Are We Seeing the Same Colors?

12-05-26

These are some colors we see:

Red
Blue
Green

Obivously, for everyone of us, the first one is red, the second one is blue, and the third one is green…right? Right? When I was a child, one fine day I had a weird thought: what if we actually are not seeing the same colors? What if for a group of people, let’s call them the Anders (German for “the different”), the boxes look like this:

Red
Blue
Green

Again, the first box is red for the Anders too, but the red they see doesn’t look like the red we see. It looks like what green looks to others!

I remember this occured to me when I was in like sixth grade, it was 2016. I felt like I had discovered a very amazing concept! I wasn’t willing to share it so early and wanted to do some more research before revealing my new discovery (😅) to the world. But before I could do that, I came across this video from Vsauce titled Is Your Red The Same as My Red?. I was both happy and sad. Happy because something I had originally thought of was not completely off track, sad because it wasn’t really something that I had uniquely found.

Well, what do you think? Are we seeing the same colors?