Speaker 1: Welcome to stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Speaker 1: Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to well your mind.
Speaker 1: My name is Robert lamp and Um Julie Douglas. Julie,
Speaker 1: we are podcasting on a very gray day. Fog has
Speaker 1: not lifted for days, right that the sky is just
Speaker 1: totally gray. My son keeps asking where sign where? Where
Speaker 1: where do you go? And I have to begin to
Speaker 1: explain rudimentary celestial mechanics to it, and the need to
Speaker 1: test the same question again and then ask where where
Speaker 1: is the blue sky? Well? And I think that is
Speaker 1: the power of the blue sky in our lives, right,
Speaker 1: It's depicted everywhere, It's we we were talking about this.
Speaker 1: In children's books. You don't often see gray skies depicted.
Speaker 1: You see blue skies. Will you do? In the Lorax,
Speaker 1: which is my son's favorite book for seemingly forever, now,
Speaker 1: very blue skies as well? Well? You have to because
Speaker 1: of the small took skies of course, yes, Um, But
Speaker 1: you know, I think blue is one of those really
Speaker 1: important colors to us because on some physical level but
Speaker 1: also subconscious level, it in end caps our visual field
Speaker 1: that we think of when we think about our existence.
Speaker 1: It's the color of the sky and the color of
Speaker 1: the ocean. Um. And yet this is the thing about
Speaker 1: blue is the ultimate magician, appearing mostly as an illusion,
Speaker 1: which will discuss in a bit. Yeah, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a powerful color. Uh. You know, we're gonna get into
Speaker 1: some of the color theory in a bit that. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's the it's the color ultimately of the
Speaker 1: of the sky and ocean. It's kind of the color
Speaker 1: of emotion itself. I mean, people seeing the blues. Uh.
Speaker 1: Picasso went through his blue period. Like I can't like
Speaker 1: when I think of blue in terms of its just
Speaker 1: emotional power, So I always end up picturing the uh
Speaker 1: the picture of the Picasso did the old guitarist, you know,
Speaker 1: where the very also kind of gray looking guitarist is
Speaker 1: sending there his head bowed and looks old and tired
Speaker 1: and sad, and he's just you know, caked in blue shades. Um.
Speaker 1: I Also, I feel like with blue, I think back
Speaker 1: a lot two times when I was a kid looking
Speaker 1: up at like a really clear blue sky and there
Speaker 1: being something comforting but also kind of oppressive about it,
Speaker 1: you know. And uh, And I think about that a
Speaker 1: lot too, especially if I'm if I'm far from home
Speaker 1: and I look up and see that blue sky, there's
Speaker 1: something there's something comforting and universal about it, but also
Speaker 1: universal and in the same way that death is universal.
Speaker 1: You know, it's that relentless blue and it's the relentless
Speaker 1: light of the sun. Right, there's nothing to filter it.
Speaker 1: I mean, is it any wonder that modern Mongolians still
Speaker 1: pray to uh munk punk Kingary the eternal blue sky?
Speaker 1: Is it any wonder? Ultraman Ultramarine is the pigment often
Speaker 1: reserved to paint the mantle of a virgin Mary. By
Speaker 1: the way, so she is typically seen with a very
Speaker 1: blue color scheme. Indeed, so there are all sorts of associations.
Speaker 1: For me, it's Miles Davis kind of blue, so in
Speaker 1: that synesthesia sense. Okay, so you listen to Miles Davis
Speaker 1: seeing the blues and you actually kind of well, he
Speaker 1: has an album called kind of Blue and um, so
Speaker 1: I always think of it's a sort of rainy night
Speaker 1: music and it's a it's a very concentric patterned um
Speaker 1: type of album, and that each song builds on this
Speaker 1: familiar pattern, which kind of messes with it a bit.
Speaker 1: But so for me, it's that that's space of jazz
Speaker 1: and blues and melancholy. And again, I feel like I've
Speaker 1: been talking about this a lot lately, the space the
Speaker 1: absence um. But you know, again, the blue can be anything.
Speaker 1: It can be that baby blue, um, it can be
Speaker 1: Prussian blue, Turk boys blue, very hippyish to me, hey,
Speaker 1: And indeed than you have that whole literally gray area
Speaker 1: where blue touches gray and then you lose yourself and
Speaker 1: like the German grays and German blues melding together bahlsi
Speaker 1: and blues yah. On the color spectrum, it's wedged between
Speaker 1: violet and green. It has a wavelength between four hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty and four hundred nanometers, and blues with a
Speaker 1: higher frequency and a shorter wavelength gradually look more violet,
Speaker 1: while those with a lower frequency and a longer wavelength
Speaker 1: gradually appear more green. Now pure blue that kind of
Speaker 1: you said, have that sort of existential angst too. In
Speaker 1: the middle has a wavelength of four hundred and seventy nanometers.
