Finding a new colour is the sort of thing you might wonder about if you took ayahuasca (we imagine) but scientists say they have actually managed to do it.
You won’t be able to see it just on a walk into town, however.
It only became visible after special lasers were shined into their eyes, specially designed to only activate certain cone cells which determine our colour vision.
The resulting hue was similar to green or turquoise, but so vibrant it could not otherwise be experienced.
We haven’t seen it either, so we’ll have to take their word for it: the above colour block is what they said it came closest to, but it still wasn’t that.
Describing the mind-bending discovery in the journal Science Advances on Friday, they said it was ‘blue-green of unprecedented saturation’, which was ‘beyond the natural human gamut’ and had been formally measured with colour matching by the human researchers.
They said it’s not the only ‘new colour’ which could exist, either, as theoretically colours that are even more unlike what we know could be seen using the method. Woah.
What is the name of this ‘new colour’ and why?
The researchers clearly had poetic minds, as they thought carefully about what to name their laser machine and the resulting ‘novel’ colour.
They used a machine called ‘Oz Vision System’ to stimulate the cone cells, a reference to the magical Emerald City visited by Dorothy in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz.
In this city, far away from the dusty plains of Kansas where she started the story, everything is green and sparkling.
Similarly, looking at ‘Oz’ colours – compared to the boring old green you see when you look at trees or the sea on a sunny day – is like being in a magical new world of possibility.
Turning to the ‘new colour’ itself, it has been named ‘Olo’.
This also has a hidden meaning, as researchers named it after the binary code 010.
Eyes have three types of cone cells: S, L, and M, which are each sensitive to different colour wavelengths blue, red, and green.
To make the five subjects see the new colour, Oz only stimulated the cells responsive to green.
So Olo, or 010, means two types of the three cone cells were not stimulated, but only one was.
Is it really a new colour?
Not everyone thinks so, and even the researchers themselves from UC Berkeley and the University of Washington say they only achieved ‘a partial expansion of colorspace’.
Although ‘Olo’ itself has grabbed the headlines, they think the process they used to create its appearance is actually the more interesting aspect.
This is because it could be used to create many other colour perceptions too, potentially even finding a truly new colour.
The current study is just ‘proof of principle’ and ‘theoretically, novel colors are possible through bypassing the constraints set by the cone spectral sensitivities and activating M cone cells exclusively’.
What could this mean for the future?
As well as potentially allowing for more ‘novel’ colours to be perceived, researchers believe it could have practical issues too.
They say it could help us understand more about how eyes take in colour, and the machine they used ‘will enable diverse new experiments’.
Ultimately, they want to be able to control the photoreceptors in the retina (the cells that sense liught and colour).
It could even help us understand colour blindness better and try to prompt ‘full trichromatic color vision in a red-green colorblind person’.
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