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“Colors are the mother tongue of the unconscious”

… once wrote the psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung. This is because humans orient themselves unusually strongly to visual signals and learn through visual messages. Scientists therefore speak of a colorful vocabulary that humans have developed over thousands of years and which today serves as a quick orientation aid in everyday life. Red, for example, is generally associated with danger and warning. The brain is literally programmed for the signal effect of this color. If you see red, the subconscious activates the brain areas for attention and you are wide awake.

Link to the full article on the AOK website

Der Beitrag 13 Colors: Their psychological effect erschien zuerst auf Farbpsychologie.

There is “Blue” by Joni Mitchel, several colors by the Beatles – including the famous “White Album”, there is “red” by Taylor Swift and “Channel Orange” by Frank Ocean. The color “Black” stands for the albums of several artists such as Prince, Metallica, Jay-Z and AC/DC. The German band Tocotronic released the so-called “white album” in 2002 and “the red album” in 2015. In short, it is a phenomenon.

Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Thursday in the program “Tonart am Nachmittag” from 3 pm

Radioeins, Berlin station of RBB, studio talk on May 6 from 10 a.m., audio file for re-listening in the archive until June 6, 2021

Der Beitrag The color theory in pop music. erschien zuerst auf Farbpsychologie.

As a young stonemason and stone sculptor, I spent a lot of time restoring church buildings a few decades ago. Every morning I was able to witness the creation of an atmospheric world of light and color in the interior of huge cathedrals, which disappeared again at dusk. It was clear to me that I had to discover the secret of these atmospheric spaces of light and color.

Over the past decades, my path has led me from the creative disciplines of architecture, design and art to the research field of perceptual psychology. To this day, I dedicate my life to color, whether as a professor of visual communication, chairman of the German Color Center or author of numerous publications and radio broadcasts.

We perceive colors with all our senses. Colors not only give our environment its shapes, surfaces and spatiality, they also convey messages and instructions that exert enormous power over our lives. Using our most important color as an example, we take a look at why and how we see colors. Using the color red as an example, they learn about the power that colors exert on our lives, what they mean for our everyday lives, health and well-being, and our culture.

Date and time Lecture: November 23, 7 p.m. as part of the thematic focus “A dream in red”

Venue:

MONREPOS, Archaeological Research Center and Museum for Human Behavioral Evolution Monrepos Castle56567 Neuwied

Link to the organizer’s website

Der Beitrag UNDERSTAND COLOR – The natural and cultural effects of the color red erschien zuerst auf Farbpsychologie.

Spring is beginning, it’s getting warmer, the days are getting longer again. And nature gives us something back that we have missed so much: Colors.

Buether has written a book about the language of color and teaches color design at the Kunsthochschule Halle. The color red has by far the greatest influence on people. You only realize how strong it is when you take the red off a traffic sign, for example. Other test colors: blue and mauve.

PLANETOPIA is a popular knowledge magazine that provides up-to-date, informative and entertaining reports on a wide range of topics such as biology, sport, medicine and technology.

Link to the report on the SAT1 homepage

Der Beitrag Everything beautifully colorful – How important colors are for us! erschien zuerst auf Farbpsychologie.

Color and body feeling

The changes in the state of the environment have an effect on the human nervous system and are reflected in the affections of the body. If the oxygen content of the air drops, breathing speeds up and the pulse increases, movements slow down and the ability to concentrate decreases, which ultimately triggers a feeling of discomfort in the situation via neuronal and hormonal reactions. We experience these adaptations of bodily activities to changing environmental conditions, which also include the appearance of color and light, through our emotional reactions to every perceptual or imaginative situation.