Speaker 1: And we'll discuss this later, but this just happens to
Speaker 1: be the range of um of color that we perceive
Speaker 1: the most with the human eye. And of course I
Speaker 1: should also mention that blue is my son's face, a
Speaker 1: color which I find curious because we've my wife and
Speaker 1: I have done no like coaxing along those lines, like
Speaker 1: his his room is green, and we're not we're not
Speaker 1: shoving a lot of like blue for boys, pink for
Speaker 1: girls kind of thing down his throat. But he's he's
Speaker 1: he's just, without question, latched onto blue is his favorite color.
Speaker 1: And you ask him he likes blue. If he get
Speaker 1: picks out his own shirt animal designs aside, he's going
Speaker 1: to go for blue every time. Yeah, my daughter who's
Speaker 1: six years old, also loves blue. I love blue. And
Speaker 1: what this is pointing to is that there's sort of
Speaker 1: a universal um gravitational force of blue over us. In
Speaker 1: two thousand and eleven, Deluxe Paints conducted a survey involving
Speaker 1: response from thirty different countries and found that across cultures,
Speaker 1: blue was the preferred color among men and among women.
Speaker 1: Now you're probably wondering, what else, what about the other
Speaker 1: colors out there? The second favorite colors are red and green,
Speaker 1: followed by orange, brown, brown, and purple. Brown is good.
Speaker 1: Brown is an earth tone. My yoga man is brown,
Speaker 1: so is poop all right, and then yellow is the
Speaker 1: least favorite color, preferred only by five percent of people. Wow,
Speaker 1: I'm so glad that yellow is half the color on
Speaker 1: our our logo. But there, yeah, but we didn't choose that.
Speaker 1: We just it's for you five percent out there. We're
Speaker 1: looking after you. Another interesting finding is that both men
Speaker 1: and women increasingly dislike orange as they age. Interesting. I've
Speaker 1: heard before about orange being an unsettling color, like um,
Speaker 1: if I remember correctly, the torture chamber in David Cronenberg's
Speaker 1: video Drone is orange and color because they designed it
Speaker 1: with some color theory in mind that said that orange
Speaker 1: is a very unsettling color and is ideal if you
Speaker 1: have an interrogation. I'm setting inmates right sometimes wear orange?
Speaker 1: Or is that just? Is that just the show was
Speaker 1: they would show up if they escape, because again, who
Speaker 1: would wear orange? Who's gonna wear a full orange jumpsuit?
Speaker 1: And unless they've escaped from prison? If I'm like orange
Speaker 1: a lot, yeah, I mean I'm not opposed to it.
Speaker 1: I did go to a university whose color was orange,
Speaker 1: and that kind of turned me against it a little bit,
Speaker 1: I guess, but you know, but by and large, I
Speaker 1: don't have anything against orange. Alright, Okay, well let's think
Speaker 1: about six hundred million years ago, when things were just
Speaker 1: business as usual. The sun was shining in the Earth
Speaker 1: was absorbing and reflecting that light, and uh, really, nobody
Speaker 1: knew any better about what sort of colors were being
Speaker 1: produced because there was no organism that could perceive that
Speaker 1: light and color yet. Yeah. I mean, as far as
Speaker 1: the organisms actual pigmentation goes, you could have bright red,
Speaker 1: you could have a gray organism over here, sort of
Speaker 1: translucent over here. But it doesn't really matter because what
Speaker 1: limited kind of perception is going on is really just
Speaker 1: more about light and dark. It's not it's about about it.
Speaker 1: So the sun is up, the sun is down, the
Speaker 1: moon is out. It's that kind of navigational, uh, sensory input.
Speaker 1: But in terms of what color anything is, it does
Speaker 1: not matter at all. Yeah. And now think about the
Speaker 1: Earth and all of the vegetation and the creatures that
Speaker 1: we're leaving living on it. Six hundred million years ago,
Speaker 1: a lot of the colors and plants and animals um
Speaker 1: came from and continued to come from, pigments, colored chemicals
Speaker 1: that absorb certain wavelengths of light. And these pigments while
Speaker 1: we think of them is more like ornamental today because um,
Speaker 1: you know, we've largely hacked them that way our evolution
Speaker 1: has um. They have been helpful in other ways. Granules
Speaker 1: of melanin, for example, help keep bird feathers strong and
Speaker 1: help protect human skin from the sun. And chlorophyll is
Speaker 1: a chemical that helps plants trap light for photosynthesis. It
Speaker 1: also makes them look green. Yeah, because we often we
Speaker 1: like a colorful bird and we instantly think, oh, what's
Speaker 1: colored this way for attention? It's all about a visual
Speaker 1: presentation or it's about camouflage. But their actual structural properties
Speaker 1: that are essential here, Yeah, and we tend to think
Speaker 1: of them more as like color currency. Now again, peacock's
Speaker 1: this this amazing display that is meant to attract a mate.
