What can you call the color you see if there is absolutely no light in the room? What color is darkness? The very darkest?
Darkness Has Its Own Color
The first to research and explain the «real» color of darkness was Gustav Theodor Fechner. He, being a scientist in the field of experimental psychology, a physicist, and a philosopher, actively studied human perception of color. It was Fechner who suggested that, instead of black, darkness is rather the color «eigengrau.» Translated from German, eigengrau means «intrinsic gray» and represents a color slightly brighter than black.
Black Is Darker
However, in order to understand what eigengrau looks like, you need to try to figure out how people perceive darkness. Choose any black object in front of you and look at it for one or two seconds. Now turn off the light and close your eyes, and if you are in a well-lit room – shut them tight. Let your eyes adjust to the darkness that has set in, and then suddenly open them. It may take several attempts, but over time you will notice that the black object will be darker than the color of complete darkness that you saw when you closed your eyes.
When we close our eyes or are plunged into complete darkness, most people see a blurry gray field. And it usually consists of alternating areas of tiny white and black dots. It is precisely this color that is called eigengrau. What we «see» – is visual noise.
How We Perceive Colors
The receptors in the retina of our eye are divided into rods and cones. The rods are responsible for monochrome images, that is, they perceive only dark and light radiation, while the cones – distinguish various colors. When light enters the rods, a series of reactions occurs that begin the process of triggering a nerve impulse. Since the human eye numbers more than one hundred and twenty million rods, the effect of these nerve impulses is expressed in the appearance of visual noise.
The amount of visual noise is the same regardless of whether our eyes are closed or open. The problem is that the noise itself is in motion, and we, by and large, do not even see it. Consequently, the question arises: how can we see an object that is darker than the visual noise, if we do not see the visual noise itself? And the answer – is contrast.
A Different View
Let us conduct one more experiment: open a completely black image on your phone and stretch it to fill the whole screen. Look at the phone screen in a lit room – the brighter the surrounding objects, the darker the phone screen will seem. However, as soon as you turn off the light completely, this same phone screen, because of its backlight, will become the brightest object in the room. Now it will have a grayish tint. When our brain processes visual information, contrast is more important than the brightness of objects. Therefore the darkness, as we see it, is related to the brightest thing at which we are looking.
On this basis, when our eyes adjust to the darkness and begin to distinguish darker and lighter silhouettes, paradoxical as it may be, the darkness becomes lighter than any black object, taking on the color eigengrau. If the color of darkness were black, we would not be able to distinguish the outlines of shapes – all objects would then merge into a single black canvas.
Scientists Have Settled the Debate About the Chicken and the Egg – It Is Now Clear Which Came First
