Color Is A lot More Confusing Thank You Think

[00:00:00]the philosophy of color.

[00:00:02]>> When you look at most sink designs, the knob that controls the hot water is usually red and the knob that controls cold water is usually blue.

[00:00:09]blue. We associate >> I don't think usually. I feel like if there is a color, it's red and blue.

[00:00:14]There's either no colors and it just says like H or L or it is red or blue.

[00:00:18]That is like a universal connection.

[00:00:20]>> associate red with hot and blue with cold. This phenomenon is an instance of cross-modal correspondence, a perception where multiple sensory modalities interact. In this case, our visual perception is connected to our perception of temperature. There are a few other examples of this, like synesthesia, a word that traces back to Greek words that mean together sensation. People with synesthesia can associate things like numbers and colors. So, two might be violet and five might be yellow. There's >> I mean, they usually say that about like well, I there was an argument about the the colors of subjects.

[00:00:56]Like science is green. Science is definitively green as a color. Like the subject. What are English I and then it was like people were arguing what English, math, history were like yellow or blue or red. Math is red. I don't know if I would say math is red.

[00:01:13]>> There's also the McGurk effect, where the same sound can elicit different perceptions based on how we see a person speaking that sound.

[00:01:21]>> ba ba ba ba ba ba >> Here, our visual perception and auditory perception are becoming intertwined. The bouba/kiki effect is another [music] instance of this. If I present these two images to you, which one would you call bouba and which one would you call kiki?

[00:01:38]Both >> Oh, bouba's definitely bouba's definitely the squishy looking one and kiki's the hard one. Sharp.

[00:01:46]bouba kiki >> American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India are more likely to call the left shape kiki and the right shape bouba.

[00:01:55]>> What?

[00:01:56]>> bouba and which one would you call Kiki?

[00:01:59]Both American college undergraduates and Tamil speakers in India are more likely to call the left shape Kiki and the right shape Booba. The way we see these shapes is interacting with the way we hear sounds. But for >> Kiki sounds more harsh.

[00:02:14]Right? Like if I hear if I hear the word Kiki, it's like jagged, rough, you know?

[00:02:20]Booba is like smooth, uh squishy.

[00:02:25]What? And I'm also thinking of boobs.

[00:02:27]>> [laughter] >> I feel like we need to use I we need to use different words here.

[00:02:32]>> This video I'm mostly concerned with color. In 1969, Brent Berlin and Paul Kay studied 20 different languages from around the world and the words they have for different colors. They identified a total of 11 basic color categories: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray.

[00:02:51]In particular, they noticed that some languages didn't have all 11 words and that there was a pattern for which words a language had. Words for brown, purple, pink, orange, and gray were never present in languages that didn't already distinguish between green and blue. They broke this pattern down into >> This is like mind [ __ ] me right now.

[00:03:10]There's certain languages that don't have colors for they don't have terms for these colors.

[00:03:14]>> gray were never present in languages that didn't already distinguish between green and blue. They broke this pattern down into a sequence. Purple, pink, orange, and gray come after brown. Brown comes after blue. Blue is preceded by both green and yellow. Green and yellow come after red. And finally, the most basic language categories are dark, cool, and light warm, encompassing the set of all >> Okay. Oh, dark, cool, light, warm? Yeah, it's incom- it's like the whole range of colors. Like everyone has like hot and cold bases.

[00:03:47]But then you're getting to hyper specifics of what color you're speaking about.

[00:03:52]>> warm, encompassing the set of all cool colors and warm colors as two categories.

[00:03:57]Now, it's important to mention that this study has been criticized. It assumes an ethnocentric bias based on Western scientific and political thought. It's basically implying this idea of progress, where more primitive cultures have not sufficiently evolved to capture the true categories of color that the Western languages have. I don't think Berlin and Kay have successfully proven that speakers of so-called primitive languages can't perceive the same range of colors that we can. They just >> No, they can perceive them. They just don't have a specific terminology for them. They might use They might describe the the color of orange in a different way. They might say like a lighter tone of a hotter a warmer color.