The atmosphere we experience in a room correlates with the emotional attunement of our body to the visual situation. Our bodily functions adapt to the changing color and light conditions in our living space, they correlate with the course of the day and seasons, as well as with the conditions in artificially created room situations. We experience how our space for action begins to shrink in winter as the light seems colder and weaker, which is linked to the appearance of nature, whereas we regain it with the intensely bright, polyphonic, delicate and pure colors of spring. Our physical feeling for the color and light conditions of each situation determines the visual identity of our living space. It is only when this emotional relationship between man and his environment is disturbed that the significance of color and light for our being becomes apparent.

Blindness, defective vision, color vision deficiency, color blindness or light sensitivity describe disorders in the visual relationships between people and their environment, which are accompanied by limitations and changes in the ability to experience and act. Visual perception disorders can be congenital or occur following damage to the visual system. Cerebral achromatopsia, a form of total color blindness following damage to the associative cortex area of the brain, occurs rarely, but here the importance of color for our physical sensation and our experience of space can be worked out particularly clearly. The visual center of the brain processes the information from the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation of the visual field unaffected by the disorder, but only shades of gray can be seen where colors should actually be experienced. Color disappears from the world of perception and imagination when there is no longer a neuronal representation that can give meaning to the spectral information. What remains of the color for the affected person is only the body sensation, which is the reason why he perceives the appearance of his environment as strange and unreal in every situation.

Color and atmosphere

The neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks describes the case of a painter who lost the colorfulness in the representation of his inner and outer space due to brain damage. All of a sudden, he was no longer able to imagine color, his memories and dreams lost their colorfulness and the world seemed colorless and pale to him. (Sacks, Oliver “Eine Anthropologin auf dem Mars”, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, Hamburg
(1998) Sacks speculates that, after his stroke, the painter could identify colors only on the basis of his linguistic memory. His awareness of the painful loss of color in his environment stems from the sudden contradiction between his bodily sensations and the way his environment appears to him. At the onset of the impairment, this sense of loss was very distinct to him, for although it was not visible, it was perceptible in the change in his bodily sensations as he encountered the visible environment. His familiar surroundings suddenly looked dirty and unappetizing to him; everything white seemed moldy to him, and every black surface seemed dusty. People appeared to him as animated gray statues, whereupon he began to avoid them. Human skin no longer appeared“flesh-colored”to him, but rather“rat-colored,” which had a significant impact on his behavior—ranging from a sense of revulsion at the thought of touch to a complete absence of sexual fantasies and desires. Food suddenly seemed disgusting and unnatural, which significantly diminished his desire and enjoyment of eating. Even closing his eyes did not help, as the tomato remained black even in his imagination. He now preferred black and white foods because he could still reconcile them with his memories, and they seemed natural to him. ( ibid. Sacks, p. 25 ) Flowers became indistinguishable to him and could almost only be recognized by their scent and shape. He saw the sky in a pale gray, from which the dirty white clouds could hardly be distinguished. Reds and greens appeared black to him, while yellows and light blues looked whitish. His world seemed lifeless and cast in lead, just as his dreams and memories suffered. He clearly felt that something deeper had been destroyed than his ability to orientate and identify himself, his sense of the identity of his physical states with the appearances of his environment and thus his visual identity. The loss of his emotional states became especially clear to him during particularly emotional events, such as the sunrise, which now seemed to him like a “huge atomic bomb explosion”. (ibid. Sacks, p.33 ) Antonio Damasio reports similar experiences of a color-blind person for whom even fresh snow still appeared dirty. (Damasio, Antonio R. “Descartes Irrtum”, List Verlag Munich, 1995, cf. Central Achromatopsia)

