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There are a bunch of "weird" colors that we don't see naturally. Wikipedia has a page on them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color

Some can be created at home without any special equipment. For example, you can't mix red and green and create a "redgreen," but if you cross your eyes and have one eye see red and the other see green, you might see a new color you haven't seen before.

I also see weird colors in displays with a high frame rate that cycle between colors quickly. And at one point, I had a laser shot in my eye, which destroyed part of my vision. Initially, in that spot, I saw a weird iridescent silver-greenish color I had never seen before. Although that was pretty cool, I wouldn't recommend repeating this involuntary experiment just to see that color.




I tried really hard to see the "redgreen", but it just felt like an occlusion bug when two 3d objects have the exact same z layer and fight to render on top of the other.


Stygian blue is my favorite. What an insane color.


I see it but it doesn't really feel like a new color? It just looks like blue on top of black. Maybe a new intensity, if I was being super generous, but not a new color.


I think it qualifies as a new color. If we can't differentiate colors on saturation, hue or intensity then I don't know how there are supposed to be multiple colors at all. It seems like fair play by the scientists, if a bit shrewd in defining "new".


> If we can't differentiate colors on saturation, hue or intensity

I don't think I follow. We can obviously distinguish all of these and do it on a daily basis... what do you mean we can't?


We haven't even been able to agree on blue and green historically.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue%E2%80%93green_distinction...


To me, Stygian blue doesn't look like blue on top of black. It looks like black that glows blue, which doesn't make sense in the real world. I think it is fairly described as a new color—I would be quite unsettled if I encountered it in real life.

Of course, colors are a hallucination our brain produces, so perhaps different brains deal differently with an unusual experience like Stygian blue.


> It looks like black that glows blue

I could maybe buy that as a description, but...

> I think it is fairly described as a new color—I would be quite unsettled if I encountered it in real life.

I don't feel this follows. There are a lot of things that would unsettle me if I saw them, like if someone gave off a visible aura. Heck, I even found a "black flame" a bit unsettling, and I saw a literal video of it on YouTube (look it up if you don't know what I'm referring to). I'd feel similarly if I saw a transparent human too. The feeling you get - or the fact that you haven't seen something visually similar before - doesn't really imply it's a new color, I think!


I get more of a black in the middle and blue glow around the edges. Also not sure it qualifies as a new color. To me, it's more like an interesting illusion that combines black and blue.


Each person's qualia can be different from the next. It's definitely a new color, regardless, in that you won't encounter it in nature.


wait, crossing eyes to see color is a totally different thing than having pointing the receptor right ? The one in OP's article is a new weird signal that got sent to the brain, the other is the brain itself mixing 2 known signals.




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