What are IMPOSSIBLE COLORS?

[Music] hello so happy to have you here for this 30 second series of the joy of sciencing got a lovely little episode for you today something i think you'll really enjoy but as always before we begin i'll be running all the colors you need to follow along with us at the bottom of your screen and he was crazy about all these little doers down here none of them actually exist makes me want to take my brain and just beat the devil out of it okay then so let's start today's episode first we want to make sure our pre-stretch canvas is lined with liquid yeah it's going to be a weird episode today yeah we're going for it now entering the facility out of all the energy the universe has to offer your human eyeballs evolve to perceive just a very small slice of it this small slice is the visible light spectrum and within it all the colors you could possibly perceive an estimated 10 million of them you peep these different hues and shades with so-called cone cells at the backs of your eyes you have millions of them and they have three general sensitivities within this visible light spectrum more or less red green and blue now because of all these possible colors scientists have been thinking about for hundreds of years how best to lay out this vast color space but in realizing that all colors must be some combination of cone excitement from physical wavelengths of light they settled on this color space established in 1931 by the international commission on illumination this was the first chart to actually quantitatively link certain wavelengths of light with the physiological perception of color it's very important so let's look a little closer in this color space if you look closely you can literally see everything that you can see along the top edge of this triangle are the fully saturated spectral colors the colors that you can create with a single wavelength of light like red green and blue the space also shows the range of human perception in nanometers from around 430 nanometers in blue to a standardized 700 nanometers in red also notice that very different color combinations in this space can create the same resultant color for example both hues of blue and purple and green and violet produce the same light blue and then at the bottom of this color space you have what's called the line of purples these colors have no single associated wavelengths like the spectral colors do colors along this line like purple and pink and magenta cannot be created by single wavelengths of light what i'm saying is that a color like magenta does not exist on the visible light spectrum it's entirely a creation of your brain a brain running more or less visual effects software bgi if you will i think you can wrap your head around a color combination not existing on its own in nature but the reasoning behind this non-existence doesn't stop here now i don't want to freak you out too much man but not only does a color like magenta only exist in your mind they all do red green phthalo blue liquid white burnt sienna yellow ochre another bob ross color none of them actually exist color is not an intrinsic property to the wavelengths of light that enter your eye and create color in the brain it's just that a few million years ago it was evolutionarily advantageous for your brain to distinguish different wavelengths of light bouncing off of different objects in the environment maybe like berries that were poisonous or not and now fast forward a few million years and we're being manipulated on tick-tock by fancy millennial colors now because you have a similar brain to your human brothers and sisters most people will agree on what redness and blueness is but it's important to recognize that blueness only exists with your brain to interpret blueness it's the same way that music only exists aside from pressure waves when there is some interpreter so information processing system to interpret it as music but kyle can't we apply the same reasoning to conclude that human experience itself is an illusion well yeah i mean that is kind of the takeaway here and it kind of means that nothing nothing [Music] where's my son where's my boy let's not worry about all that right now what i'm getting at is that your perception your reality is wholly shaped by your meaty machinery up here and that's why impossible colors exist okay that's enough of that demon talk now then what i'm going to do is i'm going to take a little bit of yellow ochre here gonna mix it on the palette with a little bit of blue now when i mix these two colors together what you'll notice is not a true mixture of yellow and blue instead it looks straight up like a green more like a green more like a teal here i have on my canvas just nice little brush strokes just two hairs and some air there now see what i mean about that it's not a true mixture of yellow and blue it's green it's not yellowish blue and i want to show you the difference here as i go in with my two inch brush so i'm going to take a little too much brush i'm going to take some bright red and i'm going to mix that on my palette as well it makes a little bright red on my palette a little bit more blue we're going to go in with blue now you see as i add the red and the blue here i'm going to take our little roll of paint i'm going to put that right on the canvas i'm gonna put that right in the canvas now when i put this on the canvas you see it is more of an intermediate color than the yellow and the blue you see i get something i get a true mixture of the red and the blue where when i mix the yellow and the blue it is more of a transitional color a green now this is because yellowish blue is a forbidden color isn't that something else okay let's get crazy now i want to show you another forbidden color now watch this i'm going to take a little bit of red take a little bit of red we're going to put this on the canvas a little bit of red we're also gonna take a little bit of sap green you know i love my sap green we're gonna put that right on the canvas now when we mix this on the canvas little brush strokes on the canvas notice that again we get not a mixture not a mixture that can look both red and blue but we get another