It all started with an argument over a blanket.
“I am a visual neuroscientist and my wife, Dr. Marissé Masis-Solano, is an ophthalmologist,” says Dr. Patrick Mineault, designer of the viral web app. I am my blue“We argue about a blanket we have at home. I think it is unmistakably green and she thinks it is unmistakably blue.”
Mineault, also a programmer, was playing around with new AI-assisted coding tools, so he designed a simple color discrimination test.
If you navigate to ismy.blue, you’ll see the screen display a color and be asked to select whether you think it’s green or blue. The shades become more similar until the site tells you where on the spectrum you perceive green and blue compared to other people who have taken the test.
“I added this feature, which shows the distribution, and that really got people excited,” Mineault says. “‘Do we see the same colours?’ is a question that philosophers and scientists – really, everyone – have asked for thousands of years. People’s perceptions are ineffable, and it’s interesting to think that we have different points of view.”
Apparently my blue-green boundary is “bluer” than 78% of others, meaning my green is blue to most people. How can that be true?
According to Julie Harris, a psychology professor at the University of St Andrews who studies human visual processing, our brains are programmed to distinguish colours through retinal cells called cones. But how do we do more complex things, like naming them or recognising them from memory?
“Higher-level processing in terms of our ability to do things like name colors is much less clear,” Harris says, and may involve both cognition and prior experience.
Science can be complicated, but ismy.blue’s intuitive interface and visualized results were instantly engaging, generating more than 1.5 million views since its launch in early August.
“I’m not really surprised that it’s resonated, because people want to understand how others see the world,” Mineault says.
There is clearly a widespread fascination with perception and subjectivity. Many of us remember how The Dress went viral in 2015 because to some it looked white and gold and to others blue and black.
Most differences in colour perception are physiological, such as colour blindness, which affects one in ten men and one in one hundred women. However, others may be related to cultural or linguistic aspects.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on linguistic relativity, popularized in the film Arrival, suggests that language shapes the way we think about and even perceive the world. In the 1930s, Benjamin Lee Whorf argued that the world consisted of “a kaleidoscopic flow of impressions organized… largely by the linguistic systems of our minds,” pointing, for example, to the multiple words the Inuit use for “snow” as an example of differences in cultural perceptions.
Although this theory remains the subject of intense debate in linguistics, psychology and philosophy, language does influence how we communicate ideas. For example, in ancient Greek there is no word for “blue,” which is why Homer described stormy seas as “dark as wine” in The Odyssey. In contrast, Russian has separate words for light blue and dark blue. Recent research suggests that a larger vocabulary may only be beneficial for remembering colors, not for perceiving them.
Before you argue online about whether a certain hue is aqua or cyan, it’s important to note that ismy.blue’s results have limitations. The slightest variation in viewing conditions influences color perception, which is why vision researchers take such care when designing experiments. Factors such as the model of your phone or computer, its age, screen settings, ambient light sources, time of day, and even which color is presented first in the test will all influence your answers.
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Night modes, in particular, increase the redness of a device’s screen, making blue hues appear greener. To see if this influenced the test results, Mineault separated the data into two groups: before or after 6 p.m. The effect was immediately apparent, especially on devices with built-in night modes.
What’s the point of ismy.blue if it’s so variable? After all, it’s just entertainment. But if you want results with a little more equivalence, Mineault suggests doing the exercise with other people on the same device, so that “everyone is in the same lighting and in the same place.”
Although Mineault has no plans to publish the results, ismy.blue is a great example of citizen participation in science. For example, since 2010, tens of thousands of people have played the online puzzle game Fold itwhich helped scientists at the University of Washington solve notoriously difficult protein folding problems. The Sea Hero Quest mobile app, which aimed to learn more about navigation in people with dementia, had more than 4 million players before the experiment ended in 2017.
Historically, science is insular, focusing almost exclusively on the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). Opening up research to the public allows scientists to better understand the astonishing diversity of human experience. “Most vision scientists have always said that ‘we are all the same,’ (but) there is all kinds of interesting evidence showing that vision can be different in different cultures,” Harris says.
Citizen science also works wonders for the relationship between an often rigid academic community and the general public.
“It’s a lot of work to communicate something to someone outside of your subspecialty, but I think that’s where the innovation happens,” Mineault says.
But one question remains: what color is the blanket?
“We’ve done the test several times,” Mineault says. “As soon as there’s a little bit of green there, I call it green”; his wife sees blue.
The solution? Maybe just buy a new one.