Unveiling the Power of Color 2
What you are really seeing
Photo by Nieuw: Wikipedia/commons/e/e4/Chocoladetruffels_Lindt.JPG
Brown is said to be the most delicious color, because it reminds us of chocolate, cocoa, cinnamon, coffee, cloves, nuts, crusty bread, etc. The claim is that ʺaroma-rich shades of brownʺ create irresistible settings. This researcher is basing his claims on the assumption that color is responsible for the emotional reactions. Is that true, or is there a more obvious explanation?
Chocolate on chocolate chips and a woodworm on a fiberboard. You can find the same shade of brown in both pictures. Is brown delicious or not? Photos under license from shutterstock.com.
Woodworms display a brown like that of semi-sweet chocolate. So do fallen leaves late in autumn, and cow dung. Where is that mouth-watering feeling now? The assumption that the color hues we can measure can be correlated to reliable emotional responses is obviously wrong.
Chocolate looks delicious. Woodworms do not
The easiest and the correct explanation is that the chocolate looks delicious, but the woodworm does not. The things themselves trigger emotions, not the colors they show up in. Your sense of vision sees something, compares it to remembered images, recognizes it, and causes specific feelings linked to the object itself to arise. In this case, if you have stored many instances of melt-in-the-mouth chocolate, you will feel delight. Of course, this remembered image of chocolate tends to be brown, and not ultramarine blue. Brown is obviously not triggering the emotion, but it is still somehow interwoven with the image. This gives rise to our question: if colors do not trigger emotions, what are they there for? Why do we see the world in color?
A rare delight
Purple polar aurora seen from Alaska. Photo Jan Curtis, creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0
The polar lights are truly spectacular displays of color in nature. They allow us to see atoms in the Earth's upper atmosphere that we normally cannot see. Oxygen and nitrogen atoms excited by a high-energy solar wind discharge electrons to a lower state of energy, and we see the discharge as colored stripes in the sky. These auroras are so rare that we hardly ever realize that we see similar discharges every time we open our eyes. The chocolate is brown because it absorbs blue light and emits brown light. We recognize the authenticity of the chocolate because of this energy discharge, which is typical of chocolate. Just as the auroras show discharge processes that are typical of polar lights.
An everyday marvel of nature
Minerals. The different colors show us molecular differences. Color reveals the identity and authenticity of natural objects. Photo under license from shutterstock.com.
The colors we see are an emergent property of their molecular structure. We see matter because it emits energy in the visible spectrum, and we have developed the fascinating ability to see these energy emissions as colors – a profound evolutionary achievement! The gemstones in the picture will not evoke the excitement that auroras do, but the capability to see them and to recognize differences is just as wonderful. The stones differ in their mineral composition, and with a bit of practice we can recognize each one by its colors. People, water, pebbles, nitrogen atoms – we see the energy they emit as they pass through our visual field. We have learned how to translate their energy emissions to highly specific knowledge about them. Isn’t that wonderful?
What about a chocolate brown vinyl floor?
If the colors we see match the shapes we expect – the brown of the chocolate, the shimmering pink of the quartz, the pale green of the jade – we have the simultaneous pleasure of recognizing a familiar object and experiencing the delight we associate with it. But what happens if we fake the appearances? What will we experience if that chocolate brown hue appears on a vinyl floor? Will that brown floor look appetizing, or confusing, or will it somehow alienate us from nature? You now know that the floor will not look appetizing. That’s simply not how color links to emotions. The ability to separate identity from appearance is in fact a relatively new development on the evolutionary time scale. But our sense of vision is passionately interested in the material nature of the world and the colors reflected from object surfaces are its most important source of information. What happens if object and color disagree? This topic is so important that it deserves another blog.
Katrin Trautwein
Tübingen, 2024