What color is a tennis ball?

Is it yellow? Is it green? Or what if, as one scientist argues, “there’s no such thing as a color?” Guest: Bevil Conway, visual artist and neuroscientist at the National Eye Institute To watch this episode on video, find us on Netflix! For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠ We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 1:28Speaker 02

  A while back, I was at physical therapy. I was doing some stretching. I was talking to people. We were talking about tennis. And at one point, someone said something about yellow tennis balls. And I was like, no, they're green. And then someone else was like, no, they're yellow. And then someone across the room was like, no, they're obviously green. The next day, I come into physical therapy and there is one of those questions above the water fountain, like where it's normally, what's your favorite sandwich? Or what's your favorite holiday or something? This time, it was what color are tennis balls? And it was pretty much even. It caused like this physical therapy uproar.

• 2:12Speaker 02

  And when I asked people how they voted, they told me they just couldn't even believe there was a debate. So I called up Bevil Conway. He's a neuroscientist who heads up a lab at the National Eye Institute. He's working on a book called Color-Coded. It's going to be out next year. And he's also a working artist. That's actually how he got into studying color in the first place. And Bevil told me, there's a pretty good reason for why so many people disagree about tennis balls. He said, it's simple.

• 2:42Speaker 03

  There's no such thing as a color.

• 2:44Speaker 02

  Today, an unexplainable what?

• 3:03Speaker 02

  Bevil Conway, thanks for coming on the show.

• 3:05Speaker 03

  Oh, my God, it's so much fun to be here.

• 3:07Speaker 02

  So you are an artist. You are also a neuroscientist. You study color. You're also working on a book about color. Are there still color mysteries? Are there things science doesn't know about color?

• 3:25Speaker 03

  There are lots of mysteries about color. I think, you know, for a long time, people thought that color was a kind of, you know, a little bit of like a filter. You know, everything that's really important is in black and white. And then there's a color filter you put on top of it and then-

• 3:42Speaker 02

  Just like a decoration.

• 3:44Speaker 03

  A decoration, yeah. And, you know, a bunch of years ago, my lab were blown away to discover that there's as much brain involved in processing color as there is in face recognition.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  The same, the same amount of-

• 3:57Speaker 03

  Tissue.

• 3:57Speaker 02

  -brain processing power?

• 3:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's like tons and tons of tissue in like pretty fancy bits of brain that are doing pretty high level things, like parts of brain we think of as being involved in social cognition and in, you know, high level reasoning and visual memory. Color must be more than just this like little add-on. It's doing something much deeper. So, so we're trying to understand what those bits of brain are doing.

• 4:22Speaker 02

  So before we get into all of those mysteries, I wonder if we can just kind of get on some solid ground.

• 4:28Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  What is color? And how does it work? How does our brains and eyes perceive it?

• 4:36Speaker 03

  Sure. So color, I think the classic definition would be color is the visual feature that you get from the spectral composition or the wavelength properties of the light entering your eye. People typically see the long wavelength end as red light and then going through short wavelengths, you know, following Roy G. Biv, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  So why isn't color as simple as just longer wavelength, red, shorter wavelength, blue? Why is color mysterious?

• 5:16Speaker 03

  If color were just wavelength, then an object under blue light would look blue and the same object under yellow light would look yellow. And that wouldn't be very helpful because what you want is a signal that tells you about objects immune to the lighting condition. You want them to always have that color. A perfect example is like, take a peach. If you look at a peach outside and you look at it inside, it's always going to look like peach color. But if you looked at the pattern of wavelengths that are coming off of the peach, they're very different inside and outside, under different lighting conditions. They should be different colors if color were just wavelength, but they're not different colors. Those two different compositions of wavelengths look the same color.

