Do we all see colours the same way? It's one of those questions that sounds simple until you think about it for a moment. Research shows that we experience colours differently depending on biology, genetics, language, cultural background, and gender. But the deeper question — whether what you experience as red is the same subjective experience as what I experience as red — may be impossible to answer. At least for now.
The Hard Problem of Consciousness
Researchers once largely assumed we saw colours roughly the same way. After all, we broadly agree on the colour of things — the sky is blue, the sun is yellow, grass is green. But more recent work has cast real doubt on this. There's no fundamental reason why our minds should represent colours identically. Theoretically, two people could agree that something is "red" while having entirely different subjective experiences of what red looks like.
The philosopher David Chalmers calls this the "hard problem of consciousness." Scientists can scan the brain, map every chemical reaction, and identify exactly which neurons fire when a person sees yellow — but that data can never tell you what it feels like to experience yellow. No amount of objective measurement bridges the gap to subjective experience. That, says Chalmers, seems to be a brute fact of nature.
Consider the process: light from an object travels as a wave to your retina. The retina converts it into chemical information, which travels along the optic nerve to the visual cortex. The brain constructs an image in conscious perception. We can document every step of that process in detail. What we can't do is use that documentation to verify whether your experience of the resulting colour matches anyone else's.
The Squirrel Monkey Experiment — New Colours
One illuminating line of research asks whether the brain can generate entirely new colours following changes to the eye's light-sensing apparatus.
Researchers chose male squirrel monkeys because they only have two types of cone cells — blue-sensing and green-sensing — making them functionally colour blind to red. When shown red dots on a grey background, they don't respond; to them, red is indistinguishable from shades of grey.
In the experiment, the monkeys were injected with a virus that converted some green-sensing cone cells into red-sensing ones. After the injection, the monkeys could pick red dots out of the grey background. They could now see red.
What colour did they see? That's the remarkable question. The monkeys had never seen red before — no learned experience, no cultural associations, no vocabulary for it. Yet once the visual apparatus to detect red wavelengths was in place, their brains generated a new phenomenological experience.
The experiment suggests the brain doesn't passively receive colour — it actively creates it from whatever light-sensing information is available. Give the brain new input, and it generates a new experience.
Impossible Colours
It's not only monkeys who can perceive new colours. There's evidence that humans can too — under the right conditions.
The human visual system has two types of opponent neurons that function in a binary way: a blue-yellow pair and a red-green pair. These neurons can't signal both colours in their pair simultaneously. You can see a mixture of blue and yellow (which we call green), but you can't see a colour that is simultaneously and equally blue and yellow.
Such colours are called "impossible colours" — they exist outside the normal range of visual experience because the opponent neuron system can't process them.
In the 1970s, researchers thought impossible colours were strictly theoretical. But in the 1980s, Thomas Piantanida and Hewitt Crane devised an experiment to force the eyes into perceiving them. Participants wore head-stabilising devices that adjusted images in real time so that a red-green border remained fixed on exactly the same retinal cells regardless of eye movement.
After staring at the screen long enough, most participants reported seeing new colours forming along the border — colours they had no name for and couldn't describe except by what they weren't. The academic community was sceptical. But in 2010, better-controlled research confirmed the earlier results.
How We Respond to Colours — And Why That's Consistent
Even if we can't confirm whether subjective colour experiences are identical, research does suggest our emotional responses to colours are broadly similar — and that these responses are evolutionary in origin.
Blue wavelengths — visible in clear sky, midday sun, and open water — tend to produce calm and reduced alertness. Yellow, orange, and red wavelengths produce alertness and heightened activity. These responses appear across the animal kingdom: not just in mammals but in fish and even single-celled organisms.
Life tends to be more active during yellow-light periods (dawn and dusk) and less active during blue-light periods (midday and night). The hypothesis is that midday inactivity evolved as protection against UV radiation, while night-time inactivity reduces predation risk. Colour, rather than light intensity, may be the primary driver — with melanopsin receptors in the eye gauging blue versus yellow light to influence mood and circadian rhythms.
For more on how colour affects interior spaces, see our guides on how room colours affect your mood and which bedroom colours are most relaxing.
Knowledge Changes What We See
What you already know about the world affects how you perceive colours. Researchers regularly explore this by changing the colour of familiar objects and observing the response.
In one notable study, participants were placed in a room lit by yellow light — the kind found in energy-saving bulbs common in car parks. This type of light disrupts the brain's ability to detect colour, making everything appear pallid and brownish. When participants looked at objects in this environment, they could still identify them — a strawberry was recognisably a strawberry — but they didn't want to eat it. Other participants appeared less attractive than usual.
The hypothesis is that the colour distortion violated the participants' learned knowledge of how certain things should look. A brown strawberry signals something is wrong, even if you can't articulate why. These responses were strongest for evolutionarily significant things — food and other people — and weakest for neutral objects. We may interpret colours not just visually but through the filter of what we already know and expect.
Do Our Brains Process Colours the Same Way?
Researchers used magnetoencephalography to measure the electrical patterns in volunteers' brains after exposing them to different colour images. Using machine learning, they mapped correlations between different brains looking at the same colours.
The results were striking. Brains responded to colours in much the same way across participants — suggesting something like a "red signature" or "blue signature" exists at the neural level. Each brain was slightly different, but the patterns were consistent enough to be identifiable.
A follow-up looked at whether the relationships people perceive between colours are also similar. When one person sees red, do they associate it with orange more than with blue — the same way someone else would? The answer appears to be yes. Our internal maps of colour relationships are broadly similar even if we can't confirm that the raw experience of each colour is identical.
Do We See the Same Colours?
Probably not — at least not exactly. The evidence suggests we see approximations of what others see. Differences in the number and sensitivity of cone cells in the retina cause variation. So do differences in brain structure. When researchers ask people to choose the "most red" or "most green" shade from a range, they reliably disagree. For some people, pure red looks scarlet; for others, it reads as closer to salmon.
Whether these differences are biological or cultural is contested. Researchers flip between both positions. Language clearly plays a role — some languages don't lexically distinguish between blue and green, and speakers of those languages are demonstrably slower to distinguish the colours under time pressure. Some languages have only two basic colour terms (dark and light), and speakers categorise colours accordingly.
Gender appears to matter too. Women carry two copies of the X chromosome — the part of the genome responsible for colour discrimination — versus one for men. This opens the possibility that some women encode four different types of cone cells rather than the usual three, known as tetrachromatic vision.
Early research suggests it's real. Women with tetrachromacy can perceive subtle colour differences that appear identical to trichromatic viewers. Around 40 per cent of women may have some form of tetrachromatic genetic encoding, though how many actually perceive a fourth dimension of colour in everyday life is still under investigation.
What This Means for Colour Selection
At a practical level, this is why online colour selection is genuinely difficult. When we describe a bean bag as olive, taupe, or slate, we're working from standard colour charts calibrated for trichromatic vision — the most common type. But those colours will appear differently to people with red-green colour blindness (affecting around 8% of men and 1% of women), and differently again to anyone with tetrachromatic vision.
We use accurate colour photography under standardised lighting conditions to give the most faithful representation we can. If you're uncertain about a shade, our team is happy to discuss it — and our colour and mood guide or the post on choosing sofa colours for your living room may also help with the broader decision. Explore our full range of bean bag chairs across all colour options.
The age-old question — whether your red is the same as my red — isn't answerable yet. But we now understand more than ever about why colour perception varies, and that understanding continues to grow.
