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Cosmic Clues about Color that Don’t Even Exist: How Our Brain Creates Extraspectral Colors
- Sutithi
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
What are the impossible colors we encounter every day? What are hyperbolic colors or stygian blue? Do you know that some colors are created artificially by our brain? At times, our brain literally invents colors that aren’t real.
Blue and red have wavelengths, but magenta is a fake color, created by our confused brain when it pairs red and blue together. Does our brain deceive us in any way, filling in gaps while creating an abnormal range of hues that are not there in this universe?
It seems every time we look at these fantastic hues, we look into our brain’s power of improvisation to create an imagined color spectrum.
Let’s get deeper into this enigma and find out the colors that are really created by the brain’s creative interpretation.
How Do We See Colors in the Real World
We see the world through various color bands and feel the existence of color. Basically, color is produced through light; we identify different colors by their wavelengths and how fast they reach our eyes. They reach our eyes with different wavelengths. This information is captured by our eyes before sending it to our brain. Next, our brain determines the color we are presently seeing and this process unfolds many unexplored areas of the eye–brain relationship.
Is it Possible for Colors to Deceive Our Eyes?
It is amazing to note that the color purple, closely related to violet, does not have its own wavelength. It can only be perceived when two different wavelengths of red and blue mix and match. These colors are coded as extraspectral.
Here comes the most intriguing part: the blend of red and blue wavelengths doesn’t create purple; what we get is perceived as a dominant hue. Our eyes can see only primary colors like red, blue, and green and our mind identifies other hues of the spectrum by blending these primary hues. Then it further processes this information.
Purple does not exist as a single wavelength; it is constructed by the brain when red and blue lights are perceived together.
For the admirers of pink, please note that there is no dedicated wavelength for the color pink as well, this means that more than one wavelength must mix in order to perceive pink as we do. In reality, pink is nothing but a shade of red. It’s easy to produce the color pink by adding more white hues to it.
Our eyes can see the lighter shades of red as pink, while another tertiary hue is magenta that comes between red and violet. The color is also used alongside the bands of cyan, yellow, and black as primary colors predominantly used in printing. Our eyes perceive a color even without a corresponding wavelength. How can it be considered a primary hue, challenging our understanding of color perception?
VIBGYOR Has the Key to This Enigma
While in school we learned about the rainbow band VIBGYOR (starting with violet and ending with red), right? As discussed earlier, the color magenta appears in between the two extreme shades of this spectrum, violet and red.
Our brain gets confused while mixing the two extremes, so it creates a color somewhere in between as a secondary or tertiary color. It starts inventing close alternatives, and that’s how the illusion of magenta is created by cognitive processing.
Solving the Perpetual Puzzle of Black and White
We know the basic science behind how light gets absorbed by objects and how a certain amount of light gets reflected. These reflected wavelengths are actually called colors. So, whatever is reflected becomes the color of the object.
When all the light waves are absorbed and nothing gets reflected, we experience no color, that is black. But when all of them get reflected and blend together, we get the color white. Then, can we term them as colors? No. They can be better called tints or shades.
One more interesting thing to note here: white and black we see around us are not the purest ones. The whitest of white still absorbs a little amount of color and the blackest of black reflects a small amount of light. To get the purest black, we have to invent something as unique as a color called ‘Vantablack.’
In Search of Vantablack: The Color of a Black Hole
To get the purest black, or the super-black, we have to get it completely absorbed. It is possible through creating vertically aligned carbon nanotubes absorbing 99.965% of light. The synthetic color called ‘Vantablack’ is a man-made creation.
This is considered the blackest material on Earth by researchers, stirring waves of controversy. How can anything be blacker than black? Can anything be as black as a black hole in the universe? The answer is ‘no.’ Thus, researchers are trying to get closer to it by making shades darker than our usual black, manufacturing something like Vantablack.
Unboxing the Enigma of Silver and Gold
Are silver or gold colors in the true sense? They have highly reflective appearances of metallic hues. When light bounces off the surface of gold and silver, these illusions are created by our brain.
In reality, silver is nothing but pale gray, and gold has an affinity with yellow. The silvery and golden shimmer is created by manipulating light and shade surrounding an object. In artistic creations, the metallic sheen is produced by mixing gray and yellow with a fine metallic powder, to get the desired effect.
Gold is Created through Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity
How come Albert Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity, i.e. E=mc², creates gold? Just as we have discussed the possibility of creating silver by mixing the color gray with fine powdery substances, the same goes for gold as well. In that case, gold must be made with a silvery hue.
But science and the ‘Theory of Special Relativity’ have made things different.
The electrons inside the atoms of gold move so fast that they travel at a constant speed. The excess energy increases the amount of matter they contain, not the speed. Thus, the atoms absorb light of shorter wavelengths, such as blue and reflect longer wavelengths, such as yellow– giving gold its color in reality.
The Mystery of Stygian Blue: A Blue That is Almost Black
Not many of us have specific knowledge about stygian blue other than painters and artists. It is a bizarre shade of dark and mysterious blue, also considered an impossible and extraspectral color.
While gazing intensely at the color of the sky at night or taking a deeper look into the ocean, we get a feeling of this optical illusion. Our eyes get fatigued while looking intensely at yellow then black, and it creates an extremely saturated blue that hardly exists in reality, blending dark blue and black, evoking a sense of mystery and meditation.
More Color Mysteries to Enchant Us Forever: From Afterimages to Color Chromosomes
The world of color is full of surprises, and the deeper you dive, the more there is to discover.
Have you ever stared at an object for a long time and then looked away – have you discovered that the image reappears in different colors? These are afterimages. For example, if you intensely stare for a few seconds at the color magenta, it can create a rare greenish afterimage which is called hyperbolic green.
Women Can See a Wider Spectrum of Colors Than Men
Research shows that most women can see or perceive more colors than men, especially different shades of red. This is related to color-vision genes on the X chromosome, meaning two X chromosomes can give a person a better sense of color perception.
Blue Skins and Black Suns: How Artists Use Non-naturalistic Palettes for Creative Expression
Color is not just what we see with our eyes, but it’s a sensation and more of a feeling. It ignites memory and the power of imagination. That’s why artists have used non-naturalistic colors or created impossible hues to push the color spectrum beyond realism—like painting skin in blue or green as used by Picasso or Matisse, black suns or white shadows, trees in red or purple, or shadows in green instead of gray or black. Their expressive palettes expand the way we decode color symbolism, what it can reveal.
The enigma of color continues to stir emotion, invoke symbolism, and shape mood or concept rather than simply reflecting how things appear in real life.
