this post was submitted on 21 Jun 2024
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Today I Learned

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[โ€“] ieightpi 38 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (14 children)

I want to better understand this because the sky is clearly a specific color that has been there since the beginning.

How did proto humans not look up at the sky and considered in their feeble brains, "everything above the ground is this very unique color. It's different from the ground, and the plants."

I get that sea and lakes really don't look blue. But did they look up and not see some shade of blue on a clear day?

[โ€“] Sludgehammer 2 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

There's been research that language shapes how we perceive the world around us. Because there was no word for "blue" there was no concept of blue, the color still existed but their brains just lumped it into "green". Sight works by the visual centers brain taking data from the eyes, throwing most of it out, then building a model which is what the rest of the brain gets to actually "see". That's why optical illusions work.

A commonly cited source for language shaping our perception of color is Jules Davidoff's studies on the Himba tribe. The Himba have no word for blue, and they struggled to pick out the blue square from this color wheel. However, they do have many distinctions for shades of green so when given this color wheel they could easily pick out the square that's a different shade of green (and yes I opened it in MSpaint to check and one of the green squares is a different shade.)

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