Do we all see the same colours?

Asked by: Jake Bogdan, Switzerland

A minority of people are ‘colour blind’, in that they see colours as duller than usual and have difficulty distinguishing certain colours.

These problems aside, whether your experience of red is the same as mine is a tricky philosophical question because we can never truly know each other’s subjective experience. What’s for sure is that the same object can be perceived as being a different colour by different people, depending on the assumptions their brains make about the background lighting.

Just look at the ferocious internet argument in 2015 over whether a striped dress – pictured on Tumblr – was white and gold or blue and black (check out ‘the dress’ to read more).

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