Reply To: Language and consciencous
Simon Mathews wrote:
Russians find it easier to say whether hues that can be considered to be in the “middle” of light and dark blue are different from one another.
Got a citation for that? Until then I just have to take a layman’s word on it.
I’ll add a layman’s take on that. Culturally, we (wasps? westerners?) don’t standardize on what exactly is light-blue or dark-blue, but (e.g.) Russians standardize more specific colors of blue. I’ll bet if the experiment compared our perceptions of just “blue” vs the perception of the two Russian colors, even the range of blue on a spectrum (say between green and purple) would vary, too. Point is, as “standard” as our set of colors seem to us, it’s the culture’s language that causes us to communicate and learn and communicate (i.e. it’s a feedback loop) some concepts more deeply than others.
Colors of the rainbow: ROYBIV, red orange yellow blue indigo violet. To be honest, I don’t have a clue exactly where “indigo” lies, because I haven’t had to incorporate the word into my vocabulary. It’d take me longer to point out indigo on a test, too, and (according to the experiment in PNAS) I would be more likely to vary my answers to “what is indigo”. The interesting finding is that whenever I happened to be exposed (say) to the sounds of a normal conversation of bystanders, it’s even more likely that I’ll be slower and less accurate compared to people familiar with indigo, while they happen to be exposed to any similar, nearby conversation.
Not to beat this esoterica about perception and consciousness into the mud, but artists and graphic printers dealing daily with an even larger gamut of colors probably perceive and think differently about the colors around them, and not just because there are more names to remember. Those specific colors also associate more deeply with specific objects we all see in our environment. I believe that primates in particular can detect more variations of red than other animals, and the evolutionary explanation for that is because it helps one to gauge the ripeness of fruit from a distance. That kind of perception and consciousness goes right to the root of one’s survival instincts, although culture also influences it. And some higher primate cultures (in addition to human culture) can vocalize that ripeness to each other, among other socially important concepts.