Speaker 1: But those are things again that got hacked in evolution. Um,
Speaker 1: it wasn't until a predator with eyesight showed up on
Speaker 1: the scene that this became important. Color became important, and indeed,
Speaker 1: according to the NPR story how Animals Hack the Rainbow
Speaker 1: and got stumped on blue, this animal is probably like
Speaker 1: a super fast shrimp creature. It's suddenly it has eyes,
Speaker 1: it can see, it can pick up on colors. And
Speaker 1: so if you happen to belong to a species of say,
Speaker 1: bright red, little floaty, slimy invertebrate creatures up and all.
Speaker 1: Now it hadn't mattered that you're bright red, but suddenly
Speaker 1: here's this superpowered super predator shrimp and you're just sticking
Speaker 1: out like a sore delicious thumb. Right. And as eyesight
Speaker 1: evolves in creatures and as other creatures respond to it,
Speaker 1: then you begin to see animals organism starting to actually
Speaker 1: go after camouflage, go after other tactics that would help
Speaker 1: them to survive with the colors that they have. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, and it's it really gets just increasingly complex.
Speaker 1: Uh as as organisms evolved, so you end up with
Speaker 1: just this this perplexing maze of interactions that we continue
Speaker 1: to try and understand where you have bright colors on
Speaker 1: one creature or saying stay away from me, and the
Speaker 1: other hand is saying come closer, have a taste, and
Speaker 1: then other times they're saying, please confuse me with the
Speaker 1: other creature that this color just like me that happens
Speaker 1: to be poisonous. It gets very complicated, very Yeah, you
Speaker 1: have the whole pantone spectrum in there, and a bunch
Speaker 1: of reasons for them. As you have just pointed out
Speaker 1: a few Now, the majority of color earths are produced
Speaker 1: by pigments, now particles of the color chemicals that we
Speaker 1: talked about, and these are found within specialized cells. And
Speaker 1: these include melanins, which are found in nearly all organisms
Speaker 1: and produce more of the earth tones that you see
Speaker 1: that that are pretty common even to us, right as humans.
Speaker 1: And then you have carotenoids, which or carotenoids which produce
Speaker 1: colors primarily in the red to yellow end of the spectrum.
Speaker 1: So think about say, flamingos, they're pink because they're eating
Speaker 1: carotenoid rich shrimp. Yeah, you look at like a baby flamingo.
Speaker 1: They're not pink. They're not born pink, they're born kind
Speaker 1: of gray. It's only through that diet that they end
Speaker 1: up uh stealing the pigments and incorporating them into their diet, right,
Speaker 1: And it's a really easy way to eat pink b pink. Right.
Speaker 1: Then you would think the same thing would apply to
Speaker 1: colors like blue and green, but it would be wrong
Speaker 1: because it's really hard to replicate these colors into the
Speaker 1: skin or feathers through diet. By the way, if if
Speaker 1: humans eat enough carotenoids, generally through carrots, you can actually
Speaker 1: adjust the color in your eyes just a little bit,
Speaker 1: but nothing on the scale of changing your actual skin color. Um.
Speaker 1: Of course, if you eat beats, which also have carotenoids,
Speaker 1: you will see other color alternations take place. We talked
Speaker 1: about this in the Biospheriens, Right, they had a diet
Speaker 1: of sweet potatoes so much so that their skins, right,
Speaker 1: they actually eat enough sweet potatoes to change their skin color. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if your diet is extreme, Um, you can actually get
Speaker 1: in on the flamingo ritual here if you want to
Speaker 1: do that, a diet a sweet potatoes, sweet potatoes only. Now,
Speaker 1: even I were talking about how the fact that green
Speaker 1: isn't created in skinner feathers easily seems counterintuitive because you
Speaker 1: look around and you look at the earth and it's
Speaker 1: just full of green vegetation, right, Yeah, I mean, it's
Speaker 1: one thing to think about blue as being this sort
Speaker 1: of difficult to obtain pigment because you know, mine instantly
Speaker 1: turns back to say the Radio Lab episode where they
Speaker 1: talked about the possibility that the sky isn't really blue,
Speaker 1: that it's all just about us being told that it's blue.
Speaker 1: And I think about Oliver Sacks and as the book Hallucinations,
Speaker 1: you know, seeking after indigo and uh and and taking
Speaker 1: hallucinogens in order to to perceive like pure inhuman indigo.
Speaker 1: And then you you've taken all that information, you can say,
Speaker 1: all right, I can see where blue would not really
Speaker 1: be a thing per se in in in the course
Speaker 1: of evolution. But green, yeah, green is everywhere. Green would
Speaker 1: it would be vital to your ability to camouflage yourself.
Speaker 1: And in fact, we see so many different green creatures,
Speaker 1: but when you get right down to it, we don't
Speaker 1: really have that much green, uh in the natural world. No.
