I Can’t Sleep - Color | Gentle Bedtime Reading for Sleep

Episode Date: September 15, 2020

Ease into sleep with this calm bedtime reading on color, a peaceful way to help with insomnia and restless nights. Benjamin’s soothing voice explores the science and perception of color, its role in art and culture, and the ways humans and animals experience the spectrum of light. His gentle cadence turns vivid details into soft, fact-filled narration that relaxes the mind. This is not whispering or hypnosis—just calm storytelling and education designed to reduce stress, ease anxiety, and bring deep rest. Press play, close your eyes, and let the world of color guide you into dreams. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the Discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on Color, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia – Color. Happy sleeping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch. I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause.

With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast, where I read random articles from across the web to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled Color. Color is the characteristic of visual perception described through color categories with names such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple. This perception of color derives from the stimulation of photoreceptor cells, in particular cone cells in the human eye and other vertebrate eyes,

by electromagnetic radiation and the visible spectrum in the case of humans. Color categories and physical specifications of color are associated with objects through the wavelengths of the light that is reflected from them and their intensities. This reflection is governed by the object's physical properties such as light absorption, emission spectra, etc. By defining a color space, colors can be identified numerically by coordinates, which in 1931 were also named in Global Global Global. with internationally agreed color names like mentioned above, red, orange, etc. by the International Commission on Illumination. The RGB Color Space, for instance, is a color space corresponding to human trachromacy and to the three cone-level types that respond to the three bands of light.

Long wavelengths, peaking near 564 to 580 nanometers, red, medium wavelength, peaking near 534 to 545 nanometers, green, and short wavelength light, near 420 to 440 nanometers, blue. There may also be more than three-color dimensions in other color spaces, such as in the CMIK color model, wherein one of the dimensions relates to a colorfulness. The photoreceptivity of the eyes of other species, varies considerably from that of humans and so results in correspondingly different

color perceptions that cannot readily be compared to one another. Honeybees and bumblebees have trichromatic color vision sensitive to ultraviolet but insensitive to red. Papilio butterflies possess six types of photoreceptors and may have panachromatic vision. The most complex color vision system and the animal kingdom has been found in stone metapods, such as the mantis shrimp, with up to 12 spectral receptor types sought to work as multiple dichromatic units. The science of color is sometimes called chromatics, colorometry, or simply color science. It includes the study of the perception of color by the human eye and brain,

the origin of color and materials, color theory and art, and the physics of electromagnetic radiation in the visible range, what is commonly referred to simply as light. Electromagnetic radiation is characterized by its wavelengths or frequency and its intensity. When the wavelength is within the visible spectrum, the range of wavelengths humans can perceive, approximately from 390 nanometers to 700 nanometers. It is known as visible light.

Most light sources emit light at many different wavelengths. A source's spectrum is a distribution giving its intensity at each wavelength. Although the spectrum of light arriving at the eye from a given direction determines the color sensation in that direction, there are many more possible spectral combinations than color sensation. In fact, one may formally define a color as a class of spectra that give rise to the same color sensation, although such classes would vary widely among different species and to a lesser extent among individuals within the same species. In each such class, the members are called metemers of the color in question.

This effect can be visualized by comparing the light sources spectral power to see, distributions and the resulting colors. Spectral colors The familiar colors of the rainbow in the spectrum named using the Latin word for appearance or apparition by Isaac Newton in 1671 include all those colors that can be produced by visible light of a single wavelength only, the pure spectral or monochromatic colors. The table at right shows approximate frequencies in terrahertz and wavelengths and nanometers

for various pure spectral colors. The wavelengths listed are as measured in air or vacuum. The color table should not be interpreted as a definitive list. The pure spectral colors form a continuous spectrum. And how it is divided into distinct colors linguistically is a matter of cultural and historical contingency, although people everywhere have been shown to perceive colors in the same way. A common list identifies six main bands, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet.

Newton's conception included a seventh color indigo between blue and violet. It is possible that what Newton referred to as blue is nearer to what today is known as Siam, and that indigo was simply the dark blue of the indigo dye that was being imported at the time. the intensity of a spectral color relative to the context in which it is viewed may alter its perception considerably. For example, a low-intensity orange-yellow is brown, and a low-intensity yellow-green is olive-green. Color of objects The color of an object depends on both the physics of the object in its environment and the characteristics of the perceiving eye and brain.

