Existe um padrão curioso em escritos antigos, em Homero, na bíblia, e em textos egípcios, há uma paleta mais restrita na descrição do mundo, e usando cores que nos parecem absurdas para descrever as coisas. Percebeu-se que os termos para as cores vão aparecendo nos idiomas quase que numa ordem padronizada, ainda que com algumas variações. O mais constante era o princípio com preto e branco, então vermelho, e o azul sempre a última cor a ser incluída. Isso coincide com o grau de dificuldade que se tem de se produzir os pigmentos dessas respectivas cores, e também com o quanto a cor é comum ou rara na natureza, em algum grau. E mesmo atualmente, o povo Himba, da Namíbia, não tem um termo para "azul". E o mais surpreendente, eles têm muita dificuldade em distinguir azul de verde, em tons que nós conseguimos distinguir facilmente, mesmo sem ter nada diferente nos olhos, nenhum tipo de daltonismo.

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Why Isn't the Sky Blue?

What is the color of honey, and "faces pale with fear"? If you're Homer--one of the most influential poets in human history--that color is green. And the sea is "wine-dark," just like oxen...though sheep are violet. Which all sounds...well, really off. Producer Tim Howard introduces us to linguist Guy Deutscher, and the story of William Gladstone (a British Prime Minister back in the 1800s, and a huge Homer-ophile). Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue! Tim pays a visit to the New York Public Library, where a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last. Jules Davidoff, professor of neuropsychology at the University of London, helps us make sense of the way different people see different colors in the same place. Then Guy Deutscher tells us how he experimented on his daughter Alma when she was just starting to learn the colors of the world around, and above, her.

19 MB:
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio4.wnyc.org/radiolab/radiolab052112c.mp3

O site no link tem um player embutido, se não quiser baixar para ouvir:
http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/sky-isnt-blue/

Sem querer ser xiita, mas não seria " A origem cultural da visão a cores"?

Visão em cores.

Citação de: Derfel em 17 de Dezembro de 2012, 08:02:41

Sem querer ser xiita, mas não seria " A origem cultural da visão a cores"?

É, obrigado.

*vai lá e muda*

Citação de: SnowRaptor em 17 de Dezembro de 2012, 13:41:01

Visão em cores.

Vai ser visão "das cores", então, pronto.

Gladstone's solution to this conundrum was an idea so radical and so strange that he himself seriously doubted whether he should dare to include it in his book. As he reminisced twenty years later, he eventu­ally published it "only after submitting the facts to some very compe­ tent judges. For the case appeared to open up questions of great interest, with respect to the general structure of the human organs, and to the laws of hereditary growth." What makes his proposal even more aston­ ishing is the fact that he had never heard of color blindness. Although, as we shall see, this condition would become famous soon enough, in 1858 color blindness was unknown among the general public, and even those few specialists who were aware of it hardly understood it. And yet, without using the term itself, what Gladstone was proposing was nothing less than universal color blindness among the ancient Greeks.

The sensitivity to differences in color, he suggested, is an ability that evolved fully only in more recent history. As he put it, "the organ of colour and its impressions were but partially developed among the Greeks of the heroic age." Homer's contemporaries, Gladstone said, saw the world primarily through the opposition between light and darkness, with the colors of the rainbow appearing to them merely as indetermi­ nate modes between the two extremes of black and white. Or, to be more accurate, they saw the world in black and white with a dash ofred, for Gladstone conceded that the color sense was beginning to develop in Homer's time and had come to include red hues. This could be deduced from the fact that Homer's limited color vocabulary is heavily slanted toward red and that his main "red" word, eruthros, is rather untypically used only for red things, such as blood, wine, or copper.

The undeveloped state of color perception, Gladstone argues, can immediately explain why Homer had such lively and poetic concep­ tions of light and darkness while being so tight-lipped on prismatic colors. What is more, Homer's seemingly erratic color epithets will now "fall into their places, and we shall find that the Poet used them, from his own standing-ground, with great vigour and effect." For if Homer's "violet" or "wine-looking" are to be understood a s describing not par­ ticular hues but only particular shades of darkness, then designations such as "violet sheep" or "wine-looking sea" no longer seem so strange. Likewise, Homer's "green honey" becomes far more appetizing if we assume that what caught his eye was a particular kind of lightness rather than a particular prismatic color. In terms of etymology, chlOros derives from a word meaning "young herbage," which is typically fresh light green. But if the hue distinction between green, yellow, and light brown was of little consequence in Homer's time, then the prime asso­ ciation of chloros would have been not the greenness of the young herbage but rather its paleness and freshness. And as such, Gladstone concludes, it makes perfect sense to use chloros to describe (yellow) honey or (brown) freshly picked twigs.