Speaker 1: And in fact, there's a bit of color mixing for
Speaker 1: some animals. So if you see a green frog out
Speaker 1: in nature, it's not necessarily that they're eating a bunch
Speaker 1: of chlorophyll and they're they're turning green. It's that they're
Speaker 1: actually color mixing within the skin and using those pigments
Speaker 1: pigments to produce that that green coloration. Yeah, it's a
Speaker 1: yellow pigment and a blue structural color and the two
Speaker 1: end up combining into this green effect. Yeah. Now, um,
Speaker 1: so far in terms of blue, only two vertebrates have
Speaker 1: been found that have blue coloring as a result of
Speaker 1: cellular pigment called cyanaphores, and both the mantarin fish and
Speaker 1: the closely related psychedelic mandarin called the picturesque dragonette, are
Speaker 1: vividly colored fish native to coral reefs in the Pacific Ocean. Indeed,
Speaker 1: but then it turns out that some of the sort
Speaker 1: of more iconic blue creatures are are not really blue
Speaker 1: at all. For instance, the blue morphoe butterfly, which is
Speaker 1: beautiful creature, very picturesque example of blue. This is the one,
Speaker 1: for instance, you've find it in Costa Rica, places like that,
Speaker 1: and uh, and there was the famous situation where someone
Speaker 1: forget which publication cinephotographer down to get a picture of one,
Speaker 1: and they're actually very difficult to picture, to photograph their
Speaker 1: wings open while they're they're they've landed, and so the
Speaker 1: photographer just got a dead one and pinned it up
Speaker 1: and then took the picture and it was there's like
Speaker 1: a mild controversy over it, but it's a it's a
Speaker 1: very blue looking wing surface. But it turns out that
Speaker 1: you have tiny transparent structures on the surface of their
Speaker 1: wings that bounce light in just the right way to
Speaker 1: give them the appearance of this vibrant, rich blue. It's
Speaker 1: really brilliant because on one side they're brown, and the
Speaker 1: effact that's what you end up getting when you try
Speaker 1: to photograph them. Most of the time, you just set
Speaker 1: these brown wings and the effect of it being brown
Speaker 1: on that side is to absorb all the other color
Speaker 1: from the other wavelengths, so orange and yellow. And in
Speaker 1: the meantime, on the other side, as you say, it's
Speaker 1: got there was any transparent structures, and that is what
Speaker 1: bounces the light. And of course, as we sort of
Speaker 1: alluded to at the beginning of this, blue is the
Speaker 1: wavelength that comes through the best, and so that's what's
Speaker 1: bounced off the most through the atmosphere and off of
Speaker 1: their wings, or at least one side. Now, if you
Speaker 1: doubt this as an optical illusion, as the ultimate optical illusion,
Speaker 1: you could grind up their wings and you would see
Speaker 1: that there was not a speck of blue pigment in them,
Speaker 1: only brown. If you wanted to grind up that seems terrible,
Speaker 1: but yeah, well, ground up butterfly wings. Imagine that's an
Speaker 1: ingredient and in some sort of which is brew I
Speaker 1: mean sure, sure, yeah, but yeah, the crazy thing about
Speaker 1: this is it all comes around essentially to meta materials.
Speaker 1: You know, we're constantly running across new new studies have
Speaker 1: been published new findings where they have some sort of
Speaker 1: crazy new meta material where we're manipulating uh, surface structures
Speaker 1: at a at a very minute level, and in doing so,
Speaker 1: we're changing the ability of the substance to you know,
Speaker 1: absorb or to shed a substance you know, shed water,
Speaker 1: absorb water, or in the way that admit it manipulates light.
Speaker 1: I instantly think back to the Tavanta black that we discussed.
Speaker 1: You know, we have this menty materials that make this
Speaker 1: this uh, this substance appear the surface appear blacker than
Speaker 1: any natural black in our world. And essentially you have
Speaker 1: you know, nature has been doing this since time out
Speaker 1: of mind. It's been been working at that that minute
Speaker 1: scale to manipulate the way the way that we perceive color. Yeah.