[00:04:37]>> Use different category systems to describe them. But, what can be said conclusively is that according to the World Color Survey, people all over the world seem to perceive blue as cool and red as warm. Now, this >> But, that's probably like I don't think that's a shock. Like, I think that is a universal agreement. Blue is cold, red is hot because red is associated with fire and lava or just things that are heating up. Like, as things get hot, they tend to get more red.

[00:05:06]And blue things is like ocean water, ice.

[00:05:09]>> Now, this might not be particularly surprising. We make all kinds of associations between colors and concepts. In video games, the health bar is often red. The mana bar is usually blue and stamina is green. We often associate red with love, anger, or power. Blue has a sophisticated >> the health bar is red because of blood.

[00:05:27]The blood your heart is perceived as red, therefore your health bar is usually red.

[00:05:33]Mana is usually blue. Why is that?

[00:05:36]>> We often associate red with love, anger, or power. Blue has a sophisticated, reliable, corporate vibe. Orange is usually associated with energy, taste, extroversion, or amusement. But, these symbols vary cross-culturally. Buddhist monks wear orange robes, where orange symbolizes enlightenment. In placebo studies, pills with hot colors like red or yellow work better as stimulants, whereas pills with cool colors like blue or purple work better as depressants.

[00:06:03]These results do seem to depend on culture, though. Purple with >> I think it depends on culture largely because of the environment they're surrounded by. I don't think it's just like culture in the sense of how they traditionally speak or communicate. It's more so like do they live in an environment where they're interacting with colors that represent these things? Like what color is the average flower they're in? What color is the average thing that they're experiencing? Like I I mean now he's showing the color purple, you might go into this, but like the idea of royalty.

[00:06:31]Yeah, he's about to do it. The idea of like royalty is usually associated with purple because purple was like a rare color that I think they got from like snails back in back in the day. So, it's like now a lot of things that are perceived as like rich tend to be purple. It's like a royalty class.

[00:06:48]>> associated with royalty because purple dye was made from a species of sea snail.

[00:06:53]>> Uh-huh. Learned that in history class, freshman year.

[00:06:57]>> which excreted it from a single gland, the hypobranchial gland, in very small quantities. This made the dye very rare and was usually only available to the very wealthy. So, just because of this coincidence >> Mhm. Crown Royal.

[00:07:10]Not even really royalty, but yeah, it does you do associate Crown Royal as like a drink. Like if you if you have had Crown Royal, you usually associate it with like a higher quality of alcohol, but it's usually around the same price as like [ __ ] Jack Daniel's. Like it's not it's not that much more expensive. It's not like a high-end liquor.

[00:07:29]>> that psychological association emerged.

[00:07:31]The >> It's such a it's a design thing, too, man. If I'm being honest, like it it it it it break it it breaks down beyond just the marketability of the color itself. It's like if you're going into a liquor store, things that have fancier, more jagged, and unique designs are immediately perceived as higher quality, regardless of the contents.

[00:07:52]>> association emerged. The one color association that remains consistent across cultures is cool and warm. This might just be coincidence, but it taps into a much more universal one. Our skin gets red when we're warm and goes blue when we're cold. When we gaze at a warm sunny landscape, we're presented with warm colors. When we gaze at a cold overcast day, we're presented with cool colors. So, what even is color in the first place? I'm going to argue that there are two ways of describing it, which are basically captured by two figures, Newton and Goethe. Let's start with Newton and the scientific description of light.

[00:08:26]Visible light can be understood as waves of electromagnetic radiation. The human eye can perceive wavelengths of about 400 to 700 nanometers, where 1 nanometer is 1 billionth of a meter. The visible colors on the spectrum increase from red to violet, following the >> Well, and beyond that, aren't there I I think it's only women are capable of like this is like an actual thing. Only women are capable of experiencing a wider range of colors than men, right?

[00:08:54]Isn't there like something where like women can see like a hundred shades of yellow?

[00:08:58]And that's why like Wait, women are better at distinguishing shades of color than men. They notice different identity variations in hues. That's why it's like men typically care less about certain fashionable senses of how things match than than women do.