• 6:00Speaker 02

  But if we were to say, take one of those like droppers on a, on a Mac Paint or whatever on the computer and test what actual pixel it is, it would be extremely different pixels.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  That's right. And this, this is sort of what neuroscientists, what I think is so cool about color is it's so fundamental for how we need to experience the world, but the mechanics of how it does it teaches us a lot about the brain. What we're talking about is color constancy. That is, an object's color is constant despite the viewing conditions. But you have that same experience for a person. It's like your spouse is the same person they were yesterday and tomorrow. You have a picture in your mind about who they are that is a constant thing that, that allows you to then say, oh, you look a little tired today. Why? Because you're comparing that against this idea you have in your mind about who they are as some sort of, you know, meta thing that's more stable and constant than, you

• 6:58Speaker 03

  know, that, that the given example right in front of you.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  So if the peach is fundamentally a different color inside and outside, and our brains are telling us that it is still, you know, peach colored.

• 7:13Speaker 03

  Right.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  How? How are our brains doing that?

• 7:18Speaker 03

  So it's not fundamentally a different color. It's the same color. That's the cool thing. The problem is that you are carrying around, no, in your head, an idea that color is wavelength. And that is the mistake. That's the error. Color is not wavelength. And we've known this for a long, long time. But the problem is that we want something that we can measure, that we can put a number on, that is, you know, an empirical measurable number that's outside of an observer, that's a thing out there in the world, that would be the same number regardless of who looks at it. And color at its core is not that. Color is dependent on your own visual system interacting with the world.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  And that doesn't mean it's any less real. It just means that its reality is dependent on psychological neural brain processes. And that's what makes color fascinating.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  So color isn't wavelength?

• 8:16Speaker 03

  No.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  And color isn't the, the dropper on a computer that's telling you what, you know, the color code or the pixel is? Color is, you're saying, something that is essentially created in the brain or by the brain?

• 8:30Speaker 03

  Absolutely, yes. Color is, color is a generative product of the brain that gives us reliable, useful, true, meaningful, objective information, but it itself is not. It's some generative product of your brain in order to come up with this information that's useful and meaningful about the world. It's actually creating that thing that is a color. It doesn't map in some direct reflexive way that's like, you know, keys on a keyboard that are mapping, you know, this frequency is this tone, this frequency is this color all the way up the keyboard. Colors don't exist out there in the world, independent of a viewer to see them.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Is this related to the, the dress? You know, like 10 years ago, when that photo of a dress went viral and a bunch of people on the internet thought it was blue and black, and a bunch of people thought it was white and gold, and everyone got super upset? Is this the same type of thing of seeing something in different lighting or different contexts and perceiving a different color?

• 9:33Speaker 03

  It is. So the dress was fascinating because, you know, people have often quibbled about labels. So people with normal color vision, looking at exactly the same thing, were asserting very different perceptions. And, you know, from a deep kind of philosophical point of view, it's important because they weren't saying, yeah, it kind of looks different to me, but I understand how you could see it as different. They were like, no, it is white and gold. And other people were saying-

• 10:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, fundamentally different colors.

• 10:03Speaker 03

  It is different, yeah. And that was, for me, sort of professionally and personally, it was a really big deal because it's kind of underscored this fact that color is this generative constructive thing that your brain is doing, making all kinds of assumptions, filling in the gaps about lighting, about what you think you're seeing. And in the case of the dress, it worked the way it worked, probably because, you know, it's such a crappy little photograph, very blurry, it doesn't give you a lot of context. And your visual system, your own brain, has to make a guess about what the lighting is. And if your brain guesses that the lighting is like nice, warm, direct sunlight, then it kind of implicitly subtracts out a little bit of the yellow from the image and you see it as blue and black.

• 10:48Speaker 03

  Whereas other people looking at exactly the same pixels on the same monitor, who assume that the lighting is like cool, indirect, you know, shaded light from, from blue sky, their brains color correct the image, subtract out some of the blue, and they see it as white and gold. And so you have these two groups of people whose brains have just made different assumptions.

• 11:09Speaker 02

  Why do you think that- Less people feeling so unnerved. You know, to, when this happened, it was just people could not possibly believe someone else could look at that dress and see a different color.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  It was amazing. And you know, it was, it's still to date, I think, the most viral image in the history of the internet. It's like Wired Magazine, who published this story, you know, that was my theory explaining how the dress worked.