Speaker 1: You and I were talking about solar sales earlier, and
Speaker 1: we were saying, we're like, we're so proud of ourselves
Speaker 1: as humans for creating this this material that can reflect
Speaker 1: light and can do a bunch of things in the meantime,
Speaker 1: you have these butterfly wings that are doing the same
Speaker 1: sort of things on this smaller scale, albeit uh for
Speaker 1: different reasons. Now, there's a two thousand and twelve study
Speaker 1: that found that some birds use bubble laced keratin. This
Speaker 1: is the same sort of stuff that you find in
Speaker 1: human fingernails in the barbs of their feathers, and it
Speaker 1: scatters the light from the feather in a way that
Speaker 1: happens to look blue to humans. And Northern Woodlands Magazine
Speaker 1: said a simple way to test this out is to
Speaker 1: take a blue feather, hold it up to the sky
Speaker 1: so that's back lit, and with the sunlight streaming through
Speaker 1: the feather rather than bouncing off its surface, the blue
Speaker 1: color vanishes and you just get this sort of drab
Speaker 1: grayish brown. But if you bring the feather down so
Speaker 1: that the light bounces off of it and scatters the
Speaker 1: blue wavelengths of light, the feather then appears blue once again,
Speaker 1: and this is called structural coloration. You know, then the
Speaker 1: more we study this, the more it seems clear that,
Speaker 1: you know, we have this this naive version of reality
Speaker 1: in which they're just these pure colors, sort of Crayola
Speaker 1: understanding of the world. You have all these pure colors
Speaker 1: floating around, and some pages are are our color with
Speaker 1: certains and others with other crayons. But it's really it's
Speaker 1: almost like there are no real colors at all. When
Speaker 1: you start breaking it down, it just gets it gets,
Speaker 1: this gets so murky. Well, so when you consider other
Speaker 1: organisms out there, like bees there they are perceiving ultra
Speaker 1: violet lights that that we don't um. But yeah, I agree,
Speaker 1: it's kind of funny to think of all the things
Speaker 1: that are going on that we do not perceive. Because
Speaker 1: I was thinking about again that feather, because you've got
Speaker 1: that keratin structure, and there's a layer of melanin and
Speaker 1: that is also working with the So the caratin is
Speaker 1: bouncing off stuff and the melanin is absorbing red and
Speaker 1: yellow wavelengths. So all that is going on, but we
Speaker 1: don't see it. Now, if you want to talk about
Speaker 1: a really fantastic blue that occurs in nature, or again
Speaker 1: appears to occur in nature, uh, and we're talking like
Speaker 1: supernormal stimuli level of blue, then you have the berry
Speaker 1: of the Polia condensed sata plant, which has an exceedingly blue,
Speaker 1: like reflectively intense blue that is just more potent than
Speaker 1: any other living creatures. Blue. Yeah, yeah, that's that's what
Speaker 1: uh old Rick Steiner, a physicist says about it. It It
Speaker 1: says that it's reflectivity is really more intense than any
Speaker 1: living thing. And he said most services reflect just a
Speaker 1: small percentage of the light that hits them. However, this
Speaker 1: berry reflects thirty of the light. The berry skin itself
Speaker 1: has no pigment, no colored cells, or I should astric
Speaker 1: that um. But all the cells are coiled in the
Speaker 1: sort of twist, and the cells form sheets just like
Speaker 1: the skin of an onion, and that allows light to
Speaker 1: filter down through the layers in a way that creates
Speaker 1: again that structural coloration that I was talking about with
Speaker 1: the feather. And there's just a few cells in the
Speaker 1: berry skin that do reflect other colors, and that is
Speaker 1: what gives the fruit what Center calls a pick selated glow. Wow,
Speaker 1: so you have you have a few pigments in there,
Speaker 1: but then most of it is just completely structural color.
Speaker 1: You look at this thing again, you think of it
Speaker 1: in Crayola terms, and you think, wow, that that berry
Speaker 1: is really painted with a nice blue. But there's there's
Speaker 1: it's it's mostly just a matter of structurally altering the
Speaker 1: way that the lights playing with it. Yeah, and there's
Speaker 1: a good reason for this too. I mean, this is
Speaker 1: a very tiny berry, so in a sense, it needs
Speaker 1: to do this. It needs to be able to reflect
Speaker 1: more white so that it can have the sort of
Speaker 1: brilliant blue that as a beacon two birds to come
Speaker 1: and eat it and spread it, spread the seeds. It's
Speaker 1: it's basically like the it's the smaller business that has
Speaker 1: blown its entire advertising budget on a really catchy Super
Speaker 1: Bowl at Yeah, I was gonna say it's a snapple
Speaker 1: of sodas. Maybe I'm not sure if that fits. All Right,
Speaker 1: we're gonna take a quick break and when we come back,
Speaker 1: we will discuss more about the color blue, uh, particularly
Speaker 1: how plays into your eyes. All right, we're back, And
Speaker 1: before we talk about the color blue of eyes and
Speaker 1: and whether it actually even exists, we should talk about
Speaker 1: the blue sky and whether it actually exists. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you get into this discussion. He's the sky actually really blue?
Speaker 1: And where do we even get that idea? Is it
Speaker 1: just something that we we hear about. We hear people
Speaker 1: talk about the blue sky, Like didn't I don't remember
Speaker 1: telling my son that the guy is blue. Did he
Speaker 1: indeed just pick that up from a book where he
Speaker 1: sees a more vivid depiction of blue and it looks
Speaker 1: like his shirt that he's told as blue. Did somebody
Speaker 1: at school say, hey, this guy is blue? Or is
Speaker 1: there an innate blueness to the sky? Well, you've probably
Speaker 1: heard the explanation before that, because the earth is covered,
Speaker 1: you know, with water, that it's the This sky is
Speaker 1: just reflecting that back. But that's not actually what's happening.