[00:09:14]>> by Boards of Canada to violet, following the mnemonic ROYGBIV, which is also a great song by Boards of Canada.

[00:09:21]The retinas of our eyes have things called cone cells. We have three types of those.

[00:09:25]>> [music] >> One responds really well to blue light, one to green, and one to red.

[00:09:29]>> get really tripped out when I think about how I'm seeing things because I know there's light entering my eye and it's like processing in my brain, but where's the vision coming from?

[00:09:40]Does that make sense? This is like a high shower thought thing. Where's the vision coming from?

[00:09:46]Like I know light, but I'm saying like I'm seeing [ __ ] but like how am I seeing [ __ ] Like that doesn't make Yeah, your retina, but I'm saying my brain is is processing information to create a reality within my own mind.

[00:10:02]Like what I'm seeing isn't how things actually are, and it's [ __ ] trippy.

[00:10:06]>> The colors we see in the world are the result of the way in which these receptors respond to different levels of blues, greens, and reds that are reflected by materials.

[00:10:16]In the book The Physics and Chemistry of Color by Kurt Nassau, he enumerates 15 different causes of color, including everything from the incandescence of flames, the rotations of blue ice and water, and the interference of soap bubbles.

[00:10:29]A lot of our scientific understanding of color has its roots in an experiment by Isaac Newton conducted in 1704.

[00:10:36]He constructed a triangular prism and shone a sunbeam through it, refracting its light.

[00:10:41]>> Oh my god, what is this a This is a [ __ ] cover for a music album.

[00:10:46]>> Colors emerge from this process of refraction, which he called >> Pink Floyd.

[00:10:49]>> the spectrum.

[00:10:50]About a hundred years later, Goethe, the German poet responsible for Faust, became interested in color, too. Goethe knew about Newton's experiments and tested it himself with prisms he borrowed from a friend, as you do. We've all got that one friend who always has a bunch of prisms on hand.

[00:11:06]>> Yeah.

[00:11:06]>> While Newton was concerned with systematically analyzing color in a scientific way, Goethe was interested in color [music] as we see it. He conducted experiments with colored shadows. He noticed that if a colored light is shown on an object and a white light is shown on its opposite side, we perceive the shadow as the color's complement. In his color wheel, he situated these complementary colors opposite one another. In his view, our perception strives for unity. Yellow >> y'all do if I actually just broke out like 15 prisms? Would you be surprised?

[00:11:38]If If he was like everybody got that one friend that got a bunch of prisms and I'm like and I go I go just grab a bunch of them.

[00:11:44]>> demands violet. Orange >> No.

[00:11:47]>> demands blue. Purple demands green [music] and vice versa.

[00:11:51]Another instance of this is the phenomenon of accidental color.

[00:11:54]Here, I've made the screen yellow. Pause the video and stare into the yellow for 30 seconds or so.

[00:11:59]>> [music] >> And then unpause.

[00:12:02]And then unpause.

[00:12:04]Your eyes had become accustomed to the yellow and when the screen abruptly switched to white, your perception conjured a violet hue. Our eye wants to bring harmony >> It was purple.

[00:12:14]I see yellow. You're an idiot.

[00:12:17]>> to our visual experience.

[00:12:18]>> It was purple. But now if we go back and he does it again, wait.

[00:12:22]>> abruptly switched to white. the video and stare into the yellow for 30 seconds or so. And then unpause.

[00:12:29]Your eyes >> Yeah, now it doesn't look purple. It just looks white.

[00:12:32]>> accustomed to [music] the yellow and when the screen abruptly switched to white, your perception conjured a violet hue. Our eye wants to bring harmony to our visual experience.

[00:12:42]The eye creates freedom for itself [music] by produ- >> Isn't there another thing side note?

[00:12:46]Don't you have a blind spot in your eye?

[00:12:49]But your brain fills it. I'm so serious.

[00:12:52]Whoa, looking at my camera looks weird as [ __ ] now. Do I look that gray? Yo, is my camera tripping out or what? Your your brain fills in a natural blind spot with missing information so you don't notice it.