• 11:35Speaker 03

  That article was viewed something like 35 million times.

• 11:39Speaker 02

  Oh, my God.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  Like, this was a global phenomenon. This was not restricted to like, some small pocket of college-age students.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  And your theory was, was the, assuming the light?

• 11:50Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 11:50Speaker 02

  Assuming the context of the light?

• 11:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  I think a lot of people, right when it came out, they, they interviewed a lot of vision scientists. And, you know, my initial reaction, too, was like, huh, that's weird. I wonder what's going on there. And a lot of my colleagues thought, well, maybe it's got to do with proportions of rods and cones, or people are looking at different displays, or maybe people are just silently colorblind, or, you know.

• 12:14Speaker 03

  But I think, I think the idea that your own brain could play such a fundamental role in determining what the pattern of wavelengths means, that just doesn't, you know, it just seems so, really? That big of a difference? Like, it just, even for vision scientists, it wasn't sort of sitting at front of mind. I think the reason that it played so deeply, you know, if I could wax poetic.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Please.

• 12:39Speaker 03

  It's, it's that, it's that our contemporary society depends on a shared experience. Right? Our laws depend on a common idea of what's right and wrong.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, whether, whether my red is your red, we still need to be able to point at something and agree that it's red.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  And here was an example where it was like, no, that, you were wrong. Like, that isn't white and gold. It's blue and black, clearly. You know, how can you possibly, do we live in a shared reality? And if you can't trust your eyes, I mean, like, what can you trust? And I think people genuinely felt like, is this the beginning of the end? Like, is our whole society collapsing? I mean, look at Twitter, it was great. There was all sorts of expletives flying around. People like, no, are you kidding me? You are so wrong.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  Have you ever gotten into an argument about a color? Like, I, I, I once got into an argument about tennis balls and what color they were.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, what color are they?

• 13:39Speaker 02

  I couldn't believe anyone thought they were yellow. I always thought they were green.

• 13:43Speaker 03

  Oh, interesting. Huh.

• 13:45Speaker 02

  Have you, have you ever gotten into a, into a color fight?

• 13:47Speaker 03

  They're totally yellow. I mean, we can get into one now. Like, you're wrong.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  It didn't, I never even, it never even occurred to me that they could be yellow.

• 13:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It's so funny. I really, I thought that they were definitionally yellow.

• 14:08Speaker 02

  In a minute, a no-holds-barred color fight. We're gonna find out, once and for all, tennis balls, yellow or green?

• 14:25Speaker 00

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• 17:47Speaker 05

  You need color to make a rainbow, not candy wrappers and flashlights.

• 17:53Speaker 02

  Have, have you ever gotten into a, into a color fight?

• 17:57Speaker 03

  I mean, I guess with my spouse, like everybody, we get into occasional color fights.

• 18:03Speaker 02

  I get into color fights with my wife all the time.

• 18:07Speaker 02

  But that pillow is gray. It's brown.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  Yes, it's, it's, yeah. I actually have a really lousy color sense. I mean, I'm acutely attuned to color. I can tell you what color is. I have a pretty good color memory. But if you ask me to come up with like, a color palette for your living room, like, I am not your guy. I, I, I have great awe. And I think that's partly why, because I have this deficit. But people who are able to do that, you know, figure out what ties go with what shirts, and I, I wear gray and...

• 18:38Speaker 02

  All the science in the world can't tell you how to dress.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  No, no, I have, I have to get serious help. So I'm, I'm not in, I'm not usually one to find myself in fights about color. I'm usually in the space where I'm like, oh, I see. I know, you're probably right. You're probably right. Like, now you're already making me think, maybe tennis balls are green. Like, I probably, huh.

• 19:00Speaker 02

  Well, okay. So are, what is going on with tennis balls?

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Tennis balls are funny. I mean, if you ask people to pick their best example of green, and blue, and red, and orange, and yellow, and so on, all these color terms, there's a lot of variability. So if you ask, green and blue is the, is the most variable, some people's best example of green is another person's best example of blue. Like, it is that crazy.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Meaning, like, you, you could ask me to pick a color that would be perfectly green, and then someone else would be like, no, that's blue?

