Your Brain Can't Handle This Colour

This colour here would probably best be described as “mauve” – but your brain actually can’t deal with it.

It’s a bit confusing, but your brain actually can’t handle this colour. Some might call it mauve, some might call it violet. But you most likely won’t remember it.

A new study out of Johns Hopkins reveals that people can’t remember specific hues – instead, their brains convert them into roughly similar, more generic colours.

This is what their press release reads:

“First the researchers asked subjects to look at a colour wheel made up of 180 different hues, and to find the “best” examples of blue, pink, green, purple, orange and yellow. Next they conducted a memory experiment with a different group of participants. These participants were shown a coloured square for one tenth of a second. They were asked to try to remember it, looking at a blank screen for a little less than one second, and then asked to find the colour on the colour wheel featuring the 180 hues.

When attempting to match hues, all subjects tended to err on the side of the basic, “best” colours, but the bias toward the archetypes amplified considerably when subjects had to remember the hue, even for less than a second.”

When people were asked to recall the colour in question above, the majority pointed to a much more simple colour for their brains to comprehend: Pink.

Weird, right??