[00:13:06]Like there's a spot in your brain where you're trying to like envision something and you don't notice it because it's just filling the gap for you.

[00:13:13]>> producing the opposite of that which is forced upon it, creating in this way a satisfying >> You have a dominant eye? Yeah, I know.

[00:13:20]You do a little task where you like hold something in front of you and like look at what's centered.

[00:13:25]>> whole.

[00:13:26]Goethe was also very concerned with how color affects us. The color palette of a scene tells us about the seasons and cycles of our world. They show us how to tell one thing from another. We wouldn't be able to spot these berries if they weren't brightly colored. We see certain colors as warm and textural. We see others as cold and spacious. Yellows seem to come towards us >> [music] >> and blues seem to recede away. Not only is color associated with temperature, but also proximity and distance.

[00:13:53]>> [music] >> Goethe took this so seriously that his home was painted very deliberately with a yellow [music] dining room to create a sense of warmth and pleasure and a greenish blue study to promote a stimulating calming environment. Where Newton's approach was analytic, [music] Goethe's approach was poetic. These aren't necessarily contradictory views either. They're just two ways of looking at things. To elucidate this distinction, consider the scientist Mary. She exists in a black and white world, but she can still study color.

[00:14:20]She has access to physical [music] descriptions of color. She can tell you which wavelengths correspond to each color, but she can't see them. She has no conscious experience of color. Now, suppose Mary is able to exit this black and white world and take in the perceptual experience of color for the first time. The question is, will Mary gain any new understanding? This thought experiment was proposed >> I don't know. You're going to watch the Logan Paul video where he cries when he looks at a sunset.

[00:14:44]>> posed by Frank Jackson [music] in 1980 >> [panting] >> two. Newton approached color as Mary did from her black and white world. While Goethe was concerned with the understanding Mary achieved from actually seeing color. Goethe urged that physical descriptions of color only tell half the story.

[00:15:02]>> [music] >> We can't separate the color in the world from the color as we see it. He didn't view humans as passive observers of things. For him, the outer world calls [music] forth the inner world meeting in a participatory interaction. Color isn't just the light particles out there in the world, nor is it a conscious representation of the light in the world. Instead, color arises through the interplay of light and sight.

[00:15:25]So, in this way, we don't just take color in. Color emerges from our interaction with the world. In a sense, we put a little bit of ourselves into the color.

[00:15:34]In the book Interaction of Color, the artist Josef Albers discusses the way in which color is relative. In visual perception, a color is almost never seen as it really is, as it physically is.

[00:15:46]This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. Here's an experiment he describes. There are three pots >> everybody envisions color in a different way, depending on who they are.

[00:15:55]>> of water in front of you containing warm, [music] lukewarm, and cold water. You dip your hands into each outer container, left hand in the leftmost pot, and right hand in the rightmost pot. You perceive two different temperatures, warm on the left and cold on the right. [music] But then you dip both hands in the middle container. You perceive two different temperatures again, but this time in reverse order. Your left hand feels cold, and your right hand feels warm.

[00:16:18]>> Oh, yeah, that is [ __ ] and weird.

[00:16:20]Like when you're when you're really cold outside, and then you go inside, and you feel hot. Like you're kind of like putting your hand on like a stove.

[00:16:29]>> The water is neither of these temperatures. It's lukewarm. [music] The context of our prior experience altered our perception. In the same way that the relative temperature of our hands deceives us in this haptic illusion, where physical fact and our conscious experience don't match, optical illusions also deceive. They cause us to see colors other than those with which we are confronted physically.

[00:16:52]Remember this dress?

[00:16:53]>> Oh my [ __ ] god, no. I'm not I hate I literally this is like dude just pisses me off. Oh, it's black and blue.

[00:17:01]>> Yo, this meme blew up just over 8 years ago. People argued endlessly over whether the dress was black and blue or white and gold. The reason nobody could agree was because people's visual systems were interpreting the photograph in different ways.

[00:17:15]In particular, different people assumed different conditions of illumination.