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly. And this isn't like, language-based. This is true across all cultures.

• 19:45Speaker 02

  We, we just perceive blues and greens kind of badly or vaguely?

• 19:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. And one of the ideas that we have about that is that blues and greens aren't really the colors that are tied to objects. So if I ask you, what colors are objects, you know, it's a weird, weird question. It's like, objects can be any colors. But it turns out, if you actually go and measure, you know, the colors of things that you choose to label in the world, most of them are like, yellow, brown, red, pink, some purples, not many.

• 20:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, I guess like, green and blue is the background, right?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  That's like the background.

• 20:20Speaker 02

  Like, green's the forest, and blue is the sky.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:23Speaker 02

  Huh.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  And, and even in nature, there are very few natural blue objects. And that's partly what made blue as a pigment so desirable. So what's weird about yellow is that yellow, if you just ask people in the, in the rainbow to pick where yellow is, people are incredibly consistent. It's like, it's right here.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  So people really know yellow?

• 20:46Speaker 03

  They really know yellow. And I think what's going on with the tennis ball is that it is a little bit fluorescent. It's actually emitting a little bit more light than it's taking in, because it's reprocessing it, short-wavelength light, in the visible spectrum. So they've picked this bright, you know, yellow, which is right at the peak of our visual system sensitivity. So the color of the tennis ball is the optimal wavelength that we can detect with our eyes. And it's right in that range, where it's technically probably closer to green than it is to yellow. But because it's so bright, and yellow is considered a bright color, the brightest color, people are, could be persuaded to see it in a yellow direction.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  What I hear you saying is that I'm right, and it's green.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, although, although I still like it as yellow.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  But, but, but, I mean, more seriously, what you're saying is that there's a sense in which it is kind of green, but yellow has almost a gravitational pull, because it's so...

• 21:49Speaker 03

  Right. Yes, yes. I think that's the way I would think about it.

• 21:53Speaker 02

  Is there also an idea that color is real? Like, stuff looks yellow?

• 21:58Speaker 03

  Right.

• 21:59Speaker 02

  But, but there's not necessarily a border around what is yellow?

• 22:03Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, I mean, this builds on this idea of colors as ideas. So those language, culture gives us, you know, ready-made, in language, the boxes that we put around what constitutes that color versus some other color, the, the way we categorize colors. So we have this thing where it's like, is it either the perceptual thing, or the language thing? It's like, no, it's actually a whole lot of these things. They're all meeting out together. They're all working together.

• 22:30Speaker 02

  What about the rainbow? You know, when I see red, orange, yellow, green, blue?

• 22:34Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:36Speaker 02

  Are those not kind of distinguishable, distinct colors?

• 22:41Speaker 03

  Well, the rainbow isn't. I mean, every time I see a rainbow, I challenge myself to try and figure out where the colors start and end. And, you know, we actually set this up in my lab the other day. We projected a rainbow onto a white sheet. And then I had everybody mark on the sheet where they saw, you know, each of the colors. And people are not entirely consistent.

• 23:02Speaker 02

  And would different cultures draw lines for colors in different places?

• 23:07Speaker 03

  They will definitely draw lines for colors in different places because they have different color concepts. They have different color ideas.

• 23:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I, I think about sometimes how in English we have light blue and dark blue. Like you add black to light blue and you get dark blue.

• 23:24Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:25Speaker 02

  Then you have orange and brown. You add black to orange and you get brown.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  Right.

• 23:29Speaker 02

  And in my head, well, first of all, when I found out that you add black to orange and you get brown, like I told all of my friends and I freaked out. And they're like, stop talking to me about brown.

