This might sound a bit weird. I had this thought about colours. Does everyone in this world see colours the same way? Is red colour perceived by you and me in the same way? To be fair we will have to rule out the colour blind individuals from our study, as we already know their perception of colour is quite different from those who are not colour blind, even though we cannot experience it.
We learn about colours at an early childhood. Children are taught to differentiate colours at an early age. They are shown a leaf and told that colour is Green, shown a Red Apple and told that is Red. We learn that without thinking. So we all know leaves are Green and Apples are Red. But we don't know whether other people see it the same way we see it. Later you learn to mix colours and create new ones. But how do we define a colour? How do we define Green and Red? You can do it with colour codes when you are on a computer. But how do we define a colour to someone else using words? To define a colour we will have to show that colour to someone. But we cannot go into somebody else's head and see how they see that colour.
A lecture given by Dr. Lindsay Marshall of Newcastle University shed some light on this dilemma. He said language has influence on how we perceive colours and showed us a study done an African tribe. This tribe named the Himba tribe, sees colours differently than most of us. The reason behind this is that they have a different naming pattern for colours and their shades. Here is the video that shows this. http://www.boreme.com/posting.php?id=30670
We can never know for sure, but the study on Himba tribe shows there can be difference in the way people see colours.
Here is a video from VSauce on YouTube.
Is Your Red The Same as My Red?