Speaker 1: Think about the absence of light actually, and think about
Speaker 1: what happens when we don't have light up in the
Speaker 1: sky when it's dark. You know, you get the stars
Speaker 1: coming out, and the sky appears to be a black
Speaker 1: velvet color because of course we don't have any light
Speaker 1: from the sun. But once the sun is up and
Speaker 1: the rays of light play with particles in the air,
Speaker 1: right that the gas molecules, then you have this interaction
Speaker 1: of light and particles, and it looks kind of split
Speaker 1: that white light. For a second, let's put it through
Speaker 1: a prism. If we do that, we know we get
Speaker 1: Roy G. BIV. And we know that each of those
Speaker 1: color components of this rainbow of colors has different wavelengths,
Speaker 1: And it turns out that the shorter the wavelength, the
Speaker 1: more these colors will scatter in the atmosphere when the
Speaker 1: sun is up, you know, during the day, and the
Speaker 1: more our eyes will perceive them. I mean, that's sort
Speaker 1: of the short and dirty answer here. Yeah, So essentially
Speaker 1: about the scattering of that blue light, and that's why
Speaker 1: we perceive this guy is blue. Yeah, because think about
Speaker 1: You've got oxygen and nitrogen molecules dominating the atmosphere and
Speaker 1: they're relatively small, and so these are interacting really well
Speaker 1: with the wavelengths of indigo. Yes, and you're probably thinking
Speaker 1: right now, indigo. Well, then why why doesn't this guy
Speaker 1: appear much darker like indigo to us? Well, the second
Speaker 1: part of the answer to why this guy is blue
Speaker 1: is that the mechanics of our eyes are pretty flawed.
Speaker 1: We can't actually perceive that color as it is, and
Speaker 1: so are I. Our machinery does a little bit of
Speaker 1: pigmentation itself. It takes some of that white light, mixes
Speaker 1: it with indigo, and you get more of a blue color. Now,
Speaker 1: the more white there is, the more that color will change. Right,
Speaker 1: The less like there is, the more that color will change.
Speaker 1: On a different spectrum, so you get the brighter blues,
Speaker 1: darker blue, if you get great now, if you if
Speaker 1: you want to go over this material again, we do
Speaker 1: have a video about the sky and wine is blue
Speaker 1: and wine appears to be blue. I will be sure
Speaker 1: to include a link to that video on the landing
Speaker 1: page for this episode. It's stuff to Blow your Mind
Speaker 1: dot com. So this naturally flows into the idea of
Speaker 1: eye color. Old blue eyes, old blue eyes. Frank Sinatra,
Speaker 1: who you know, has you could say the skies and
Speaker 1: his eyes in a sense, because the same thing is
Speaker 1: kind of happening in the eyeball. Yeah, what we're saying here, Sorry,
Speaker 1: so not your fans. Frank's eyes were not really blue,
Speaker 1: and in fact, nobody's eyes are really blue or green.
Speaker 1: Really Hazel's home, because mine are supposedly green. Sorry dude, Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean mine are kind of gray green. Um. The
Speaker 1: the the only true chosen ones out there are people
Speaker 1: with the with brown eyes, the only people who are
Speaker 1: not trying to pull one over us with an optical
Speaker 1: illusion of different colored eyes. And this is because irises
Speaker 1: are made up of three layers, a thin top and
Speaker 1: back layer with a spongy layer in between called the stroma,
Speaker 1: and any layer can have pigmentation in it, and there
Speaker 1: are a few different colors of pigmentation that come into
Speaker 1: play here. So most people have either dark brown or
Speaker 1: yellow pigment in at least one of these layers, and
Speaker 1: the combination of yellow and brown go into making brown
Speaker 1: and amber colored eyes. So brown people have these pigments
Speaker 1: um and each layer of the iris giving the eye
Speaker 1: a strong brown color. But when you don't, when you
Speaker 1: have sort of different genetic uh deposits of this pigment
Speaker 1: in the eye and in the different layers, you have
Speaker 1: variation of eye color. Because what I'm talking about here
Speaker 1: is is that that brown, let's say that's in the
Speaker 1: back layer, could be absorbing all the different spectrum of light. Right.
Speaker 1: But let's say that you didn't have any pigmentation in
Speaker 1: this trauma, all right, but you have molecules hanging out
Speaker 1: in this trauma. Well, what's happening there is that again
Speaker 1: that blue light is bouncing around in there because all
Speaker 1: the other ones are all the other wavelengths of the
Speaker 1: other colors are absorbed by the brown. And then you
Speaker 1: have the particles in this trauma that are basically reflecting back,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of like the blue sky effect. Wow.
