Impossible colors...

For today's post I thought I'd talk about an interesting thing, so called impossible colors... Impossible colors are colors that can't be seen using any combination of colored light under normal circumstances. Only by exploiting the way your brain processes colors. The first kind I'll cover are...

Chimerical Colors

Chimerical colors can be seen by exploiting the color fatigue that the color sensing cone cells in your eyes experience when you look at a strong color source for a while. The effect is most obvious when you look at something brightly colored for a moment, then look at a blank surface...you see a reverse color image of the thing you were looking at. Some of the types of chimerical colors include 'stygian colors' (colors that are simultaneous dark and impossibly saturated), self-luminous colors (colors that mimic the appearance of glowing even when they aren't), and hyperbolic colors (bright colors that are impossibly saturated). You can see some examples of each using the template below, just stare at the X for 60 seconds, then switch to the next picture over. The last picture in each line is something like what you should see.

(image by Zowie at English Wikipedia GFDL or CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

The second kind of 'impossible' colors are made by 'overlapping' opposing colors, like 'redgreen' and 'yellowblue'. They're not really overlapped, your brain tries to combine the images from your left and right eyes into one 3D image for you (that's how binocular vision works). You can see an example below by staring at the picture and crossing your eyes so that the two crosses become one.

(image by Wyatt915 [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons)

There are a few other related things, but I'll save those for another post. Have a nice day and I hope you learned something. Please upvote, follow, and resteem if you found it informative. :)