Physically, objects can be said to have the color of the light leaving their services, which normally depends on the spectrum of the incident illumination and the reflectance properties of the surface, as well as potentially on the angles of illumination and viewing. Some objects not only reflect light, but also transmit light or emit light themselves, which also contributes to the color. A viewer's perception of the object's color depends not only on the spectrum of the light leaving its surface, but also on a host of contextual cues, so that color differences between

objects can be discerned mostly independent of the lighting spectrum, viewing angle, etc. This effect is known as color constancy. Some generalizations of the physics can be drawn, neglecting perceptual effects for now. Light arriving at an opaque surface is either reflected specularly that is in the manner of a mirror, scattered that is reflected with diffuse scattering, or absorbed, or some combination of these. Opaic objects that do not reflect specularly, which tend to have rough surfaces, have their color determined by which wavelengths of light they scatter strongly, with the light that is not scattered being absorbed.

If objects scatter all wavelengths with roughly equal strength, they appear white. If they absorb all wavelengths, they appear black. Opaic objects that specularly reflect light of different wavelengths with different efficiencies look like mirrors tented with colors determined by those differences. An object that reflects some fraction of impinging light and absorbs the rest may look black but also be faintly reflective. Examples are black objects coated with layers of enamel or lacquer. Objects that transmit light are either translucent,

scattering the transmitted light or transparent, not scattering the transmitted light. If they also absorb or reflect light of various wavelengths, differentially. They appear tinted with a color determined by the nature of the absorption or that reflectance. Objects may emit light that they generate from having excited electrons rather than merely reflecting or transmitting light. The electrons may be excited due to elevated temperature incandescence as a result of chemical reactions chemoluminescence after absorbing light of other frequencies, fluorescence or phosphorescence, or from electrical contacts as in

light-emitting diodes or other light sources. To summarize, the color of an object is a complex result of its surface properties, its transmission properties, and its emission properties, all of which contribute to the mix of wavelengths in the light leaving the surface of the object. The perceived color is then further conditioned by the nature of the ambient illumination and by the color properties of other objects nearby and via other characteristics of the perceiving eye and brain. Perception Development of theories of color vision

Although Aristotle and other ancient scientists had already written on the nature of light and color vision, it was not until Newton that light was identified as the source of the color sensation. In 1810, Goethe published his comprehensive theory of colors, in which he as scribed physiological effects to color that are now understood as psychological. In 1801, Thomas Young proposed his trichromatic theory, based on the observation that any color could be matched with a combination of three lights.

His theory was later refined by James Clerk Maxwell and Herman Fohn Helmoltz. As Helmoltz puts it, The principles of Newton's Law of Mixure were experimentally confirmed by Maxwell in 1856. Young's theory of color sensations, like so much else that this marvelous investor achieved in advance of his time,

remained unnoticed until Maxwell directed attention to it. At the same time as Helmoltz, Avald-Haring developed the opponent, process theory of color, noting that color blindness and after images typically come in opponent pairs, red green, blue orange, yellow, violet, and black white. Ultimately, these two theories were synthesized in 1957 by Hervich and Jameson, who showed that retinal processing corresponds to the trichromatic theory, while processing at the level of lateral geniculocle nucleus corresponds to the opponent theory.

In 1931, an international group of experts known as the Commission Internacional de la Collage CIE developed a mathematical color model, which mapped out the space of observable colors and assigned a set of three numbers to each. Color in the eye The ability of the human eye to distinguish colors is based upon the varying sensitivity of different cells than the retina to light of different wavelengths. Humans are trichromatic. The retina contains three types of color receptor cells or cones.

One type relatively distinct from the other two is most responsive to light that is perceived as blue or blue violet, with wavelengths around 450 nanometers. Cones of this type are sometimes called short wavelength cones or S-cones, or misleadingly blue cones. The other two types are closely related genetically and chemically. Middle wavelength cones, M-cones, or green cones are most sensitive to light perceived as green, with wavelengths around 540 nanometers, while the long wavelength cones, L-cones, and red cones,

are most sensitive to light that is perceived as greenish-yellow with wavelengths around 570 nanometers. Light, no matter how complex, its composition of wavelengths, is reduced to three color components by the eye. Each cone type adheres to the principle of univariance, which is that each cone's output is determined by the amount of light that falls on it over all wavelengths. For each location in the visual field, the three types of cones yield three signals, based on the extent to which each is stimulating. These amounts of stimulation are sometimes called tristimulus values. The response curve as a function of wavelength varies for each type of cone. Because the curves overlap, some tri-stimulus values do not occur for any incoming light combination. For example, it is not possible to stimulate only the mid-wave length, so-called green cones.

the other cones will inevitably be stimulated to some degree at the same time. The set of all possible tristimulus values determines the human color space. It has been estimated that humans can distinguish roughly 10 million different colors. The other type of light-sensitive cell in the eye, the rod, has a different response curve. In normal situations, when light is bright enough to strongly stimulate the cones, rods, play virtually no role in vision at all. On the other hand, in dim light, the cones are under-stimulated, leaving only the signal from the rods, resulting in a colorless space.