• 23:40Speaker 03

  That's lovely.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  But in my head, light blue and dark blue feel much more related than orange and brown. They feel like they are the same color, whereas orange and brown feel like fundamentally different colors. I don't know what that's about, but I'm just aware that certain color categories can be actually close together and feel very different for different people.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  Right. And I think, I think the orange brown example is instructive because it relates back to, you know, the color statistics of the parts of the world that we care about. Like, objects really are more often, you know, warm colored compared to cool colored. And I think that's why we have the warm, cool distinction in language with coloring. And, you know, let's not lose sight of the fact that our color vision system didn't evolve by itself. It evolved in conjunction. It co-evolved together with the stuff we're actually using our color vision system to see. So, you know, fruits, the, the primate trichromatic color vision

• 24:44Speaker 03

  system evolved at the same time that trees invented fruits. There are going to be lots of fruits that are different between brown and orange. Then there are fruits that are going to be different between light blue and dark blue. And so it's, it makes sense in some, in some sort of deep way that, that language would then reflect that difference. There is a very deep connection, interaction between language and perception. But I don't think it's like if you don't have a color word for blue, that you won't be able to perceive, you know, that color, that it just would be invisible.

• 25:25Speaker 02

  So let me ask you, I mean, if, if, if a color doesn't exist, if color is something that we experience in our heads, why do you paint? Why do you spend so much time mixing colors?

• 25:38Speaker 03

  I mean, I think it's because color is something that's constructed in our heads, that it makes it a very satisfying sort of playground in the studio. Because you now have almost like raw access to that social communication thing. You know, one of my favorite examples is Matisse. You know, he worked at a time when manufacturers were coming up with lots more new pigments.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  So the gamut of colors was expanding dramatically. And that meant that the color coming out of the tube, you know, he didn't have to mix a green with blue and yellow. He could take a really beautiful emerald green or a, or a, you know, a moss green or a fur green or, you know, all the different kinds of greens he could have. And he could use them right out of the tube. And so then he's got this struggle because each of the colored marks he's putting down on his canvas is now going to change in the context of all the other marks. So he's now trying to figure out how he's going to grapple with the interactions of these colors. And he ends up leaving little white spaces of the canvas around his colored marks, which turns out to, you know,

• 26:47Speaker 03

  preserve the integrity of the colors so that they don't, they don't influence each other. So I'm going to give you two examples. You can take a gray and put it on a red background and that gray will now look green. If you separate the gray and the red square with a little white buffer, the gray now looks perfectly gray and the red looks perfectly red. So he ended up doing this in order to keep the colors to look the way they looked when they came out of the tubes. Because that's what he really wanted. And as a consequence of that, he exposed the canvas that the painting was made on. And all of the art historians were like, oh, you can't do that. That's like modernism. That's crazy. You're like showing the substrate that the painting is made on. And, you know, now the lie of painting is punctured.

• 27:29Speaker 03

  And that ended up having this whole impact on Western art.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  I think in the studio and in my own studio practice, there are lots of these kinds of, I think of them as games or tricks or, you know, the things you're struggling with, where you're using your own visual system as a feedback device, you know, to explore what, what it's doing and how it's working. And then how it does relate to, you know, what you experience and, and what other people think. And of course, you know, I make a painting. And when someone walks into a gallery and looks at the painting and likes it or stops or breathes deeply or, you know, exhales or something, I think that is the biggest high there is. It's like, oh, I actually did something that communicated with you. And it wasn't through words. It was through this visceral language of color.

• 28:30Speaker 02

  If you want to see this episode on video in full color, head over to Netflix. This episode was produced by Valerie Schenkman and me, Noam Hassenfeld. It was edited by Joanna Solotaroff. Our video editor is Jacob Reynolds. Our animator is Kareem Karrea. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch. And Meredith Hadnot runs the show. Mixing and sound design from Christian Ayala. Music from me. And Bird Pinkerton jumped up and ran toward the sound. She stopped and she listened. And then she ran. Finally, she could see it. A tiny crack of light.

• 29:14Speaker 02

  Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with me and Bird. If you have thoughts about the show, we'd love to hear from you. You can email us at [email protected]. Or if you'd like to support the show, join Vox. Become a member. Just go to vox.com/members. And if you signed up because of us, let us know. We'd love to hear it. Unexplainable is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. And we'll be right back here next time.

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• 30:21Speaker 07

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.