Gladstone is well aware of the utter weirdness of the idea he is pro­ posing, so he tries to make it more palatable by evoking an evolutionary explanation for how sensitivity to colors could have increased over the generations. The perception of color, he says, seems natural to us only because mankind as a whole has undergone a progressive "education of the eye" over the last millennia: "the perceptions so easy and familiar to us are the results ofa slow traditionary growth in knowledge and in the training of the human organ, which commenced long before we took our place in the succession of mankind." The eye's ability to perceive and appreciate differences in color, he suggests, can improve with prac­ tice, and these acquired improvements are then passed on to the off­ spring. The next generation is thus born with a heightened sensitivity to color, which can be improved even further with continued practice. These subsequent improvements are bequeathed to the next generation, and so on.

But why, one may well ask, should this progressive refinement of color vision not have started much earlier than the Homeric period? Why did this process have to wait so long to get going, given that from time immemorial all things bright and beautiful have been blazing us in the eye? Gladstone's answer is a masterstroke of ingenuity, but one that seems almost as bizarre as the state of affairs it purports to account for. His theory was that color-in abstraction from the object that is colored-may start mattering to people only once they become exposed to artificial paints and dyes. The appreciation of color as a property independent of a particular material may thus have developed only hand in hand with the capacity to manipulate colors artificially. And that capacity, he notes, barely existed in Homer's day: the art of dyeing was only in its infancy, cultivation of flowers was not practiced, and almost all the brightly colored objects that we take for granted were entirely absent.

This dearth of artificial colors is particularly striking in the case of blue. Of course, the Mediterranean sky was just as sapphire in Homer's day, and the Cote just as azure. But whereas our eyes are saturated with all kinds of tangible objects that are blue, in all imaginable shades from the palest ice blue to the deepest navy, people in Homer's day may have gone through life without ever setting their eyes on a single blue object. Blue eyes, Gladstone explains, were in short supply, blue dyes, which are very difficult to manufacture, were practically unknown, natural flow­ ers that are truly blue are also rare.

Merely to be exposed to the haphazard colors of nature, Gladstone concludes, may not be enough to set offthe progressive training ofcolor vision. For this process to get going, the eye needs to be exposed to a methodically graded range of hues and shades. As he puts it, "The eye may require a familiarity with an ordered system of colours, as the con­ dition of its being able closely to appreciate anyone among them." With so little experience in manipulating and controlling colors artificially and so little reason to dwell on the color of materials as an independent property, the progressive improvement in the perception of color would thus have barely started in Homer's time. "The organ was given to Homer only in its infancy, which is now full-grown in us. So full-grown is it, that a child of three years in our nurseries knows, that is to say sees, more of colour than the man who founded for the race the sublime office of the poet."

What are we to make of Gladstone's theory? The verdict of his con­ temporaries was unequivocal: his claims were almost universally scoffed at as the fantasies of overzealous literal-mindedness, and the oddities he had uncovered were unceremoniously brushed away as poetic license, or as proofof the legend ofHomer's blindness, or both. With the benefit of hindsight, however, the verdict is less black and white. On one level, Gladstone was so accurate and farsighted that it would be inadequate to class him as merely ahead of his time. Fairer would be to say that his analysis was so brilliant that substantial parts of it can stand almost without emendation as a summary of the state of the art today, 150 years later. But on another level, Gladstone was completely off course. He made one cardinal error in his presuppositions about the relation between language and perception, but in this he was far from alone. Indeed, philologists, anthropologists, and even natural scientists would need decades to free themselves from this error: underestimating the power of culture. source: Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. Chapter 1: Naming the Rainbow

Daltonismo generalizado na Grécia antiga? Progressivo refinamento da visão das cores? Pelo visto, não:

Colored statues? To us, classical antiquity means white marble. Not so to the Greeks, who thought of their gods in living color and portrayed them that way too. The temples that housed them were in color, also, like mighty stage sets. Time and weather have stripped most of the hues away. And for centuries people who should have known better pretended that color scarcely mattered.

