Is colour a thing?

While reading about colour and what it is, I found a lot of writing about colour existing only in our minds. At first, this was a tricky concept to wrap my head around. Our language refers to colours as things that exist outside of us. That is how we are taught to think of colours from our earliest learning days. Names for colours are taught to young children. Red, blue, green, yellow, pink, brown, orange, purple, black and white. These colour names felt like they were attached to colours that are things with characteristics. Red is loud and bold, like a siren. Yellow is happy and cheery. Green is calmer and friendly. Green means go. Red means stop. They have personality in a way.

Things seemed to have colours. The banana is yellow. This can be understood as yellow being part of the banana. The banana has yellow. Yellow is a thing that belongs to the banana.

The reality is colours do not exist how we see them, outside of us. When writing this, I still use language that makes it seem like colours are physical things because that is the most common form of communication. Colours are conceptual things. Colours are one of the ways our bodies interpret light. Since we are all slightly different from each other, we interpret light differently as well.

Forms of colour blindness are well documented, but I wonder if blindness is the correct word. Some people are totally unable to see colours. In this case, it makes sense to apply the word blind, but it is a rare condition. About 1 in 30,000 people have complete colour blindness. It is known as achromatopsia. There are many people who are known to have colour vision deficiency. Babies are born unable to see colour and colour perception can reduce with age. Since the process of experiencing colour involves our eyes and brains, there are many factors that can affect our ability to experience colours.

I have had disagreements about colour with other people. My daughter insists a ball our dog plays with is purple but I see it clearly as brown.

My colour identification has shifted as I worked on my book about colour. Through the process of understanding colour concepts, language, and definitions, I have completely changed how I perceive and identify blue and cyan. Now when I see cyan, I say cyan. I do not call it blue. I don’t see it as being blue. I don’t reach for blue paint if I want to paint something that presents cyan to me. I search for the paint I think will do the best job at representing cyan.

Humans can only perceive a small range of colours from the visible light spectrum. Our language can reduce our understanding of colours or expand it. There are species able to perceive a wider range of colours, like mantis shrimp and butterflies. I wonder what words would be applied to some of the colours they can see but we cannot. Some really fun words could be created if we could only experience those colours.

We all experience colour differently but can agree on certain colour concepts. How we name, define and utilize these concepts can help shape our understanding of many other concepts. We are free to reimagine colour experiences and shift language to be more helpful and accurate.