Color and behavior

It is considered certain that color perception offers humans an evolutionary advantage in their habitat. (Purves, Dale and Lotto, R. Beau “Why We See What We Do”, Sinauer Associates, Inc. USA 2003, P.103 ) For example, edible fruits and many prey animals or even sources of danger cannot be recognized by colorblind people. In addition to the survival of the human species, there is also the question of the connection between color vision and experience and behavior. The color-blind painter became a night person, whereby he began to use his improved orientation ability in the dark space of the night, he went to dim places whose appearances were in harmony with his sense of space. These night dreams exist in all sighted people because our color receptors in the retina only become active at a high light intensity, while the rods manage with much lower light intensities. At night, all people are color-blind, which gives night dreams a different identity from that of day dreams. They appear to us in many shades of brightness between black and white and not in the grayscale images experienced by the colorblind painter during the day. Night dreams resemble the mood of black-and-white films and photographs, whereas they appear alien in a decolored color image. This enabled the color-blind painter to find his way back to his visual identity in night dreams alone. He described himself as a night person and began to explore distant new places specifically at night, where he was able to resume his work as a painter. (ibid. Sacks, p.65 ) Alone in the darkness of the night, he felt familiar with the people and things, which is why he was able to behave quite freely there alone or with his acquaintances and friends. A patient with achromatopsia described by Robert Boyle also changed her behavior in this way and only went for walks in the evening hours, stating that this was the only time she felt well.

Color and identity

Edwin Land, who also made a name for himself as the inventor of the Polaroid camera, demonstrated as early as 1957 that color and light are not absolute spatial conditions, as Newton still assumed, but that visual perception is based on the relationships between all parts of the visual field. The color and light conditions of a homogeneous surface change with the transformation of its surroundings, which is also known as simultaneous contrast. Land demonstrated that even with a red and a green color filter and two images of a situation taken from slightly different angles, a realistic-looking color impression can be achieved. The wavelength of the light only correlates with the perceived color under artificially produced standard conditions, as it changes with multicolored appearances due to the surrounding colors. Land’s observations were given a neuronal explanation with the discovery of various visual areas in the brain. There is an area in the brain that responds specifically to the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation of the environment after it has been converted by the retina of the eyes into corresponding impulses that can be decoded by the brain, the cortical field V1, and there are other areas in the associative cortex, the cortical field V4, which are indispensable for the development of color experiences. The intermediate world of spectral information from the visual cortex only enters the consciousness of a sighted person as a result of cerebral achromatopsia. This intermediate realm is illustrated by the color-blind painter’s attempt to arrange a large number of different colored spools of thread according to their brightness. When viewed directly, his arrangement appears incorrect to the sighted person, as the experience of color influences the perception of the brightness of the light. A black-and-white image of his arrangement, however, approximated the viewer’s feeling for the brightness of the light to a large extent. (ibid. Sacks, p.36 )

With the loss of color, the constancy in the colorblind person’s visual space also disappeared, which meant that his surroundings suddenly seemed to transform for him when the lighting conditions changed. All things constantly changed their appearance and were always in new relationships to each other, which gave him the impression of an unstable world. (ibid. Sacks, p.44 ) Color therefore not only increases the density of information in visual space; it also lends this complex network of relationships additional stability. With each new usable color channel, the complexity, stability, and information content of our visual representation of the environment increase. Our ability to identify objects, as well as our sense of orientation, improves with the colorfulness of our environment, a fact that can also be observed in the experiences and behavior of young children. (Gibson, James J.; “The Senses and the Process of Perception” (1966), Hans Huber Publishers, Bern, 1973; and Gibson, James J.; “The Perception of the Visual World” (1950), Beltz Publishers, Weinheim and Basel, 1973) We react more quickly to colorful events, are better able to track movements and recognize shapes, and we taste, smell, hear, and feel color; thus, with the loss of color, a part of our experienced environment ceases to exist. After his injury, the color-blind painter long forwent the experience of art because he could not bear the loss of his access to the realm of humanity’s cultural engagement with color.