White marble has been the norm ever since the Renaissance, when classical antiquities first began to emerge from the earth. The sculpture of Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons struggling with serpents sent, it is said, by the sea god Poseidon (discovered in 1506 in Rome and now at the Vatican Museums) is one of the greatest early finds. Knowing no better, artists in the 16th century took the bare stone at face value. Michelangelo and others emulated what they believed to be the ancient aesthetic, leaving the stone of most of their statues its natural color. Thus they helped pave the way for neo-Classicism, the lily-white style that to this day remains our paradigm for Greek art.

By the early 19th century, the systematic excavation of ancient Greek and Roman sites was bringing forth great numbers of statues, and there were scholars on hand to document the scattered traces of their multicolored surfaces. Some of these traces are still visible to the naked eye even today, though much of the remaining color faded, or disappeared entirely, once the statues were again exposed to light and air. Some of the pigment was scrubbed off by restorers whose acts, while well intentioned, were tantamount to vandalism. In the 18th century, the pioneering archaeologist and art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann chose to view the bare stone figures as pure—if you will, Platonic—forms, all the loftier for their austerity. "The whiter the body is, the more beautiful it is as well," he wrote. "Color contributes to beauty, but it is not beauty. Color should have a minor part in the consideration of beauty, because it is not [color] but structure that constitutes its essence." Against growing evidence to the contrary, Winckelmann's view prevailed. For centuries to come, antiquarians who envisioned the statues in color were dismissed as eccentrics, and such challenges as they mounted went ignored.

Continua aqui: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/true-colors.html
Exemplos: http://blog.garycorby.com/2010/07/colors-of-ancient-greece.html

O podcast não diz que a hipótese do Gladstone estava correta, quanto a explicação. O livro citado é uma das recomendações de literatura posterior, inclusive.

Também pouco depois de postar me lembrei dessa descoberta de que as/algumas estátuas gregas tinham cores que as fazem parecer dançarinos de frevo, e me perguntei se poderia ter alguma implicação, mas nem pensei em ir atrás disso porque teria que ir atrás das datas e termos em grego para as cores, origens deles, etc, quando provavelmente há pesquisa "pronta" mais completado que eu poderia fazer.

Vou ver se encontro mais coisas sobre o assunto.

Citar

http://neuroanthropology.net/2008/03/05/sapir-whorf-hypothesis-was-right-about-adults/

[...]

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It is well known that in adults, perception of colour is processed predominantly by the left hemisphere, which is also where most people process language. Studies have shown that the language one speaks can have an impact on the colour one sees.

[...]

The interesting twist on this report is that the team also tested pre-linguistic infants, from four to six month olds. Unlike the adults, the children were able to do perceptual tasks requiring colour categorization faster in the left visual field, suggesting that colour perception is a right hemisphere phenomenon in 4- to 6-month-olds. As the abstract to Franklin et al. (2008) explains: ‘The findings suggest that language-driven [category perception] in adults may not build on prelinguistic [category perception], but that language instead imposes its categories on a [left hemisphere] that is not categorically prepartitioned.’

The article by Smith goes on to discuss a couple of other interesting research papers (one of which I might return to in another post), but I found this instability in colour perception fascinating. The data suggests that there might be a discontinuity in the way that people categorize (and perceive, more importantly) colours between infancy and later life. The pre-linguistic way in which infants perceive colour may not necessarily be the foundation for colour perception later on, once a child learns language.

In other words, instead of having a part of our brain which categorizes colours, we have at least two ways we could do it, one that only emerges after we’ve learned language. I suppose that, at least in the populations that the Berkeley team were testing, the later-to-arise language-related categorizing capacity seems to displace the earlier way of accomplishing the task. Of course, it might not wipe out the earlier capacity, and it might emerge under duress or if there was some organic problem with the left hemisphere, dominant solution (which might be language based). [...]

