
There are four main types of impossible colors: the first is hyperbolic colors.
Let’s take, for example, hyperbolic green, which surprisingly is not a new weed brand,
but instead an impossibly green color.
You see, because of overlaps in what wavelengths our cones can pick up, our green cones can
never be stimulated on their own: there will always be some stimulation of either red or
blue cones.
But, if you were somehow able to just stimulate the green cones, you would see hyperbolic
green: a green greener than any green that’s ever greened.
And there is actually a way to trick yourself into seeing hyperbolic green: take magic mushrooms.
Wait no, that’s not right: I meant, afterimages.
You see, if you stare at magenta for a long time, your red and blue cones get fatigued,
so when you look away, you’ll see a green afterimage, because magenta is the opposite
of green.
If you then looked immediately at green, the green afterimage will combine with the green
you’re looking at and you’ll see hyperbolic green.
Go ahead, try it.
Seriously.
Put your face way too close to the screen, the way you were always told not to.
Now, stare at the magenta.
Keep staring.
Keeep staring.
Don’t get distracted by the little clown in the corner of the screen.
Okay, now look at the green!
Diiiid it look extra green?
Hopefully it did, but if not, you should do what I do whenever anything goes wrong and
blame my animators.
Second up are stygian colors: colors that are an impossible combination of dark and
saturated.
For example, stygian blue is seen as just as dark as black, but also as blue, which
is normally impossible, because you know, the only thing that’s as dark as black is,
well, black.
To see stygian blue, stare at this yellow, then at black, but this time I’m gonna make
you pause the video to do it, because we’ve got ads to get to.
Third are self-luminous colors, which are colors that appear impossibly bright.
Whatever color you stare at first, you’ll see the self-luminous version of its opposite.
So, if you stare at this green, then at white, you’ll see self-luminous red.
Or this yellow, then white, and you’ll see self-luminous blue.
If you stare at this Luigi, then white, you’ll see self-luminous Waluigi.
Finally, there are impossible combination colors.
According to the theory of opponent-process, you cannot see any colors that “could be
described as a combination of two colors on opposite sides of the color wheel.”
Basically, that’s fancy science talk for that you can see reddish-yellow, which is
basically orange, but you can’t see reddish-green.
If you mix red and green light, you see yellow, if you mix red and green paint, you see brown.
Except that maybe you can see reddish-green if you look at this and cross your eyes to
make them overlap.
Did you see it?
Okay, now, if you keep your eyes crossed you should see something else impossible…
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