The fate of the colorblind painter clearly shows that the colorfulness of the environment is a construction of the human brain, an ability shared with other living beings. The ability of lower animals to adjust their behavior to the light situations of their environment is already derived from a few photochemically sensitive cells, but we can only speak of vision when organisms can compare the light conditions found in the environmental situation with those they have already experienced and adjust their actions accordingly. The identity of our entire living space, including its representational appearance, is linked to the experience of color. Our environment appears to us in its colorfulness, just as it exists in its materiality, in its smell and taste and in its sound. A surface without the familiar color loses its identity and appears artificial and alien to us, a feeling that is foreign to those who are colorblind from birth. These changes in the colorblind painter’s behavior disappeared as he became accustomed to the state of colorblindness, which turned into complete color amnesia as the feeling of alienation subsided. His dreams, ideas and perceptions seemed increasingly real to him. Only then was it as if there had never been any colors in his life. (Sacks, p.69) In the time after the accident, he did not miss the color itself, as it completely eluded his imagination, but he missed the feelings that arise in people when the environment appears in color. Color is an emotional quality that, like other emotional states, determines our being in the environment in its own way.

Color scheme and models

Color and light models always represent a reduction of the complexity of our visual representation of space; they are systems whose statements are only valid within the defined system boundaries. For color and light systems, these can only be laboratory conditions in which the complexity of the visual world is masked in order to make specific relationships visible. As the example of the color-blind painter illustrates, the separation of color perception and the associated meaning on a neuronal level leads to color blindness. This is why it is impossible in practice to generalize the statements made by colour and light systems. A model of the concepts of color and light is not a reflection of reality, but illustrates what is common to the experiences of many. Models are always based on abstractions of concrete experiences to symbolic generalizations, which can become the basis for conceptualization and thus communication. Apart from the conditions of their own construction, they can only make quantitative statements about what qualitative meanings must already be present in the viewer. Without a sense of the manifestations of color and light in our environment, any statement of a color and light system is empty, which prevents blind people from learning anything about the nature of color and light.

The attempt to separate color and light models from our experience and define them as independent systems of knowledge seems absurd, as the example of the German DIN standard shows:“Color is the visual sensation of a part of the visual field that appears structureless to the eye, through which this part can be distinguished solely from an adjacent, equally structureless area seen simultaneously during monocular observation with a stationary eye.” Only a person with monocular vision who is nearly blind—someone who has experienced the world from birth as a diffuse field of brightnesses and hues, and who would also have to be so completely paralyzed that no body or eye movements would be possible—could fulfill these prerequisites. The stationary eye sees nothing, since it is only through the constant movement of the receptors—the so-called nystagmus—that differences in the visual field can be registered. Color and light are not objectively describable quantities, since they derive their meaning only through comparison—by establishing relationships with memories and the entire visible environment. The comparison of all these influencing factors does not result in an unambiguous statement, but rather in a sense of the situation. All scientific descriptive systems for color and light—such as the spectral theory of the refraction, reflection, and absorption of light waves; the theory of color mixing by addition and subtraction; and the theory of a color space spanning the dimensions of hue, luminance, and saturation, allow us to systematize individual aspects of our visual experiences for the purpose of quantitative description in the form of logical models. Schopenhauer already considered it possible that a highly intelligent blind person could independently construct a theory of color based on statements made by others about color. (ibid. Sacks, p.64 ) These quantifying descriptions are powerful because they lend the subjective experiential content of the phenomena of color and light a terminology that places the work with colorants on a uniform, communicable basis. In the color matrix of the computer display or the pigments of the printing ink, the appearance has long been divorced from its existence as a surface. The aesthetic expectations of the appearance of our living space are in a state of upheaval due to the new technical freedoms in the design of our environment. Color and light remain the mediators of a reality in which feeling alone still allows qualitative statements to be made about the relationship between man and his environment. This begins with the purchase of an apple and extends to the design of our living environment.

