Color & Perception

Ever since I heard this podcast two summers ago,I was raving about the new things I had learned about the phenomenon of color in how it relates to language and is perceived by the brain. Today I relistened to this podcast to get some of my facts straight, and was once again fascinated and inspired by the topic. Radiolab's podcast really intrigued me in the last 20 minutes when it talks about the color blue.
William Gladstone, British politician from the 1800's was a Homer fanatic, and in noticing the use of color words as adjectives, he began to count the amount of times each color was used. Black and white were most common, followed by red, yellow, and green. Blue was never used. Intrigued, Gladstone started searching through other ancient texts such as ancient Greek works, Vedic texts, and the original Hebrew Bible. The word blue was never used. This puzzle lead researchers to believe that colors were not named and categorized until the production of dyes. Given that blue is so rare in nature, it was one of the last dyes to be made, and therefore one of the last colors to be given a name by the Western world.
What about water and the sky- the most obvious blues in nature? There's an explanation for this as well. Homer's works describe the ocean as a dark wine color. The Hebrew Bible describes the heavens, but makes no mention of the blue sky. A member of the Radiolab team but his curiosity to work on his 18 month old daughter. Having taught her all the colors that a young girl should know (including blue), her parents never taught her that "the sky was blue". When asked what color the sky was, she hesitated for a long time before responding with... white.
Studies of language by Sapir and Whorf teach us that language effects the way we categorize and conceptualize the natural world. This was put into practice when researchers headed to northern Namibia to study a group called the Himba. While the Western world has 11 different major color categories, the Himba have about half that. Red, green, blue, and purple all belong to the color category, "zoozoo". When shown a spread of boxes, all green, except for one very obvious (to Westerners) blue box, they had a hard time identifying  which square was different. But don't worry, this was no ethnocentric trap to praise our western color scheme. The Himba people were also presented with a spread of squares that were all- what looked to me- as green. They easily identified the odd one out, which I could barely tell looked any different. This experiment epitomizes the phenomenon of the language to perception relationship. Whats more? When asked what color the sky was, Himba informants responded with a color that translated to black. And water? Well that's white, of course.


The podcast:
http://www.radiolab.org/story/211119-colors/