Is Blue Far?

Umm….I think your adjective “Earthy” makes it pretty obvious that we associate brown with “dirt”.

Good post.

Now, if a computer, color blind to the cultural preference of the populace, were to govern us, would the population feel uneasy?

How do you program to accomodate emotive responses across an array of cultures?

Humans can see emotions and emotional reactions.

How does a computer object see emotions responding to its color choice?

Right about the expensive purple dye that the Phoenicians peddled. It became the royal color and has ever since been associated with luxury.

It’s important to remember that coloring products could be expensive and difficult until the modern chemical industry got going only about a century ago. Today, we can make anything any color we want at a reasonable cost. But for a long, long time, there were all sorts of technical restrictions that meant certain colors were associated with certain objects, so there is much technical contingency about the traditional connotations of colors.

I know in the middle ages there were supposed to be big differences between “black bile” and “yellow bile” personality-wise, but unlike blood or phlegm I can’t remember the last time I actually saw either of those two.

Orange = fire, which explains warmth. Orange is not associated with learning that I know of, the graph you linked refers to a whole book so I guess it’s in there.

Pink might not be so associated with healthy skin as much as it’s associated with lips, nipples and genitals (these features are sometimes pink or pink-ish in non-white humans too). This isn’t limited to humans; this color association seems to have had an even bigger impact on the bodies of baboons.

The orange = fire seems obvious to me. And Brown = earth too. We stand on the earth, it’s reliable, and wel, down to earth.

Purple and yellow are tricky, I agree. The red + blue thing doesn’t convince me, and neither does “urine”, but I it’s funny and intriguing.

Otherwise i think you may be on to something.

I wonder if it is just me, but was blue the easiest to read for you people as well? If so, maybe because the color was mentioned in the title?

Anyway, I see I have picked the right colors for my blog theme 🙂

Blood is red.

Hi, I’m not entirely sure if this is relevant, but you could probably find something from the palettes and patterns that the community creates at colourlovers e.g. their take on colours and mood

Robin, the connection I’m making is that “seen in sharp focus” = rational, unmysterious, stable. Note the traditional association of faeries with twilight, a time of day when vision is blurrier, objects are less clearly seen, and the perceiver’s expectations (or fears) can give rise to momentary illusions. Purple objects by their nature cannot be seen clearly.

Our natural behavior when confronting with an object that’s imperfectly resolved is to look more close, peer, squint, or otherwise bring it into sharper focus. But purple things cannot be perfectly resolved by doing so; one of the two wavelengths becomes more out of focus as the other is better resolved. They elude our optical “grasp.”

> BLUE: sky/water, far mental mode

Interesting then that OB’s color is blue.

Your interpretation of blue seems far fetched. Most of those things can be experienced in near and far mode, and there are plenty of far related things in other color categories. I don’t see what ‘cold’ has to do with far. ‘Rational’ can be near or far depending whether it’s holistic analogizing or reductionistic reasoning. Art could be far inasmuch as it is to do with high ideals and abstraction, but pictures are near, and art is at least as connected to them. Freedom and loyalty can be high values or immediate feelings, and there are plenty of high values not linked to blue, such as love (certainly far), compassion, peace, success. I don’t see how unhappy and trouble are far. Gods are socially distant, fair enough there.

Orange – reflected glow of fire light to be more specific. I

Yellow – symptomatic of liver disease / jaundice. Implies poisoning

Stefano – Red skin coloration may also have evolved in response to the presence of color vision or evolved in tandem.

Interesting that if one changes the words slightly, some contexts may become more apparent, e.g., “empyreal” for blue pertains to the highest heaven in the cosmology of the ancients, i.e., celestial, and therefore far away. “Tyrrenhian” is purple used in ancient robes, apparently special and pricey because one had to crush so many mollusks to get an adequate quantity of dye. The exercise could be continued by substituting, say, “saffron,” for yellow to lend a more spiritual/cultural connotation.

To me yellow spells “cheap”, “sale”, “discount” – maybe a danish thing?

According to synesthesia-inspired Jimi Hendrix:

“Orange is young, full of daring but very unsteady for the first go ’round.”

and:

“Blue are the life giving waters taken for granted; they quietly understand.”

Jimi seemed to think blue was far.

According to Time’s reporting of a study published recently, “men who are shown pictures of a woman in a red dress want to ask her more amorous questions than men who are shown a picture of the same woman wearing blue or green. They also want to sit closer to her.”

I guess red is sexy.