Originally posted by Lovecraft
Grizz,
What we see is, in fact, a *very* small part of the electromagnetic spectrum. There is much more to light than what we see and experience as color.
Here is kinda how it works for us humans: The part of the electromagnetic spectrum we actually see with our eyes is called "Visible light" -- which by some crazy twist of cosmic randomness happens to be "visible". Yeah yeah, ok, it's called visible light because it is light we can see, but I like thinking its some crazy cosmic coincidence anyway. But, I digress...
We perceive the varying energy levels (the frequency of the light waves) within the visible light spectrum as color. With red at the lower end and blues and violet at the higher energy end. Below the red we have infra-red light (things like digital cameras, pit vipers and television remote control recievers "see" this light just fine) beyond the violet there is ultra violet light, radio waves, x-rays, gamma-rays and cosmic rays -- we just can't see them. If our eyes could see them, and things worked the way they do now, we would perceive the other bands of light as possibly new and completely different colors altogether, instead of red, orange, yellow, blue, indigo, violet and the shades and hues in-between, we would see oh, I don't know, the color flurple, bingelhop, and gransid :veryconfu ... but, light is light and all those rays in the EM Spectrum are light so with us seeing a very little bity band of that great spectrum, then, indeed, we do only perceive a few of the possible colors "out there".
Honey bees can see into the ultra violet spectrum... I wonder how they perceive the "color" of this light? Maybe to them it looks like what "green" looks like to us?
Just remember, our eyes react to the changes in wavelength of light by ultimately stimulating the visual portion in our brains, which then translates this into a perception of color -- since we are dealing with perception here, who is to say that what looks like red to me doesn't appear, at least in the mind of a secondary observer, as yellow to another?
As far as the blind and color being described as warm or cool... I don't buy that explanation, because reds look warm to us and blues cool because of the heat we feel from real red and yellow objects (sun, fire, hot coals) and the cools we experience from blues (water, ice etc.) -- Just because a blind person associates a perception of color as "warm" or "cool" doesn't mean they are perceiving color in a dream the way a sighted person may -- unless, of course, the blind person, at one time, did, in fact, have sight and experienced "color" first hand.
--Lovecraft
