[GuyOnTilt]

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Colour is your brain's way of telling you that the light you're seeing is of a particular wavelength (or combination of wavelengths).

To see an object in a certain colour means that it reflects (or emits) that wavelength (or wavelengths) of light. Which wavelengths it reflects depends on how the particular structure of its atoms and electrons interact with photons of light.

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Right. I was taught all of this in middle school, but things I've come across sporatically make me think it might not be that simplistic. I'm not positive on any of this since I haven't studied it in depth, but my understand is that what I perceive as an object's "colour" is not just one wavelength being being reflected, but a range or spectrum of wavelengths, and my eye or brain's tendency to interpret that as one particular colour is completely personal and can and will vary greatly depending on species or even individual entities within a species (i.e. biological makeup). I had come across this before but didn't really think anything of it, but early this morning I happened upon this article from An Anthropology on Mars:

"In 1957, ninety-odd years after Maxwell's famous demonstration, Edwin Land - not merely the inventor of the instant Land camera and Polaroid, but an experimenter and theorizer of genius - provided a photographic demonstration of color perception even more startling. Unlike Maxwell, he made only two black-and-white images (using a split-beam camera so they could be taken at the same time from the same viewpoint, through the same lens) and superimposed these on a screen with a double lens projector. He used two filters to make the images: one passing longer wavelengths (a red filter), the other passing shorter wavelengths (a green filter). The first image was then projected through a red filter, the second with ordinary white light, unfiltered. One might expect that this would produce just an over all pale-pink image, but something `impossible' happened instead. The photograph of a young woman appeared instantly in full color - `blonde hair, pale blue eyes, red coat, bluegreen collar, and strikingly natural flesh tones,' as Land later described it. Where did these colors come from, and how were they made? They did not seem to be `in' the photographs or in the iluminants themselves. These demonstrations, overwhelming in their simplicity and impact were color `illusions' in Goethe's sense, but illusions that demonstrated a neurological truth - that colors are not `out there' in the world, nor (as classical thery held) an automatic correlate of wavelength, but, rather, are constructed by the brain."

This got me thinking and I did some very brief research online, but I don't know enough about these areas to draw any real conclusions.

GoT