Why is it so difficult to remember the exact colors?

• April 24, 2024

You are going to buy a new sofa and struggle to remember the exact tone of the living room wall ... why is it so difficult?

Now, new research explains why people often have trouble remembering a particular color tone correctly.

Scientists at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore point out that people can distinguish between the millions of colors they see in front of them, but they have real difficulties if they are asked to remember specific tones. This is because "color memory" is limited to a few, "the best", which remember only the basic colors.

For example, the brain can tell the difference between shades of blue - like navy blue, cobalt and overseas - but we label them all blue. The same is true for the nuances of all colors, the researchers said.

"We can differentiate millions of colors, but to store this information our brain has a trick, we label the color with a thick label, which then makes our memories more biased, something that is nevertheless quite useful," he said in a statement. press release study leader Jonathan Flombaum, cognitive psychologist at Johns Hopkins University.

He and his colleagues reached their conclusions through a series of experiments with volunteers who saw 180 shades of different colors . The study, recently published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, is the first to show this "bias in the memory" of colors.

Is not that the brain does not have the space to remember the millions of color tones, explained Flombaum. What happens is that instead, it intentionally uses large categories, a language driven by color, he said.

"We have a very precise perception of color in the brain, but when we have to choose that color in the world, there is a voice that says: 'It's blue,' and it affects everything we just thought we saw," he says.

Video Medicine: The surprising pattern behind color names around the world (April 2024).