{"id":20988,"date":"2025-09-30T08:50:39","date_gmt":"2025-09-30T12:50:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/?p=20988"},"modified":"2025-09-30T08:50:39","modified_gmt":"2025-09-30T12:50:39","slug":"your-brain-is-lying-color-doesnt-exist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/your-brain-is-lying-color-doesnt-exist\/20988\/","title":{"rendered":"Your brain is lying to you \u2014 This color doesn\u2019t exist and you literally can\u2019t perceive it"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever wondered if what you see is actually what exists? Since childhood, many people have had this curiosity: Is the color blue I see the same blue you see? Science shows that this doubt is not naive; in fact, the human brain doesn&#8217;t deliver raw reality, but rather an interpreted and edited version so we can act in the world. And this detail changes everything: some things we consider so real, like a color that appears every day in clothes, flowers, and even on our cell phone screens, <strong>simply don&#8217;t exist in nature<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<h2>The color that isn\u2019t really there: How can that be possible?<\/h2>\n<p>Let&#8217;s see, if you pass a beam of white light through a prism, you&#8217;ll see a rainbow unfold before your eyes, and then colors such as red, orange, yellow, green, blue, and violet appear. Simply, a perfect spectacle. However, we need to pause and take a closer look: a popular color, associated with joy and style, is notably absent.<\/p>\n<p>This is where the revelation comes in: <strong>pink (or magenta) doesn&#8217;t exist in the visible spectrum of light<\/strong>. Well, as physicist Dominik John explains, &#8220;pink is something your brain invents when it encounters a gap between red and blue wavelengths.&#8221; In other words, when your eyes receive strong red and blue light waves but little green, the brain fills the gap by creating pink.<\/p>\n<h2>Are we seeing reality, or just what our brain wants us to?<\/h2>\n<p>So much so that this story leads us to an essential distinction between two concepts: sensation and perception.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Sensation<\/strong> is a raw physiological response of sensory receptors.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Perception <\/strong>is a conscious interpretation created by the brain, which organizes, filters, and gives meaning to what we feel.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<blockquote><p>&#8220;What we perceive is not the external world around us, but our brain&#8217;s interpretation of it,&#8221; said psychologist Pang.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>The same goes for optical illusions, like the famous chessboard in which two identical squares appear different because of the shadow of a cylinder. The perception may be &#8220;wrong,&#8221; but it&#8217;s more useful than accurate, because the brain shows us objects, contexts, and relationships, not just colored pixels. And it&#8217;s not just the color pink that we can&#8217;t see; in fact, there&#8217;s an interesting list of other things we can&#8217;t see:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Humans see only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum.<\/li>\n<li>X-rays, microwaves, and radio waves are &#8220;light,&#8221; but invisible to our eyes.<\/li>\n<li>Birds detect ultraviolet patterns; sharks perceive electric fields; bees read the polarization of light.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If other species live in radically different perceptual realities, we can affirm: our vision of the world is only a slice of what actually exists. But what we can really do is create colors; it&#8217;s no wonder <a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/worlds-coolest-color-created-first\/4909\/\">the world&#8217;s coolest color was created for the first time.<\/a><\/p>\n<h2>If pink lives only in our minds, does that make it less real?<\/h2>\n<p>It&#8217;s also worth remembering that pink also raises a philosophical question about <strong>qualia<\/strong>, the subjective aspects of experience. Philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974) summarized this idea in the question: &#8220;What is it like to be a bat?&#8221; Only the bat knows, because only it experiences its unique perception. Similarly, pink is real within our minds, but it doesn&#8217;t exist in the physical world as a wavelength. Which reality is true? Both. One is objective, made of particles and frequencies; the other is subjective, made of consciousness and experience.<\/p>\n<p>We may never be able to fully translate internal experience into the terms of physical science. Still, it&#8217;s undeniable that these experiences exist, even if they are inventions of the brain. Of course, this doesn&#8217;t diminish the experience&#8217;s beauty. After all, knowing that pink is a brain invention shows us <strong>how creative and limited our perception is<\/strong> at the same time. But this changes with science; it&#8217;s no wonder<a href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/nasa-spherex-finds-102-new-colors\/14634\/\"> NASA discovered 102 new colors.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Have you ever wondered if what you see is actually what exists? Since childhood, many people have had this curiosity: &#8230; <\/p>\n<p class=\"read-more-container\"><a title=\"Your brain is lying to you \u2014 This color doesn\u2019t exist and you literally can\u2019t perceive it\" class=\"read-more button\" href=\"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/your-brain-is-lying-color-doesnt-exist\/20988\/#more-20988\" aria-label=\"Read more about Your brain is lying to you \u2014 This color doesn\u2019t exist and you literally can\u2019t perceive it\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":20989,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology","resize-featured-image"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20988"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20988\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20989"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ecoticias.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}