[00:17:19]When we look at a scene with different levels of illumination, we're able to recognize different colors as the same, a phenomenon called color constancy.

[00:17:27]Depending on how you initially interpreted the illumination of this photograph, you could see the dress with complete >> Yeah, like there's I've I literally the other day there was an instance where I had I had some object in my hand and it was a color and I turned off the light and it looked a different color. Not like, oh, just a darker hue. I was like, oh, this looks like green versus blue.

[00:17:48]>> colors.

[00:17:49]Here's another illusion you've probably seen before. We have a cylinder casting a shadow on a floor of tiles. It appears that the tiles A and B are different colors. A looks gray while B looks white. But when you scrutinize the image more closely, you realize that these tiles are in fact identical.

[00:18:06]>> Oh my god.

[00:18:12]Wait, what?

[00:18:15]>> more closely, you realize that these tiles are in fact identical. The context of the scene and the interpretation we have for what's happening is changing the way we see these colors. Even now, when you know that these colors are the same, you don't see them that way.

[00:18:30]Okay, last one. Take a look at the circles in the middle. The left circle appears red and the right circle appears green. But once again, if I zoom in, it becomes clear that each circle is in fact >> Oh my god.

[00:18:42]>> the yellow.

[00:18:43]>> Yellow.

[00:18:45]What?

[00:18:49]Like if I stare really closely, I can see that they're both yellow, but if I'm just kind of like eyes centered right in the middle here, it it does look it looks it looks red. Like this one definitively >> Here's green. But once again, if I zoom in, it becomes clear that each circle is in fact yellow. [music] All of these illusions demonstrate a key insight that get to new. Colors, as we see them, are not merely light. Color is a conscious event resulting from the interplay between the observer and the observed. The French post-impressionist artist Paul Cézanne wrote that color is the place where our brain and the universe meet.

[00:19:27]So, what do philosophers make of all this? Well, there's a number of different takes people have, but in this video, I'll be discussing two theories that I think capture the ancient disagreement between Newton and Goethe.

[00:19:37][music] Let's start with the Newton side of things and one of the most famous distinctions in all of philosophy, John Locke's primary and secondary qualities.

[00:19:46]Primary qualities are the properties of things as they are in the world, independent of our perception. Take a basketball, for example. The fact that the basketball is spherical is an inherent property of that object and does not depend on an observer seeing it that way. Then, there are secondary qualities, the stuff that depends on the observer, like smell, taste, sound, [music] and of course, color. The basketball being orange and the sound it makes when you bounce it are each secondary qualities. Objects don't exactly have colors in this way, but they have dispositional properties to give rise to colors.

[00:20:20]>> [music] >> The basketball is not orange itself, but exists in such a way that it appears orange to an observer when they look at it under the right conditions. Some people >> [sighs] >> Yeah, like it it is definitively a round object, but it's only orange in your brain because of the light that's reflecting off of it to make it seem that way.

[00:20:44]In when in reality, it really could be any There's It doesn't have a color definitively. Like, that's more subjective. It's objectively a round ball.

[00:20:53]>> We'll call this a received view of color, since the properties of the object result in the observer receiving that sense experience. On the other side of things, we have a take that's more in the spirit of Goethe. Evan Thompson, J.

[00:21:04]J. Gibson, and some others put forward what's known as an action-based ecological theory of color.

[00:21:11]On first glance, it seems pretty similar to the received view. They still don't consider colors intrinsic properties of things in the world independent of any perceiver. It depends in part on the perception of the color itself. Color is a relational property connecting the environment with the perceiving animal.

[00:21:27]But this view also wants to emphasize the fact that at the end of the day, we're still basically animals. He who understands the baboon would do more for metaphysics than Locke. That quote is from none other than Charles Darwin.

[00:21:40]Biologists will always tell us that an organism can't be understood in isolation apart from the world. And in the same way, that organism's environment or niche can't be understood apart from the organism. In fact, the animal and its environment are connected in a much deeper way than you might expect. An organism finds itself in an environment, but they don't just hang out there. They interact with their surroundings based on the physical signals the environment gives them.

