Strange Ideas that just might work

[Kitsune]

Originally Posted by Cyclefrance

I had this idea as a boy that we all saw different colours from each other but wouldn't know this because we would say 'that is yellow' and 'this is red' so we all thought we were seeing the same colour - when what I was seeing as yellow was your red.... and so on....

Does that make sense?

Wondered about that, myself.

Studies show this is true by measuring what nerves fire in the visual cortex and at what frequency when a subject is exposed to certain wavelengths of light, but the variation isn't a huge amount. Most of the variation comes from the peak wavelength that your cones are excited by and depends on variations in the pigment inside the cones. Your long wavelength cone might be more "tuned" to a wavlength several nanometers above or below someone else's, resulting in your orange being slightly more yellow or red than someone else's.

Color perception is all kinds of weird.