Do you see what I see? “The Himba Tribe”
Apparently the words we learn for colors actually affects how we see them.
Related news article from Scientific American:
The order in which colors are named worldwide appears to be due to how eyes work… Wavelengths of color that are easier to see also get names earlier in the evolution of a culture.
Color names always seem to appear in a specific order of importance across cultures—black, white, red, green, yellow and blue. “For example, if a population has a name for red, it also has a name for black and for white; or, if it has a name for green, it also has a name for red,” said researcher Francesca Tria. But if a population has a name for black and white, that doesn’t necessarily mean they have a name for red.
I had been interested in research like this 30 years ago, when I was studying psychology, but also because I had lived in Kenya. Swahili, like most Bantu languages, has only 3 real words for color (more or less, dark – light -red), with the others like “color of leaves, etc.” Anyway, I was intrigued by this very thing, can our language affect our perception, but most experiments didn’t show much difference in ability to distinguish colors, even if you didn’t have words for it. The most promising findings were in distinctions between blue and green. But then it turned out that races from nearer to the Equator had different relative numbers of green (middle wavelength) and blue (short wavelength) retina cones! (Presumably an adaptation to the more intense light.) So I gave up on the idea. This new research is interesting… but I’m skeptical. I’ll try to find the original….
One thing that seems self-evident is that experience and training affect our perceptions. A chess grandmaster sees a chess board in a very different way than does a novice; a trained musician hears details in a piece of music that a casual listener would miss completely. I wonder how much of this is at play here. Still, it’s interesting that in the video the Himba guy finds it really difficult to pick out which item is a different color when to me it’s glaringly obvious — and it’s not because I’m a trained color specialist.