Color order and meaning

Every color exists within a subjective space of meaning, the experiential content of which stems from memories of past events. The blue sky by the sea, a mother’s blue apron, and the blue eyes of one’s favorite actor coalesce into the feeling that defines the space of meaning associated with the color blue. The “blueness,” “greenness,” “redness,” etc., of things can already be distinguished from one another in this way by every toddler, although the perceived relationships within the appearance of one’s own living environment must always be viewed against the backdrop of the topographical, climatic, cultural, and social conditions of the individual or the community. The qualities of every color and light phenomenon can be described based on our sense of their meanings, just as the intensity and luminosity of a color are always experienced relative to previously encountered manifestations. White, yellow, and orange hues appear brighter to us than black, violet, or brown, so that no linear relationship can be established here between perceived brightness or intensity and the measurable—and therefore scientifically describable—properties. The visual representation of the manifestations of color and light is based on the relationships between one’s own body and its environment. These visual relationships within the environment can be organized to the extent that the connection between cause and effect can be represented and illustrated in models. Order can also be brought to our feelings, whereby we must seek the causes in the meanings of the manifestations of color and light for our physical existence. The environment serves as a memory store for humans, as Gegenfurtner puts it, because the capacities of our brain are limited. ( Gegenfurtner, Karl R., *Brain and Perception*, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2003) When we see, approximately 60% of the human cerebral cortex is active, so the question remains: what of the situations we have already experienced can actually be stored in our memory, and whether only a vanishingly small part of our past is present there—a part that manifests itself anew time and again only in the context of living encounters. How many phenomena seem familiar to us when we see them again or in a different context, and how much of this can we bring to mind in our imagination? We carry many memories of past experiences within us, yet the infinite reservoir of imaginable and perceptible space exists outside of ourselves. The living relationship between our living space and our body is established in every new experience of color and light through the eyes and is represented in our sense of the situation.

Further reading “The development of spatial-visual competence”

Der Beitrag Color and emotion erschien zuerst auf Farbpsychologie.

The first experience of color and light

“Color is different,” says a person born blind after successfully restoring his sight through eye surgery. After opening his eyes, which are now sensitive to stimuli for the first time, he experiences a completely new sensation of the way he exists in the environment, in which a completely new source of meaningful experiences suddenly opens up alongside the sensory media (lat. medium – mediator) with which he is already familiar. The intensity of the perceived radiation, on the other hand, is experienced as light that flows into him through his now functional eyes, enveloping his body like warmth and causing it to vibrate with a multitude of colored tones.

Color and light as a phenomenon

While the perceived color and light structure initially still has a purely phenomenal character for the formerly blind person and refers exclusively to himself, the character of the sign only develops from the process of multisensory confrontation with the environment. The term phenomenon (Latin phaenomenon – appearance, appearance in the air, Greek phainein – to make visible, to make seen) characterizes the process of “making visible”, of “becoming visible”, of “showing oneself” of meanings via the visual relationship between man and his environment. Only then do colors and brightness begin to refer to smells, sounds, materials and movements for the viewer, from which the memory representation of the visual space subsequently develops, which can therefore also be described as a language and cognitive system analogous to its function as a reference system for the use of signs and the meaning of signs.

The loss of color and light

The blind person, on the other hand, goes into the darkness and feels the loss of the sensory media of color and light, through which he could enter into a process of communication with the environment, whereas the memory of the color and light structure of his visual space is still represented in his memory. Color and light are therefore not accidentals of the environment, but sensory perceptions of the human being, who can store the meanings experienced with them from the multisensory experience of the natural and sociocultural environment in memory and also retrieve them again. M. Hull, who is blind, describes this profound change in his existence as follows: “As you go deeper and deeper into blindness, the things you once took for granted and which, when they disappeared, you initially mourned and for which you later tried to find all sorts of compensations, end up becoming meaningless. Somehow it no longer seems important what people look like or what cities look like. You start to live with other interests, other values. You start to live in a different world.”