Speaker 1: And and this is of course called the the tin
Speaker 1: doll effect. Yes, yeah, and and again it is fascinating
Speaker 1: because it is pretty much the same scenario that's happening
Speaker 1: with the blue sky. It's happening in your eyes, as
Speaker 1: weird and kind of magical as that sounds, and it's
Speaker 1: kind of beautiful too in a way, even though it's
Speaker 1: an illusion. And like right now, if you're a green stare,
Speaker 1: you're trying to pull an optical illusion on me. And
Speaker 1: in fact, green, by the way, is the blue that's
Speaker 1: refracted and a small amount of yellow pigment in that
Speaker 1: layer that are in ing. Wow. So, whether you're looking
Speaker 1: up into the eternal blue sky uh and uh and
Speaker 1: and trying to find some sort of logic there, or
Speaker 1: you're just looking into the the eyes of a friend
Speaker 1: or loved one, you're you're essentially seeing an illusion. Yes, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: And babies can often have blue eyes for a few
Speaker 1: days or months after birth because the melanin the darkening
Speaker 1: pigment of the eyes hasn't fully developed in this stroma
Speaker 1: so um. And I've also read that the blue even
Speaker 1: in a person's seemingly blue eyes that will actually can
Speaker 1: con fade over time as they age. Well, yeah, and
Speaker 1: that's because of them. I believe the size of the
Speaker 1: molecules in their eyes in the amount of refraction or
Speaker 1: reflecting that goes on. Now, if you want to learn
Speaker 1: more about this, this is a there's a great article
Speaker 1: by Esther Ingle Arcis writing for I O nine and
Speaker 1: the article is called physics prove that nobody has blue eyes. So,
Speaker 1: as you said in an email to me earlier, take
Speaker 1: that Snatra. Yeah, you know. It reminds me that Brent
Speaker 1: Spiner had played Data on Star Trek did an album
Speaker 1: of I think just like kind of you know, crooner songs,
Speaker 1: and they called it Old Yellow Eyes because as Data
Speaker 1: on Star Trek the next Generation, he has like yellow
Speaker 1: android eyes. There you go, that's beautiful. Yeah, yeah, he has.
Speaker 1: The Data was a beautiful, beautiful character. I like Lord two.
Speaker 1: He was all right, Now, what's the effect of someone
Speaker 1: with blue eyes staring at you? I guess it would
Speaker 1: be different for each person in their personal experience with
Speaker 1: blue But of course there exists a study to look
Speaker 1: into the psychological effects of blue, especially when it versus red. Yes. Indeed,
Speaker 1: get into these these color theories studies. You know, how
Speaker 1: does how does the color of a room affect someone's demeanor?
Speaker 1: There even if you were not going to discuss them really,
Speaker 1: but you know, they look at the how Olympic athletes perform,
Speaker 1: how well they perform they're wearing blue versus red? Um,
Speaker 1: but in particular, uh, yeah, how does blue effects, say, uh,
Speaker 1: performance on a on a test? Right? Well, there's a
Speaker 1: two nine study publishing the journal Science, which are where
Speaker 1: researchers at the University of British Columbia conducted tests with
Speaker 1: six hundred people to answer the question does does does
Speaker 1: cognitive performance vary depending on whether you're looking at red
Speaker 1: or you're looking at blue and uh surprisingly or unsurprisingly,
Speaker 1: and depending on how how much of value place on colors.
Speaker 1: The red groups did better on tests of recall and
Speaker 1: attention to detail, you know, such as remembering specific words,
Speaker 1: checking spelling and punctuation, you know that kind of you know,
Speaker 1: fine tuning of material. But the blue groups they did
Speaker 1: better on tests that required imaginative inventive freethinking, you know,
Speaker 1: coming up with with remarkable new ways to utilize this proper,
Speaker 1: that proper that element. Yeah, and if you're wondering about
Speaker 1: the mechanist, I'm here of how it was done. The
Speaker 1: participants performed tasks with words or images displayed against red, blue,
Speaker 1: or neutral backgrounds on computer screens. UM. And I believe
Speaker 1: there have been studies too in which people were housed
Speaker 1: in blue or red rooms, certainly pink ones. We've talked
Speaker 1: about that before. UM, But I'm not surprised that blue
Speaker 1: would be perceived as a creativity booster because I think
Speaker 1: there's a calming effect here at play, and we know
Speaker 1: that when your brain can settle in calm, then it
Speaker 1: feels like it had a little bit more room to
Speaker 1: play and to use its imagination. Yeah, and plus you
Speaker 1: could say, all right, if you're if you're staring up
Speaker 1: at a clear blue sky, then you probably you know
Speaker 1: there's there's not as much mystery there, like all is
Speaker 1: pretty much exposed. If you're staring at the blue water scene,
Speaker 1: you're presumably not in the water, and then you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about what's underneath it. Maybe it allows
Speaker 1: a little just just clearing of the of the work
Speaker 1: desk of the mind. Well, it's interesting too in my
Speaker 1: headspace app, just the meditation app that we um use
Speaker 1: the andy put a comb. The person who leads the
Speaker 1: guided Meditations always talks about getting in that blue sky space.
Speaker 1: He says to look at any thoughts as he sort
Speaker 1: of gray clouds passing by. So already there's this idea that, yeah,
Speaker 1: you're you're in some sort of other I don't want
Speaker 1: to say altered state, but other space in which there's
Speaker 1: a sort of clarity. Likewise, red would be easy association.
