Why we can’t recall all colours
Our brain remembers any hue as basic, thus making us err
Do you know that although we can see millions of colours, webut can remember only the few basic ones?
When we see a colour, our brain stores it as a basic, eneral hue. Sowhen we try to remember a precise colour, we err on the side of the basic shades the brain prefers, a new study reveals.
For example, there’s azure, there’s navy, there’s cobalt and
ultramarine. The human brain is sensitive to the differences betweenthese hues – we can tell them apart.
But when storing them in memory, people label all of these various colours as “blue”, the researchers from Johns Hopkins University found.
The same thing goes for shades of green, pink, purple, etc.
“We can differentiate millions of colours, but to store this
information, our brain has a trick. We tag the colour with a coarse label. That then makes our memories more biased, but still pretty useful,” said lead researcher Jonathan lombaum.
Flombaum demonstrated that what seems like a difference in the memorability of certain colours is actually the result of the brain’s tendency to categorise colours.
People remember colours more accurately, they found, when the colours are good examples of their respective categories.
“Trying to pick out a colour for touch-ups, I would end up making a mistake. This is because I would mis-remember my wall as more prototypically blue. It could be a green, but I remember it as blue,”
Flombaum said.IANS We can differentiate millions of colours, but to store this
information, our brain has a trick. We tag the colour with a coarse label. That then makes our memories more biased, but still pretty useful When attempting to match hues, subjects tended to err on the side of the basic colours, but the bias toward the archetypes amplified considerably when subjects had to remember the hue.
karuppurojakkal 