Your brain straight up can't handle this color

BI

See that color? How would you describe it? Mauve? There's probably a word out there, but your brain isn't going to try to deal with it.

A new study out of Johns Hopkins found that people can't remember specific hues, as their brains convert them into roughly similar generic colors.

Researchers first asked subjects to look at a color wheel and pick out the best examples of blue, pink, green, purple, orange, and yellow. They then showed a colored square for one tenth of a second to a different set of participants. These participants were asked to try to remember it, looking at a blank screen for a little less than a second, and then asked to find the color on the color wheel. When trying to match hues, all subjects tended to err on the side of the generic, "best" colors.

People who were asked to recall that weird color up there pointed instead to something much simpler: pink.

BI

The top chart below shows how often people labeled different hues as blue, pink, green, purple, orange, and yellow. The bottom chart shows how often each hue was labeled as the examplar for each color term. Your brain can't deal with anything in the intermediate zones.

releases.jhu.edu