The colors we see depend on language. Our brain learns to distinguish between colors that have different names.


It has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue

There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages.

Colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language.

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