[00:22:05]Through this, they transform the environment. And simultaneously, the environment itself transforms the organism by defining what traits are selected evolutionarily. The organism and >> Yeah, you're meant to survive in a specific environment that fits your needs and you and the environment serve one another. Wow, that breeds like another connectivity to Earth.

[00:22:26]>> co-determine each other. This co-determinacy is a bit of a problem for people like Locke and Newton. For them, perception involves representing items of sense data, which are the immediate objects of perception. These representations stand in for some physical object in the external world.

[00:22:42]So, we aren't actually looking out at the world. We're looking through our representations. This view [music] treats the animal and its environment as separate systems rather than two components of one system. In the ecological approach to visual perception, Gibson expresses some issues with this take. As animals, our perception is always guided. Perception and action evolved together and are inseparable. Our perception guides the activity in our motor system and our motor system guides perception. For Gibson, environments have particular relational properties called affordances, things that give us an opportunity to interact with them. Trees in relation to certain animals afford climbing. They can be described as climb-up-able. The other side of the coin is effectivities, the properties of animals that allow an opportunity for interaction with the environment.

[00:23:31]Lizards and monkeys can climb things, so they possess the effectivity, climbing thing. [music] These kinds of properties are really weird, since they're almost objective and subjective at the same time. It's both a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It's both physical and psychological. Gibson ultimately wants to say that the color >> Well, it feels like the description's more psychological, but they do definitely like they are objectively cli- climbing creatures. Climbing climbable trees.

[00:24:02]>> Colors we see have lawful correlations with >> He's losing me.

[00:24:05]>> particular ecological properties like affordances.

[00:24:09]So, what's even the difference here with the Lockean or the Newtonian view? They both agree that color depends on the observer and can't be understood as intrinsic properties of the world independent of our perception.

[00:24:20]Neuroscience can model the features of color as we perceive >> creepy. What the [ __ ] is that?

[00:24:25]>> Neuroscience can model the features of color as we perceive them. So, it might be tempting to conclude that object color is really just an illusion and we can reduce it to neural states in the visual system. But, Thompson and Gibson want to >> Dude, that one part of the MRI of that guy's face.

[00:24:41]>> avoid this. Instead of situating color exclusively in the brain, they want to take into account the relation with the environment.

[00:24:48]Instead of color being a dispositional property on the physical level, it's on the ecological level. This view is naturalistic in that it's >> What I don't >> understand is we perceive berries as a specific color, we interact with those berries as animals and eat them.

[00:25:05]Is the berry red because the tree made it red, or is the berry red because humans adapted to look at the berry as red to understand it separate from the plant? Because if the berry was made red by the plant, I would assume that's what had to have happened because the light's reflecting off the berry in a way that's perceived in our eyes in a different way than the rest of the plant. But how is the plant, as a non-conscious organism, evolving in a way that is creating their berry in a different material structure that it is reflecting light in a different way than the rest of the plant. You lost me. A plant's green, like say say a you have a tree and then you have an apple coming from that tree.

[00:25:52]The tree's brown and green, the apple's red.

[00:25:54]Is the tree making the apple materialistically in a way that it would shine red off the light to where humans and other animals see it so they eat it and then [ __ ] out the seeds and [ __ ] spread the seed of the plant, or did humans evolve to just see the fruit of a plant in that way to better understand them? I feel like both.

[00:26:16]>> strives to be in harmony with visual science, but that doesn't mean it wants to reduce animals like humans to collections [music] of neural activity and physical processes. The perceiver is treated as an active exploring animal rather than a disembodied spectator who just takes the colors in. Colors are connected with affordances and effectivities, especially in their roles as categories and signals to us to satisfy our adaptive ecological needs.

[00:26:41]They reveal what the environment can do to us and what we can do to the environment. It's also worth noting that the colors we see are not the same colors that other animals see.

[00:26:52]I mentioned earlier that humans have three types of cone cells in the eye that process >> Isn't there a shrimp that could see like a thousand?

[00:26:59]>> this color, which makes us trichromats.