Furthermore, the rods are barely sensitive to light in the red range. In certain conditions of intermediate illumination, the rod response and a weak cone response can together result in color discriminations, not accounted for by cone responses alone. These effects combined are summarized also in the cruet of curve. That describes the change of color perception and pleasingness of light as function of temperature and intensity. Color in the brain. While the mechanisms of color vision at the level of the retina are well described in terms of tristimulus values,

color processing after that point is organized differently. A dominant theory of color vision proposes that color information is transmitted out of the eye by three opponent processes or opponent channels, each constructed from the raw output of the cones, a red-green channel, a blue-yellow channel, and a black-white luminance channel. This theory has been supported by neurobiology and, and accounts for the structure of our subjective color experience. Specifically, it explains why humans cannot perceive a reddish green or yellowish blue, and it predicts the color wheel.

It is a collection of colors for which at least one of the two-colored channels measures a value at one of its extremes, the exact nature of color perception beyond the processing already described, and indeed the status of color as a feature of the perceived world or rather as a feature of our perception of the world, a type of qualia, as a matter of complex and continuing philosophical dispute. Non-standard color perception Color deficiency If one or more types of a person's color sensing cones are missing or less responsive than normal to incoming light, A person can distinguish fewer colors and is said to be color deficient or colorblind,

though this latter term can be misleading. Almost all color deficient individuals can distinguish at least some colors. Some kinds of color deficiency are caused by anomalies in the number or nature of cones in the retina. Others like central or cortical achromatopsia are caused by neural anomalies in those parts. parts of the brain, where visual processing takes place. Tetrachromacy. While most humans are trichromatic, having three types of color receptors. Many animals, known as tetachromats, have four types.

These include some species of spiders, most marsupials, birds, reptiles, and many species of fish. Other species are sensitive to only two actions. to only two axes of color or do not perceive color at all. These are called dichromats and monochromats, respectively. A distinction is made between retinol tetrachromacy, having four pigments and cone cells in the retina compared to three in trichromats, and functional tetrachromacy, having the ability to make enhanced color discriminations

based on that retinal difference. as many as half of all women are retinal tetrachromats. The phenomenon arises when an individual receives two slightly different copies of the gene for either the medium or long wavelength cones, which are carried in the X chromosome. To have two different genes, a person must have two X chromosomes, which is why the phenomenon only occurs in women. There is one scholarly report that confirms the existence of a functional tetrochromat. Synesthesia. In certain forms of synesthesia, ideosthesia, perceiving letters and

numbers, graphene color synthesisia, or hearing musical sounds, music color synesthesia, will lead to the unusual additional experiences of seeing colors. Behavioral and functional neuroimaging experiments have demonstrated that these color experiences lead to changes in behavioral tasks and lead to increased activation of brain regions involved in color perception, thus demonstrating their reality and similarity to real color percepts, albeit evoked through a non-standard route. After images. After exposure to strong light in their sensitivity range, photoreceptors of a given type become desensitized. For a few seconds after the light ceases, they will continue to signal

less strongly than they otherwise would. Colors observed during that period will appear to lack the color component detected by the desensitized photoreceptors. This effect is responsible for the phenomenon of after images, in which the eye may continue to see a bright figure after looking away from it, but in a complementary color. After image effects have also been utilized by artists, including Vincent Van Gogh. Color Constancy When an artist uses a limited color palette, the eye tends to compensate by seeing any gray or neutral color as a color which is missing from the color wheel.

For example, in a limited palette consisting of red, yellow, black, and wide, a mixture of of yellow and black will appear as a variety of green, a mixture of red and black will appear as a variety of purple, and a pure gray will appear bluish. The trichromatic theory is strictly true when the visual system is in a fixed state of adaptation. In reality, the visual system is constantly adapting to changes in the environment and compares the various colors in a scene to reduce the effects of the illumination. If a scene is illuminated with one light and then with another, as long as the difference between the light sources stays within a reasonable range,

the colors in the scene appear relatively constant to us. This was studied by Edwin Land in the 1970s and led to his retinix theory of color constancy. Both phenomena are readily explained and mathematically modeled with modern theories of chromatic adaptation and color appearance. There's no need to dismiss the trichromatic theory of vision, but rather it can be enhanced with an understanding of how the visual system adapts to changes in the viewing environment. Color naming.