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Color Categories Are Culturally Diverse in Cognition as Well as in Language
Debi Roberson1
+ Author Affiliations
1University of Essex
Abstract

Categorization is a fundamental property of human cognition. This article presents a summary of recent research that has reexamined the nature of linguistic and nonlinguistic color categories and the relationship between them. Improvements in experimental paradigms combined with a better understanding of the relationship between physiology and higher level cognition have led to a clearer understanding of the complexities of the relationship between culture, language, cognition, and perception. It is concluded that possession of linguistic color categories facilitates recognition and influences perceptual judgments, even in languages with terms that are less abstract than English. Cognitive categories for color appear to be tightly tied to the linguistic terms used to describe them.

http://ccr.sagepub.com/content/39/1/56.abstract

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Language, thought, and color: Whorf was half right

Terry Regier1, *, and Paul Kay2, *,

1 Department of Psychology, University of Chicago, 5848 S. University Avenue, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
2 Department of Linguistics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 and International Computer Science Institute, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley, CA 94704, USA

* The two authors contributed equally to this work.

Abstract

The Whorf hypothesis holds that we view the world filtered through the semantic categories of our native language. Over the years, consensus has oscillated between embrace and dismissal of this hypothesis. Here, we review recent findings on the naming and perception of color, and argue that in this semantic domain the Whorf hypothesis is half right, in two different ways: (1) language influences color perception primarily in half the visual field, and (2) color naming across languages is shaped by both universal and language-specific forces. To the extent that these findings generalize to other semantic domains they suggest a possible resolution of the debate over the Whorf hypothesis.

http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/abstract/S1364-6613(09)00145-4

Citação de: Buckaroo Banzai em 17 de Dezembro de 2012, 01:26:42

Existe um padrão curioso em escritos antigos, em Homero, na bíblia, e em textos egípcios, há uma paleta mais restrita na descrição do mundo, e usando cores que nos parecem absurdas para descrever as coisas. Percebeu-se que os termos para as cores vão aparecendo nos idiomas quase que numa ordem padronizada, ainda que com algumas variações. O mais constante era o princípio com preto e branco, então vermelho, e o azul sempre a última cor a ser incluída. Isso coincide com o grau de dificuldade que se tem de se produzir os pigmentos dessas respectivas cores, e também com o quanto a cor é comum ou rara na natureza, em algum grau. E mesmo atualmente, o povo Himba, da Namíbia, não tem um termo para "azul". E o mais surpreendente, eles têm muita dificuldade em distinguir azul de verde, em tons que nós conseguimos distinguir facilmente, mesmo sem ter nada diferente nos olhos, nenhum tipo de daltonismo.

Citar

Why Isn't the Sky Blue?

What is the color of honey, and "faces pale with fear"? If you're Homer--one of the most influential poets in human history--that color is green. And the sea is "wine-dark," just like oxen...though sheep are violet. Which all sounds...well, really off. Producer Tim Howard introduces us to linguist Guy Deutscher, and the story of William Gladstone (a British Prime Minister back in the 1800s, and a huge Homer-ophile). Gladstone conducted an exhaustive study of every color reference in The Odyssey and The Iliad. And he found something startling: No blue! Tim pays a visit to the New York Public Library, where a book of German philosophy from the late 19th Century helps reveal a pattern: across all cultures, words for colors appear in stages. And blue always comes last. Jules Davidoff, professor of neuropsychology at the University of London, helps us make sense of the way different people see different colors in the same place. Then Guy Deutscher tells us how he experimented on his daughter Alma when she was just starting to learn the colors of the world around, and above, her.

19 MB:
http://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/audio4.wnyc.org/radiolab/radiolab052112c.mp3

O site no link tem um player embutido, se não quiser baixar para ouvir:
http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/sky-isnt-blue/

Pergunta boba : como unificar essa visão da origem da visão em cores, com o evolucionismo, o desenvolvimento das estruturas, etc?

Abs
Felipe

O Pinker escreveu algo sobre isso em um de seus livros, não lembro qual. Há povos que, por exemplo, tem uma palavra para as cores escuras e outra para as cores frias, alguns separam vermelho de amarelo, mas continuam sem diferenciar as cores frias, e assim por diante.