Speaker 1: There is, of course blood. In fact, if you had
Speaker 1: a list associations for red, I would say, like the
Speaker 1: first fifty or sixty would all just be blood, one
Speaker 1: listed after another. Yeah. My daughter has said she doesn't
Speaker 1: like the color red because she thinks about blood. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but of course she has been exposed to a lot
Speaker 1: of Star Wars and Ninjago and I don't know, well,
Speaker 1: just with life Savers, right, the Sith Lords all used
Speaker 1: red light stavers, if I'm not mistaken. All the the
Speaker 1: Jedi they do they use all used blue, and then
Speaker 1: Luke had a green one, or is it the other
Speaker 1: way around? I cannot remember, but I do recall that
Speaker 1: Darth Maul has the right living red lightsaber, but not
Speaker 1: only that he has the red and black markings on
Speaker 1: his face which are very ferocious looking. Yes, yeah, so
Speaker 1: he's Yeah, he's definitely a good spokes creature for the
Speaker 1: color red, like very much just taking on red. It's
Speaker 1: this red, demonic aggressive color as opposed to a more
Speaker 1: you know, a more peaceful Jedi would presumably have a
Speaker 1: blue lightsaber interest in nice soothing blue tones. Well, and
Speaker 1: if you decided to decorate your face with blue instead
Speaker 1: of red and black, will you'd just be part of
Speaker 1: the blue man group. Right, There's not much threatening even
Speaker 1: if even if you really look at him and you
Speaker 1: start getting a little creaked out, you can only feel
Speaker 1: so threatened by the blue Man group, you know. Final
Speaker 1: final note on that, there was an article in The
Speaker 1: New York Times potion two thousand nine by Pam Belloic
Speaker 1: titled reinvent wheel blue Room diffusing a bomb red room Um.
Speaker 1: She pointed out that at the New York Times at
Speaker 1: the time there were no blue rooms. There were red rooms,
Speaker 1: but no blue rooms. So you can imagine, especially you
Speaker 1: have tight deadlines in place, it's all about like getting
Speaker 1: the story right, getting the story out on time, that
Speaker 1: it would probably be a pretty red room environment. Yeah,
Speaker 1: then the saying the article that the walls were painted
Speaker 1: a tomato soup red. Yeah. Yeah, again, keep keeping you
Speaker 1: on your toes, keeping you aggressive, I can, I could
Speaker 1: see that in the place though. And lusty and lusty
Speaker 1: that's the other association with red. Yeah, And there there
Speaker 1: have been some interesting studies along those lines that you know,
Speaker 1: that show that you know, man sees a woman that
Speaker 1: gets the red background or in a red outfit. Uh,
Speaker 1: there's going to be more. He's gonna interpreter is more
Speaker 1: beautiful or sexual? Uh, that sort of thing. Yeah, red
Speaker 1: is a very fascinating color. And I think this all
Speaker 1: just points to this idea that these colors are working
Speaker 1: on us in sub conscious ways, um, in ways that
Speaker 1: we cannot even perceive given the machinery that we have
Speaker 1: in our eyeballs. And so we may cover a couple
Speaker 1: of other colors, UM be interested to know from you guys,
Speaker 1: if you have a favorite that you'd want to know about. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, it gets right into symbolism too, because we
Speaker 1: we end up loading in associations with certain colors, uh,
Speaker 1: sports teams, cultural things such as Marty Grass. When we
Speaker 1: were getting test colors and test designs for our website
Speaker 1: a while back, one of the designs we were given
Speaker 1: was a brilliant like purple and gold design, and I
Speaker 1: think we both just said, now, that's just that looks
Speaker 1: like we're celebrating Marty Grass. It's not really what we're
Speaker 1: gonna go for. Um, there's a lot of that at play.
Speaker 1: Like someone might say I like these colors because they
Speaker 1: look kind of Rastafarian, and others might say that it
Speaker 1: looks a little too rastera for what I'm trying to
Speaker 1: do here. Uh, please keep those colors to yourself. Yeah,
Speaker 1: for my money, it's pink, because recently you had sent
Speaker 1: me an article with the tie I don't this pink
Speaker 1: even exist? Or pink doesn't exist, And there's all the
Speaker 1: sort of implications that pink has had, and historically it's
Speaker 1: fascinating color. So maybe maybe we'll get around to do that.
Speaker 1: One in the West used to be a man's color
Speaker 1: and then when we lost it. Yeah, yeah, it's hard
Speaker 1: to think of that now. All right, all right, so
Speaker 1: there you go. Blue. Uh, an exploration of the color blue,
Speaker 1: what it means to us and how we perceive it
Speaker 1: and and where it came from. Now, if you would
Speaker 1: like to explore more on this topic, or other topics,
Speaker 1: other color related topics. Be sure to check out stuff
Speaker 1: to Blow your Mind dot com. That's our mothership. That's
Speaker 1: where we'll find all the podcast episodes, all the blog post,
Speaker 1: all the videos. There's a search bar at the top
Speaker 1: of that. So there's a topic that you're interested in,
Speaker 1: go plug the word insto what we have on on it,
Speaker 1: and if you don't find anything, well, get in touch
Speaker 1: with us and let us know you want some coverage
Speaker 1: on that topic. In the meantime, you can share your
Speaker 1: blue or red or pink thoughts with us, and you
Speaker 1: can do that by sending an email to below the
Speaker 1: mind of at how stuff works dot com. For more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com. H