A team of scientists claims to have discovered a new colour that humans cannot see without the help of technology.
The researchers based in the United States said they were able to “experience” the colour, which they named “olo”, by firing laser pulses into their eyes using a device named after the Wizard of Oz.
What has the study found?
Professors from the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Washington School of Medicine published an article in the journal, Science Advances, on April 18 in which they put forth their discovery of a hue beyond the gamut of human vision.
They explained that they had devised a technique called Oz, which can “trick” the human eye into seeing olo. The technique is named after the Wizard of Oz.
In the Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, Frank Baum wrote about a man who uses tricks to fool the residents of the fictional land of Oz into thinking he’s a wizard. For instance, it is believed that the Emerald City, the capital of Oz, is so bright and vibrant that visitors have to wear special glasses to protect their eyes. The glasses are one of the wizard’s tricks, since they make the city appear greener and grander.
How do humans perceive colour?
The human eye perceives colour via three types of photoreceptor or “cone cells” in the retina. S cones pick up shorter, blue wavelengths of light; M cones detect medium, green wavelengths; and L cones detect longer, red wavelengths.
“The signals from these cones are then sent through a complex series of cells in the retina that act to clean up and integrate the signal before passing it down the optic nerve through parts of the brain,” Francis Windram, a research associate at the department of life sciences at Imperial College London, told Al Jazeera.
The part of the brain that the visual information is passed to is the visual cortex.