What’s a color wheel? It’s the light spectrum, spun in a circle, closing back in on itself.

Turn off the light so no cones get stimulated, and you experience black.

Stimulate all the cones at once, and you experience white. Stimulate the blue and green cones only, and you experience cyan. Light at different wavelengths reflects into your eyes and your cones respond to the different wavelengths. Imagine that you’re looking at a computer screen. I created a simple shorthand to exemplify the concept, with cone color referenced as (B, R, G) and -/+ to signify if the cone gets stimulated or not. When you look at an object, the combination of color sensitive cones that are stimulated creates the message that our brain interprets as color. Now let’s look at how the cones in our eyes send signals to our brain, that interprets those inputs as color. Cultural words for color based on arbitrary wavelength ranges Rods, cones, and color perception As different wavelengths stimulate our color-sensitive cones in different proportions, our brain interprets those signals as color.įigure 3. It’s all in the brain.įigure 2 shows where the red, green and blue sensitive cones interpret different wavelengths as color. They respond to wavelengths that our brain interprets as red. But don’t get confused by this, as the irony is the red cones have nothing to do with the color red. They are short-wavelength (blue cells), middle-wavelength (green cells), and long-wavelength (red cells).įor simplicity, I’ll refer to the different cones by their color name, rather than wavelength sensitivity. The rod cells interpret light and darkness (black and white), while the cone cells interpret three different wavelengths which our brain interprets as color. When light enters our eyes, photosensitive cells called cones and rods interpret the light and send signals to our brain. When we look at something, what we see is the light that bounces off of it, and into our eyes. How does light gets converted to colors? When visible light hits something, some of the light gets absorbed, but some of it reflects off. Infrared is just beyond red, and ultraviolet is just below purple. Figure 2 puts this into perspective by showing you the part that humans can see from 400-700 nanometers, which is what we call visible light. The visible light spectrum that we see is part of a continuum of electromagnetic energy. Visible light breaks into different wavelengths as it bends in a glass prism

Color wheel emotional spectrum