[00:27:02]But, this is not the norm. Animals like squirrels, rabbits, some species of fish, and possibly cats and dogs only have two. Goldfish and turtles have four, and pigeons and ducks might even have five. Even within these categories, there's variation. Humans and honeybees are both trichromats, but the colors the honeybee sees is shifted towards the ultraviolet. So, why is this a thing?

[00:27:25]Well, colors aren't just pretty. They help us >> No, then it has to be the human. It has to be the human seeing the apples red rather than in evolving that way than the plant because multiple animals have different color perceptors.

[00:27:40]So, we're evolving in a way to understand that fruit in a way. I mean, maybe it's still a I think the plant is involved in making the color perception different from that of the rest of its body.

[00:27:52]>> fight objects in the world >> or being.

[00:27:55]>> by allowing us to segment visual scenes.

[00:27:57]And they also give us clues about the objects in the scene. It can show us how ripe a fruit is, or how hydrated a plant is. This leads us to Evan [music] Thompson's argument from perceiver relativity. Color vision helps us split up the visual scene into regions of distinct surfaces or objects. Color vision varies considerably throughout the animal world. Therefore, the way we split up a scene is also likely to vary throughout the animal world. Therefore, what counts as a surface in visual perception depends on the perceiver.

[00:28:28]All of this makes sense when you consider evolutionary adaptation.

[00:28:31]Consider deep-sea fish, for example.

[00:28:34]When you're that far down in the ocean, things are pretty dark. These creepy little guys are usually monochromats, meaning that they only see the intensity of light, but no color.

[00:28:44]A lot of them hunt their prey from below, so their light perception is tuned to be sensitive to the maximum contrast to detect movement in their prey. The further up in the ocean you go, where there is much more light around, fish have much more variety in the colors they're able to perceive.

[00:29:00]Now, what about us humans?

[00:29:02]>> Dude, this video is so fascinating.

[00:29:04]>> Since the 1950s, some people have suggested that the way primate perception is configured actually co-evolved with colored [music] fruits.

[00:29:11]>> Yeah, the [ __ ] duality of Twitch, bro. Literally, the same guy goes, "This shit's boring as [ __ ] and I'm timing you out."

[00:29:17]>> Recent studies support this view, too.

[00:29:19]Species of monkeys like macaques, patas monkeys, and guenons all have similar sensitivities in mid-wave pigment and long-wave pigment. They all look very different and live in very different habitats.

[00:29:30]>> Top animal, top three animal, the little snow monkeys that sit in the [ __ ] uh the natural hot springs.

[00:29:36]>> But they also all eat a lot of fruit.

[00:29:39]These fruits, conveniently, tend to be very brightly colored and stand out in the green foliage. Now, why would these fruits be such that they're easy for monkeys to spot? This is obviously great for the monkeys, but it's also in the fruit's best interest. [music] The monkeys pick and eat the fruit, often spitting out the large seeds far away. They also swallow the smaller seeds and excrete them out later, likely much further away. This allows the fruit species to spread far and wide throughout the environment. So, it's evolutionarily adaptive for them to look brightly colored for the monkeys, since the monkeys >> It's the tree! It's the tree!

[00:30:14]>> are doing them a solid. The animal in the environment codetermine [music] each OTHER.

[00:30:18]>> WOW, HOW THE [ __ ] IS IT DOING THAT, THOUGH? How the [ __ ] is it doing that?

[00:30:23]>> other.

[00:30:24]On an evolutionary timescale, it becomes clear that the colors in the >> It is a mixture of both, but it's still it's it's still like that's crazy to me.

[00:30:32]I don't even think it's it's consciously doing it. It's just a natural selection of plants that have brighter colored fruits spread their seed. So, it's not it's not conscious. It's just random mutations that end up being beneficial for a plant's survival.

[00:30:48]>> Animal perceives are not arbitrary. They depend on the participatory relationship between the animal and their environment. The associations we have with colors reveal this harmony between us and the world. Thanks for watching.

[00:31:02]>> Bro, I loved that video.

[00:31:06]That was from 3 years ago. Oh my god.

[00:31:13]>> [music] [music]