Colors vary in several different ways, including hue, shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet. saturation, brightness, and gloss. Some color words are derived from the name of an object of that color, such as orange or salmon, while others are abstract like red. In the 1969 study, basic color terms, their universality and evolution. Brent Berlin and Paul Kay describe a pattern in naming basic colors,

like red but not red orange or dark red. or blood red, which are shades of red. All languages that have two basic color names distinguish dark, cool colors from bright, warm colors. The next colors to be distinguished are usually red and then yellow or green. All languages with six basic colors include black, white, red, green, blue, and yellow. The pattern holds up to a set of 12. black, gray, white, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, brown, and azure. Distinct from blue in Russian and Italian, but not English.

In culture. Colors, their meanings, and associations can play major role in works of art, including literature. Associations Individual colors have a variety of cultural associations. such as national colors, in general described in individual color articles and color symbolism. The field of color psychology attempts to identify the effects of color on human emotion and activity. Chromotherapy is a form of alternative medicine attributed to various Eastern traditions. Colors have different associations in different countries and cultures.

Different colors have been demonstrated to have effects on cognition. For example, researchers at the University of Linz in Austria demonstrated that the color red significantly decreased cognitive functioning in men. Spectral colors and color reproduction. Most light sources are mixtures of various wavelengths of light. Many such sources can still effectively produce a spectral color as the eye cannot distinguish them from single wavelength sources. For example, most computer displays reproduce the spectral color orange as a combination of red and green light. It appears orange because the red and green are mixed in the right proportions to allow the eyes cones to respond the way they do to the spectral orange color.

A useful concept in understanding the perceived color of a non-monochromatic light source is the dominant wavelength, which identifies the single wavelength of light that produces a sensation most similar to the light source. Dominant wavelength is roughly akin to hue. There are many color perceptions that by definition cannot be pure spectral colors due to desaturation or because they are purples, mixtures of red and violet light, from opposite ends of the spectrum. Some examples of necessarily non-spectral colors are the achromatic colors, black, gray, and white,

and colors such as pink, tan, and magenta. Two different light spectra that have the same effect on the three color receptors in the human eye will be perceived as the same color. They are metamers of that color. This is exemplified by the white light emitted by fluorescent lamps, which typically has a spectrum of a few narrow bands, while daylight has a continuous spectrum. The human eye cannot tell the difference between such light spectra

just by looking into the light source, although reflected colors from objects can look different. This is often exploited, for example, to make fruit or tomatoes look more intensely red. Similarly, most human color perceptions can be generated by a mixture of three colors called primaries. This is used to reproduce color scenes in photography, printing, television, and other media. There are a number of methods or color spaces for specifying a color in terms of three particular primary colors. Each method has its advantages and disadvantages

depending on the particular application. No mixture of colors, however, can produce a response truly identical to that of a spectral color, although one can get close, especially for the longer wavelengths where the C-I-E-1931 color space chromaticity diagram has a nearly straight edge. For example, mixing green light and blue light produces cyan light that is slightly desaturated because response of the red color receptor would be greater to the green and blue light in the mixture than it would be to a pure cyan light at 485 nanometers that has the same intensity as the mixture of blue and green. Because of this and because the primaries in color printing systems

generally are not pure themselves, the colors reproduced are never perfectly saturated spectral colors, and so spectral colors cannot be matched exactly. However, natural scenes rarely contain fully saturated colors. Thus, such scenes can, usually be approximated well by these systems. The range of colors that can be reproduced with a given color reproduction system is called the gamut. The C-I-E chromaticity diagram can be used to describe the gamut.

Another problem with color reproduction systems is connected with the acquisition devices, like cameras or scanners. The characteristics of the color sensors and the devices are often very far from the characteristics of the receptors in the human eye. In effect, acquisition of colors can be relatively poor if they have special, often very jagged spectra, caused, for example, by unusual lighting of the photograph scene. A color reproduction system tuned to a human with normal color vision may give very inaccurate results for other observers. The different color response of different devices can be problematic if not properly managed. For color information stored and transferred in

digital form, color management techniques such as those based on ICC profiles can help to avoid distortions of the reproduced colors. Color management does not circumvent the gamut limitations of particular output devices, but can assist in finding good mapping of input colors into the gamut that can be reproduced.