Are There Colors You Have Never Seen?

Life as a Tetrachromat and Artist

So, I’m probably a tetrachromat. That is a person who maybe can see more subtle differences between colors than the average person. I haven’t had the genetic test to find out if I indeed have four different types of color cone vision, but my experience in the world leads me to to presume such. I do pass the online tetrachromat tests easily, with er, flying colors.

I see somewhat into the ultraviolet range as well. My wild guess is this has something to do with the way my cones and rods work together.

The way I see things all the time is much like the way color is represented in the impressionist art works. Colors are enhanced, colors glow, there is a richness beyond what photographs tend to show. Whether this is just because of a life spent admiring color as an artist, or the reason I became a colorist artist is almost a distinction without a difference to me in practice. Some artists without the tetrachromat genetic trait have passed tests supposed to find so called true tetrachromats. It’s like some sensitive musicians who cringe at the quality of digital music recordings, and other people who can’t hear a difference from analog recordings.

When I eventually had to start wearing lenses to focus sharply up close, I noticed that the plastic lenses also filtered out some of the higher more delicate colors in flowers and things, darkening them to my eye. I also noticed that my excellent night vision was so greatly diminished that I will just take my glasses off to walk outside in the dark at night. 

I have often heard people express the wonder if there are colors we have never seen before out there. 

I can tell you, I don’t think so, unless one is colorblind. Since color is mostly mental to us, it is mostly a result of comparing one appearance to another with a brain and processing apparatus. As an artist, I know how to create illusions with color.

So if I want to make you see colors the way I do, there are different conditions I can create by the juxtaposition of shadow and light to bend your perceptions. For example, I’m guessing that I see colors in general to look brighter and more saturated, as they say, than most folks. So if I want you to see a reddish pink the way I do, I could put it next to a dark dull green, causing your eye to see the red brighter by comparison, and more importantly, your brain to think it.

Nowadays our devices and cameras have sliders that can do the same things in an instant in real time, right before our eyes. Darken this, lighten that, increase saturation, etc.

The higher colors, as I call them, the higher octaves of color, actually look just like the colors that you already know, except richer and brighter. They are not new or unknown. Flowers have always known about them.

One way to think of these colors is that they look like blacklight fluorescent colors. You really notice them in a dark room as special, but only because they are isolated and amplified by the special conditions. You will still be able see basically the same frequency of a bright orange in a flower in full sun, or bright blue in the iridescent feather of a peacock or wing of a blue butterfly without those special conditions.

The world of light is a constant kaleidoscope of color for me. I do not think I’ve ever seen an hallucination, but I do see very deeply into things, such as the velvet richness glowing in flowers, or the molecular patterning of metals. I have learned over time to recognize artifacts of my visual apparatus, such as the way the appearance of a thing is changed by what what I have just seen. For a very common example, one might see a spot of color appearing over what you are looking at after gazing at a bright object beforehand. 

There are a myriad of other much more subtle ways in which artifacts of our perceptual equipment can fool us, too many to go into here. Suffice to say, I see rainbows dancing in everything. Sometimes this looks like screen static, other times, I see little infinities sparkling in a spot of sunlight on the floor. If three cones times three makes a complexity factor of nine, then maybe four times four makes sixteen; maybe I have more information coming in than the average person, or maybe I’m just more attuned to it. Supposedly tetrachromats can see a hundred times more different colors, but remember, these are simply slight differences between similar colors everyone sees.

vector by Adam Rędzikowski

I do have some complaints living in a world of three coned humans. Like the musicians who can’t stand digital recordings, I do find discontinuous spectrum fluorescent lighting highly irritating. It really messes with my mind. Colors look all wrong. 

Also, as an artist who loves to make art on my iPad, I am limited by the palette of colors available on it. It is calibrated to a three color triangle system of colors, mapped over a geography of colors that I can see, that do not all reside in that triangle. Other four color or more color systems can and have been built, but are not in common use at this time. There are pinks, purples, blues, and especially greens that I simply do not have on my iPad. However, since I do have that bag of tricks that artists use to create illusions, I make do. And besides, most people don’t miss those colors anyway. 

One reason I do love to do art in the fiber medium, dyed yarn that is, is that I do have access to colors not available on my devices. Not yet, anyway.

 
File:Cie Chart with sRGB gamut by spigget.png

For example, there is a deep rich realm of green infused with blue, that is nowhere to be found in the vocabulary of colors on my devices. To represent these colors, I have to add black to green. This fits into the picture and is passable to most people. But to me, it is dull and ugly.

But I can get you to feel that frequency, that direction of light, by adding even more black all around that frequency of color, much like you might see if you gaze into a deep green gemstone. You would see a lot of shadow in its depths, but you would also see a bright dart of pure green light focusing in contrast, and you would have the experience of what we call a jewel tone.

My use of the word frequency is to help explain this with a metaphor of music and sound. You may not be able to hear a C note in the octaves above your natural hearing range, but we know it sounds just like a C note in the audible range, only higher. And were you to slow it down, it would sound like C you can hear. Color is like that. There are no new, never before seen colors, unless you consider a particular color that is infused with more light different, which I do not. It is the same note, sounded in a range above our perception, that is all. The mental color is essentially the same.

A debunking site claims that tetrachromacy cannot be detected by an online test because computer monitors cannot represent all of the colors needed. This is illogical since the test is to see tiny differences between the colors that include those your monitor can show, and the typical color screen can show more different colors than most people can see. 

No matter how many cones you were born with, there are many amazing things you or your descendants may be capable of than you ever thought possible, simply because you never focused deeply upon them. Perfect pitch is an ability thought to be a rare gift until someone pointed out that in tonal languages that require it, most people have it. They cultivate it from birth. The history of words that cultures have given to particular colors seems to mirror the need and relevance to use those colors in daily life. Sometimes we have to give words to thoughts so we can share them, and so pay attention to them together.

I wonder what new things we will think of to do with our old colors in the future.