Color and light as information media

In addition, like all sensory perceptions, color and light fulfill a medial function, as they inform people about environmental conditions. Just as he can adapt his body temperature to the environmental conditions through the sensations of heat and cold, he can do the same by adapting the tension conditions in his muscle and joint system to the conditions of gravity, whereas the sensations of color and light allow him to adapt his entire existence to the conditions of his environment. The adaptation of humans to the spatial-visual conditions of the environment goes further than that of all other living beings, which also use environmental radiation for their orientation and action processes and, to some extent, for their species-specific communication processes. The entire spatial-visual culture of mankind shows the result of this intergenerational and global adaptation process, without which cities, infrastructures, societies, technology, science and design would not exist in their current form. Color and light therefore function as media for the process of cognition, understanding, problem solving and mediation, the messages of which are reflected in the socio-cultural environment of the human being and in the level of competence development of each individual.

Color and light as communication media

The sensory perceptions of color and light are not only passively experienced by humans, as by many other species, but are actively used for the spatial-visual communication process. It has long been known that color adaptation to the environmental conditions of a species-specific habitat or the adoption of a deterrent camouflage can protect a species from enemies, but new scientific studies show that animals also use the media of color and light for behavior control and the exchange of information. The communication process is particularly striking for the human observer in the chameleon, which can perfectly adapt its body color to the changing color and light structure of its environment. However, the highest degree of change is not seen in the adaptation of the body color to the background, but in the communication with conspecifics. A chameleon is able to send differentiated messages to its conspecifics by changing its body color in order to communicate its intentions. These range from a willingness to fight, to submission, to an interest in mating. In addition, the color changes not only announce his behavioral states and intentions for action, but also show his responses to messages he has already received. For example, the skin color of a chameleon can be used to determine whether an invitation to mate was successful or met with rejection. To avoid attracting the attention of enemies, the exchange of messages takes place at such short intervals that it is often not even visible to other species, which is why this ability was only recently discovered by humans. (Devi Stuart-Fox and Adnan Moussalli) This example also illustrates the link between the perceived physical state and the animal’s experience and behavior, which is not fundamentally different in humans, but has merely taken on more complex forms. People also communicate their emotional states of behavior and intentions for action directly to their environment via the color change of their skin, although most communication partners are usually only aware of this unconsciously. Depending on the context of the situation, the redness of his face indicates specific states of excitement that can signal feelings such as shame, anger, desire, combativeness, interest or rejection to those around him. The unconsciously conveyed message of an emotionally conditioned physical state cannot simply be suppressed or manipulated, which is why it is also of great importance with regard to the credibility of a verbal statement.

The multisensory experience of color and light

The familiar color of all the significant entities in the environment is represented in the color and light structure of the visual space together with all other content from the multisensory engagement with the environment, which influences a person’s expectations to such an extent that they can even see them when they are no longer actually present. In one experiment, test subjects were asked to use a control to decolorize computer images of familiar fruits, such as bananas or lettuce, until only greyscale gradients were visible. However, all results showed shifts in the complementary color range, which is why the bananas showed a bluish tint and the lettuce a reddish one. The presentation of the fruit in an actual grayscale range, on the other hand, still appeared colorful to the test subjects, which indicates that the colors familiar from use are generated by the brain, since the test subjects were able to decolorize geometric objects without any problems. (Hansen T., Gegenfurtner, K.)

Memory colors or color expectations

In the field of neuroscience, we also speak of “memory colors”, which applies equally to the other formal properties of the color and light structure, such as brightness, shapes and movements. The “memory colors” or color expectations in turn form the basis for “color constancy”. The brain compares the proportional changes in the colorfulness of known objects with the lighting conditions of the environment and corrects the “actual” colors according to expectations. In this way, people can distinguish whether the change in color comes from the object itself or from the ambient light. The semantic interpretation of the color and light structure of the visual space is focused on the meaningful content, which is why the influence of ambient light on the surrounding situation is usually ignored, while the changes emanating from the objects, such as small changes in the facial color of a conversation partner, are noticed.

Der Beitrag Color and light as mediators of meaning erschien zuerst auf Farbpsychologie.