Most Humans Can See 10 Million Colors. Cal Scientists Found One More.

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Welcome to Forum. I'm Alexis Madrigal. Maybe you've gotten into a debate about the dress, a meme from years ago on the Internet, or whether a tennis ball is green or yellow, or whether something is red or pink. And in these debates, our own experiences feel undeniable. Of course, a tennis ball is green.

That's because the colors we each see feel like reality, but they're actually something more complex. They do have a basic basis in physics, wavelengths of light and all that, but the way they're rendered to your conscious mind relies on our visual perception system. And that turns out to be much more variable between people and is commonly appreciated as the research we're gonna hear about today will highlight. So let's get to it. This morning, we're joined by Rivka Galchen, staff writer at The New Yorker. Her piece in New Yorker is titled What Would It Mean to See a New Color? Welcome.

Rivka Galchen (1:45)

Thanks for having me.

Alexis Madrigal (1:46)

We've also got Austin Roorda, who's a professor of optometry and vision science at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He ran the Roorda Lab at Berkeley. Welcome.

Ren Ng (1:58)

Thank you.

Austin Roorda (1:59)

Happy to be here.

Alexis Madrigal (2:00)

And we've got Ren Ng, who's an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. Welcome, Ren.

Ren Ng (2:07)

Tickled pink to me.

Alexis Madrigal (2:09)

Let's just get a little bit about your relationship to color here. Rivka, do you actually have a favorite color?

Rivka Galchen (2:18)

Oh, it's obviously green.

Alexis Madrigal (2:20)

But what kind of green?

Rivka Galchen (2:23)

Yeah, sort of an emerald, not grass, a very synthetic kind of green. Who knows why? Who knows why? Yeah, yeah.

Alexis Madrigal (2:31)

Like Lego green, is that what we're talking?

Rivka Galchen (2:34)

Yeah, or sort of, you know, t-shirt 1984 green.

Alexis Madrigal (2:38)

Perfect. Austin, how about you?

Austin Roorda (2:42)

Well, I have to say, hello. You know, being one of the people that saw it, that's my new favorite color.

Alexis Madrigal (2:48)

Okay, we'll come back to that in a second. And Ren, what about you? Before you saw, Olo, this new color, what would you say?

Ren Ng (2:54)

As my children quiz me all the time, and know it is dark blue, ultramarine, navy, but my wife's is teal. Aha.

Alexis Madrigal (3:04)

And that actually does relate to this color, Olo.

Let's talk about how this research into this new color got started. Ren, I mean, like, talk to us a little bit about where this all came from, this idea of being able to get a new perception of color.

Ren Ng (3:25)

For me, it started when I was starting to give lectures at UC Berkeley in computer graphics about color. We have a week on color. And I'd inherited slides from lots of other professors. This is what we do when we start to teach a new course. And for me, color in my mind was much more simplistic, kind of, you know, from the engineering perspective, kind of like RGB, you know, the colors in our displays. But there was a whole week on it, and this really befuddled me at first. I tried to sort of get up to speed on why there was all this depth. And one of the things I saw on there was a picture that Austin had made that showed a picture of the retina and all the individual cells on it. And also which color type, spectral type of those cells they were.

And in trying to think about that and to be able to lecture on that, carefully, I wanted to understand that better, so I looked into Austin's work. And this is where this opportunity to show a new color opened up.

Alexis Madrigal (4:20)

Austin, why don't we use that as an opportunity to talk about how our eye perceives color? Could you give us like a little primer on that?