intermediate color which of course you'd call brown and that's because red and green is another forbidden color as we said yellowish blue and reddish green can't exist in the way that purple or magenta can exist why well scientists theorize that this is because when your eyes look at something your brain doesn't just add up all the colors together like i'm mixing paint here on my palette no when your brain sees some wavelengths of light it will interpret those wavelengths of light while suppressing other wavelengths of light which for example makes it impossible to see both yellow and blue at the same time in the same way you can see both red and blue in something like a magenta or purple this makes yellowish blue a forbidden color if something in the universe was reddish blue you could see it but if something was a reddish green or a yellowish blue you just couldn't see it and that doesn't that doesn't make me sad just a happy little accident how your brain works maybe even weirder than the forbidden colors themselves is the fact that even though they may be forbidden by your biology your brain can still perceive them well some of you might be able to maybe there have been a number of vision studies over the years claiming that the little test we are about to do will let some of you see what i said none of you can what i want you to do is try crossing your eyes or looking past the screen such that the two crosses in the boxes overlap do it right and some of you may in fact end up seeing a truly yellowish blue that is not green it's gonna feel a little weird but give it a try i'll give you a few moments and pause the video if you need to hey champ you want to talk about what happened back there no i'm okay just a little existential freak out is all that so i'm totally not i'm i'm fine so did any of you have some luck you can also try the same test with green and red the forbidden colors are actually a subset of a larger group of colors known as the impossible colors which includes another group of optical oddities recall again this color space which maps all of the colors available to your human perception now what i ask you is out there well by definition these are colors that shouldn't be available to you and your eyes given normal visual processing and visible light spectra these are the imaginary colors you should never see any physical object look like any of these imaginary colors it's theoretically impossible and yet i can show you some of these too the first imaginary color vision scientists figure out how to show us is stygian blue a blue so blue it's blacker than black blue black somehow stare at the x in the box in the left for about 20 seconds then glance at the x in the box on the right go ahead and pause the video if you need to next up is self-luminous red a red that seems brighter than white and illuminates itself do the same thing with the x's i'll wait it just seemed like you were freaking out pretty hard this time you said you were a demon i told you arya i'm fine it's you know it's not that bad it's not like you know free will is also an illusion okay so finally there is hyperbolic orange an orange more orange than fully saturated orange orange try it out each of these examples is what's called a chimeric color color that should not be available to your brain under normal circumstances the only reason that you saw anything if you did is that all that's staring at one color and then quickly switching to another color literally changes the sensitivity to light on your cone cells and therefore changes your associated color space all of this the impossible forbidden chimeric imaginary colors it really makes you wonder how much of reality are we missing for example birds are tetrachromats they have four cone cells in their eyes and not three like you do an associated color space looks very different to them what does reality look like to them therefore what does reality look like to a mantis shrimp with 12 different kinds of cone cells and not three turns out that what we consider to be impossible is relative and reality subjective but don't let that freak you out too much until next time now exiting the facility thank you so much to the ver nerdy staff at the facility for their direct and substantial support in the creation of this here video today especially i want to recognize research assistant david ockert and visiting scholar alberto bensana if you want to join the facility if you want to join me on staff drape on a silky white lab coat over your shoulders get videos early behind the scenes photos private members only live streams with yours truly not like that you can go to patreon.com kyle hill and sign up for the facility today and hey if you support our work just enough you get your name on arya here each and every week look at you there's literally hundreds of you so i have no idea how i'm gonna pass the time when i say that reality we're missing some of it it is kind of true there are animals in nature owls we've studied pit vipers that use thermal sensing that we've discovered that they map some of these other wavelengths of light onto their visual processing systems in such a way that for example the pit vipers can see heat see infrared wavelengths of light and so to them the world would actually look very differently so i'm not just trying to sound like a philosophy 101 student who's just like reality's just you know it's your opinion man well if you ask a pit viper they'd probably have a different opinion kevin work on a pit viper translator i want to talk to thanks thanks for watching oh that was a swear word and viper my bad we are mixing up a lot of themes here is any of this working that i'm doing a bob ross thing this shirt is so open

Channel: Kyle Hill

Views: 600,170

Rating: 4.9537802 out of 5

Keywords: because science, engineering, kyle hill, learning, math, physics, science, stem, the facility, color vision, primary colors, mantis shrimp, color mixing, bob ross, impossible colors, imaginary colors, chimeric colors, color theory

Id: 41H7kKwUlHo

Length: 14min 14sec (854 seconds)

Published: Sat May 01 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/Synymyn]

Thanks for retweeting my screenshot :)