What can we rely on if not the evidence of our own senses? Seeing is believing, is it not? Vision feels like something concrete and immutable and colour perception in particular seems like something that should beyond outside influence. My own understanding of colour perception was that it was a more or less a passive thing. Light hits at object, the object reflects certain wavelengths of that light into our eye and the brain recognises those wavelengths as colours.
But this, in fact, is wrong. The brain actually interprets the stimulus that the eye receives to a much greater extent than you might think. Some devilishly clever experiments have shown that colour perception occurs in the left side of the brain, which is also where linguistic processing occurs, and further research has shown that the language we use has a huge influence over the colours that we perceive.
In English we have 11 basic colour terms. These are the words that can be used to describe almost all colours, like blue, red, or purple. This number is not the same in all languages. In Russian there are discrete terms for light blue and dark blue. In ancient Celtic languages blue and green were not distinguished.
The way we describe colours is also not the same in all languages. In Hungarian there are two words for red but these do not necessarily describe the shade of the colour, but rather the context in which the colour appears, with one word being used for negative or violent red things (like fire, blood or fighting) and the other for more positive things (like the colour of an apple). The ancient Greeks would describe the sky as ‘bronze’ rather than blue because they thought of colour in terms of it’s brightness and the sky was thought to be bright like a shiny bronze plate.
These linguistic factors have an impact on how we actually see colours. For example, Russian speakers can distinguish different shades of blue more quickly than English speakers because their language distinguishes different shades of blue more quickly.
A particularly extreme example of this is found amongst the Himba tribe of Namibia. They are a semi-nomadic tribe who have been largely isolated from outside influence. They have just 5 basic colour terms, and these terms do not correlate with our own categories. For example, the colour term ‘dambu’ in the Himba language can actually be used to describe some reds, some greens, and some yellows.
Look at the circle of coloured squares below. To the Himba one of these green squares is very obviously a different shade of green.
If you couldn’t tell – and most English speakers can’t – it is the square at the top left. Now look at the picture below.
Can you see the blue square? Most English speakers can tell the difference easily. The Himba cannot.
To know that the way we perceive something as fundamental as colour so differently as a result of the language we speak is both fascinating and disconcerting. Furthermore, this phenomenon is not unique to the perception of colour. It is in fact true of just about everything, including the way we perceive and describe time and space.
The implications of this are quite astonishing, on everything from eyewitness testimony to cross cultural relations. To a greater or lesser extent we all perceive the world differently and it is probably worth bearing that in mind when we come into conflict with one another.
If you would like to be further perturbed on this subject, I can highly recommend Lera Boroditsky’s TED talk, ‘How Language Shapes the Way We Think’, available on the link below: