Our world is shaped by the many vibrant and deep colors that we can view. The blue sky, green prairies, and even red roses create a uniquely vivid experience. When colors are blended together, they sometimes capture our attention instantly and leave us breathless. But you have to wonder: are the colors we see finite or are there more?
To understand color, we first need to take a look at the traditional color wheel. Altogether, the traditional color wheel is composed of 12 basic colors. The primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. If the primary colors are combined together they create the secondary colors, which are orange, purple, and green. Taking one step further, the secondary colors combined together create the tertiary colors: red-orange, yellow-orange, yellow-green, blue-green, blue-violet, and red-violet.
By continuing to combine the color wheel, eventually you will acquire roughly 18 decillion colors. In other words, that’s 18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 or 18 with 33 zeros. Unfortunately, you will not be able to see that many colors due to limitations of the eye.
How we see colors is thanks to the cone receptors in our eyes, which takes in light energy and converts that into chemical energy. The chemical energy is then distributed and transmitted directly into our brain. According to SciShow and their YouTube video How Many Colors Can We See?, our distinct cone receptors are red, green, and blue colored.
When the color cones combine together, which is known as trichomancy, we can see up to one million colors. Trichomancy is what most people are born with and sets the bar for the average person. However, color blindness is also something to take into consideration.
Dichromacy is a color blindness that happens when either the red or green cone receptors are just plain missing within the eye. Color blindness is just as the term sounds; a person is unable to see certain colors and most colors are ambiguous to them. The effects of color blindness extend further with more cone receptors missing or all of them leaving some people to only see in black and white.
Since we understand color blindness, is there an opposite effect? Something cool like “color enhancement”? Introducing tetrachromat: a color enhancement that affects the human eye with a unique fourth color cone. The fourth color cone can register shades of red and green enabling a person to see 100 million colors. That is a hundred times more colors than an average person. A psychedelic experience for some with color blindness, for sure.
Being a tetrachromat sounds awesome and unique, but living in modern society today is very painful. According to the YouTube video Seeing colours nobody else can – Incredible Medicine: Dr Weston’s Casebook | Episode 2 – BBC Two by BBC, a tetrachromat has an overwhelming experience of seeing color because they have more to process for their brain to handle.
Remember, light energy is absorbed into the eyes and converts into chemical energy that is then transmitted into the brain. Tetrachromatic people have one more cone receptor than an average person, which means they process more visually. In other words, the experience can be rather tiring since they are converting more energy.
Tretrachomancy is like a super power with a “double-edged sword” effect. The ability to see more color than anyone is profound, yet somewhat sad at the same time. Needless to say, not just anyone can handle being a tetrachromat.
Now that we know about trichomancy, dichromacy, and tetrachromacy, the original question was to know if colors are finite? The answer is no. There are in fact more colors that we literally cannot physically see.
According to the YouTube video Are there colors we CAN’T see? by Sciencephile the AI, the human eye can only see what is known as “visible light”. Light itself is made of different wavelengths that extend from being very large to very tiny. Within the video, the light wavelength chart details our “visible light” area among the light wavelengths.
Unfortunately, the scale of the area we can generally see is miniscule compared to the rest of the chart. However, what we can take away from the information is that more colors exist outside our visible light range. Maybe someday, our eyes will continue to evolve beyond tetrachromacy and be able to see a new form of color yet to be named.
The name “Pondersaur” means “words with a roar” alluding to the creature’s distinct communication.
