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January 30, 2004brown: bastard child of color perceptionOne of the courses I'm taking this semester is Marti Hearst's information visualization course. Our recent set of readings was a couple of chapters from Colin Ware's text book "Information Visualization : Perception for Design." In his chapter on color perception, Ware writes: Brown is one of the most mysterious colors. Brown is dark yellow. While people talk about a light green or a dark green, a light blue or a dark blue, yellow is different. When colors in the vicinity of yellow and orange yellow are darkened, they turn to shades of brown and olive green. Unlike red, blue, and green, brown requires that there be a reference white somewhere in the vicinity for it to be perceived... Crazy. Despite all my work with interfaces, visualization, and design, it took reading this passage for me to realize that, spectrally speaking, brown is really dark yellow. So why its distinct appearance? (And have you ever seen a brown light??) One thought I had is based on the opponent process theory of vision, in which colors are perceptually arranged along three dimensions: a red-green spectrum, a blue-yellow spectrum, and a white-black (luminance or brightness) spectrum. Most people have three kinds of color receptors (called cones), roughly corresponding to the wavelengths for red, green, and blue light. Yellow is perceived through the sum of the higher wavelength (red and green) receptors. Since yellow is an inferred primary color, not the result of a specific color receptor, perhaps that has some bearing on why in lower luminance it has this weird perceptual transformation to brown. Then a second thought occurred to me. Maybe it's an evolutionary feature that unmistakenly lets us know shit when we see it. Posted by jheer at January 30, 2004 03:50 AMComments
Interesting, and kinda yuck. Doesn't it mean that evolutionary-wise, we are less able to perceive shit? i.e. if we sat in a shit-stained room we could sit clueless to the brown infestation? Posted by: Ken at January 30, 2004 12:01 PMI don't think shit-filled rooms was a common enough occurrence to make the adaptation unadvantageous. However, by having brown (dark yellow) appear perceptually different from lighter yellows, perhaps it gave us a strengthened means for seeing poop "in the wild." So I guess that means you can avoid shit when you see it, but if you're in deep shit, it's too late... you're shit out of luck. Posted by: heerforce at January 30, 2004 12:35 PMeven better, how about an evolutionary capability to know BULLSHIT when we see it. shit is tangible, old school, and biosphere-bound. bullshit is ethereal, timeless, and thrives in the cybersphere. what color is online bullshit? what color is digishit? dude. how is it you blogged this brainiac entry at 4am after escaping your capture! by robots and catching last call at 500? you must be a machine. you are a mechanical imposter. the mechaniheer. the robots must still have your true self. the expedition to liberate the organiheer is now in planning stage. Posted by: scott at January 30, 2004 01:23 PMIf a color-blind bear took a shit in a forest, and no one else was around, would the shit be brown? speaking of digishit, maybe orkut should add "bs factor" to their ratings, and add brown to their series of profile colors (red=sexy/yellow=trusty/blue=cool/brown=full of shit). and maybe metamanda can work on tangible user interfaces for bullshit detection when she starts grad school. Posted by: Ken at January 31, 2004 03:50 PMNaw, someone in hiroshi's lab already did a bullshit detector. Or, actually, it's a corporate fallout geiger counter. I agree with Scott. I think I was booting as you were writing this entry. Posted by: metamanda at February 4, 2004 02:42 PMTrackback Pings
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