Do all the sky blue? As the concept of preventing people to perceive color
MOSCOW, may 16 — RIA Novosti, Alfia Enikeeva. Some primitive peoples the whole color palette is limited to “light” and “dark”, and the Europeans have dozens of different words to describe subtle shades of the sky or greenery. Language affects the perception of the world, scientists say. Clenched within the conceptual categories of the human brain a lot just do not “see”.
In 1858, British statesman, writer and researcher of ancient literature William Gladstone drew attention to the strange colors in the ancient Greek poems “the Iliad” and “Odyssey”: a sea the purple, the sky is copper, iron and sheep purple, green and honey. While Homer is often mentioned black (170 times) and white (100) colors.
It turned out that the Greeks saw the world in black and white with small splashes of red, purple, yellow and green and blue are not distinguished at all.
German scientist Lazar Geiger showed that the same color perception characteristic of the ancient Icelandic, Arabic, Chinese and Jewish literary works. Only in Egyptian texts a lot of blue, but the Egyptians are an exception, they could make the blue dye.
In the ancient Chronicles, the epithet “blue” is mentioned, however, means he is black or purple-red color. For example, the phrase about “blue eyes” by the Soviet critic Yuri Lotman interprets as the bloodshot eyes of a drunkard.
The eye or the brain?
Violation of color vision red and green, sometimes yellow, and blue is called color blindness. His main reason for the absence of a special pigment in the retina of the eye. This mutation is quite rare. In Europe, color blindness suffer from two to eight percent of men and only half a percent of women. It is unlikely that in ancient times it was otherwise.
In addition, as demonstrated by a group of scientists from Rochester University in the US, the perception of color depends not only on the cone cells in the human eye responsive to waves of the electromagnetic spectrum of a certain length and transmitting the information to the brain, how many neurons of the brainthat process received by the cones-the photoreceptor signals.
The algorithm of this processing is still not fully understood. According to some studies, the signals from the cones are converted to the visual cortex located in the occipital part of the brain. There is evidence that the distinction of colours occurs in the lower temporal lobe — the area responsible for high-level visual activity, such as facial recognition. So, a neuroscientist Bevil Conway from the Massachusetts Institute of technology (USA) found in the temporal lobe of monkeys, whose retinas similar to our own, small clusters of cells that are able to adjust to the recognition of shades and create a kind of map colors.
No words, no concepts. There is no concept — no color
To combine colors in categories can only people, and they do it very differently. For example, in the language of Brazilian Indians of caraga yellow, green and blue fall into one category and are designated by the common word. And in Russian dark blue and light blue — a different color. No wonder there is the word “blue”.