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’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, simply don’t exist in nature.
The color that isn’t really there: How can that be possible?
Let’s see, if you pass a beam of white light through a prism, you’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.
This is where the revelation comes in: pink (or magenta) doesn’t exist in the visible spectrum of light. Well, as physicist Dominik John explains, “pink is something your brain invents when it encounters a gap between red and blue wavelengths.” In other words, when your eyes receive strong red and blue light waves but little green, the brain fills the gap by creating pink.
Are we seeing reality, or just what our brain wants us to?
So much so that this story leads us to an essential distinction between two concepts: sensation and perception.
- Sensation is a raw physiological response of sensory receptors.
- Perception is a conscious interpretation created by the brain, which organizes, filters, and gives meaning to what we feel.
“What we perceive is not the external world around us, but our brain’s interpretation of it,” said psychologist Pang.
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 “wrong,” but it’s more useful than accurate, because the brain shows us objects, contexts, and relationships, not just colored pixels. And it’s not just the color pink that we can’t see; in fact, there’s an interesting list of other things we can’t see:
- Humans see only a tiny fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum.
- X-rays, microwaves, and radio waves are “light,” but invisible to our eyes.
- Birds detect ultraviolet patterns; sharks perceive electric fields; bees read the polarization of light.
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’s no wonder the world’s coolest color was created for the first time.
If pink lives only in our minds, does that make it less real?
It’s also worth remembering that pink also raises a philosophical question about qualia, the subjective aspects of experience. Philosopher Thomas Nagel (1974) summarized this idea in the question: “What is it like to be a bat?” Only the bat knows, because only it experiences its unique perception. Similarly, pink is real within our minds, but it doesn’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.
We may never be able to fully translate internal experience into the terms of physical science. Still, it’s undeniable that these experiences exist, even if they are inventions of the brain. Of course, this doesn’t diminish the experience’s beauty. After all, knowing that pink is a brain invention shows us how creative and limited our perception is at the same time. But this changes with science; it’s no wonder NASA discovered 102 new colors.