Um caso curioso é que os russos vêem duas cores totalmente diferentes onde vemos azul: goluboy e siniy. Goluboy seria algo próximo do nosso ciano e siniy tenderia mais para o nosso azul escuro. Mas não é como se eles simplesmente tivessem uma palavra especial para um tom de azul, os russos simplesmente não conseguem conciliar que ciano e azul escuro sejam dois azuis, assim como nós não conseguimos conciliar que azul e verde sejam duas cores.

Citar

English and Russian color terms divide the color spectrum differently. Unlike English, Russian makes an obligatory distinction between lighter blues (“goluboy”) and darker blues (“siniy”). We investigated whether this linguistic difference leads to differences in color discrimination. We tested English and Russian speakers in a speeded color discrimination task using blue stimuli that spanned the siniy/goluboy border. We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task. These effects were stronger for difficult discriminations (i.e., when the colors were perceptually close) than for easy discriminations (i.e., when the colors were further apart). English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage in any of the conditions. These results demonstrate that (i) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference).

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full

Eu não acho que os russos e nós (literalmente) enxerguemos o mundo de maneira diferente, apenas que nossas linguagens afetem a maneira como o pensamos. Pode parecer estranho para nós alguns povos tenham palavras apenas para claro e escuro, mas se você pensar bem, nós não temos palavras próprias para cheiros. Nos limitamos a dizer que flores cheiram bem e que cocô cheira mal, mas não temos uma palavra para definir o quanto o cheiro da rosa se diferencia do cheiro da orquídea. Quando muito temos classes bem gerais para cheiros de perfume, como amadeirado e frutado.

Uma pessoa sem muita educação musical, como eu, também não sabe descrever precisamente o que é um dó e o que é um sol, apesar de ouvir as mesmas notas que uma pessoa educada. Eu sei que dó e sol são diferentes e eu as percebo diferente, mas eu não sei em que qualidade elas são diferentes uma da outra.

Citação de: Feliperj em 26 de Dezembro de 2012, 23:36:58

Pergunta boba : como unificar essa visão da origem da visão em cores, com o evolucionismo, o desenvolvimento das estruturas, etc?

Abs
Felipe

Primeiramente evoluiu a capacidade de visão a cores em primatas primatas arborícolas frugívoros, favorecendo o reconhecimento e distinção de frutas e qualidade delas. Isso deve ser o que você quer dizer por "desenvolvimento das estruturas", imagino.

Então essa "estrutura" se manteve na linhagem que gerou os humanos, na qual surgiram novas "dimensões" de capacidades cognitivas, como linguagem, e maior reflexão/premeditação. Então os humanos examinam mais trabalhadamente os estímulos sensoriais, e eventualmente dão nomes, categorias, etc. Isso por sua vez deve ter tido alguns "impactos" nas capacidades predecedentes. E/ou apenas faz com que tenhamos consciência limitada delas, de acordo com a atenção dedicada.

Acho que algo similar acontece com sons, na distinção das notas musicais. Isso deve fazer parecer algo menos esquisito e até "familiar". A evolução do nosso aparelho auditivo precede a "formalização" da música, mas apenas as pessoas com algum treinamento musical têm facilidade em distinguir as notas. Mas isso não se deve tanto a diferenças "graves" no sistema auditivo ou mesmo nas áreas do cérebro que lidam com isso. E parece que inclusive mesmo as pessoas sem treino musical são capazes na maior parte do tempo de fazer essas distinções em testes concebidos para tornar desnecessário o treinamento musical (assim como a maioria dos animais). Algo parecido também ocorre com sotaques e dislexia, que parecem ser "falta de treino" em distinguir alguns fonemas (ou associar fonemas a sílabas de acordo com o contexto), sem estar necessariamente acompanhados de qualquer problema no aparelho auditivo.

Também há de qualquer forma a possibilidade que o uilinili colocou, disso ser um fenômeno meio ilusório e não haver diferença significativa nem na percepção (acho que diferentemente então do que ocorre com sons/notas), mas a explicação evolutiva seria mais ou menos a mesma.

Citação de: Buckaroo Banzai em 27 de Dezembro de 2012, 00:22:10

Citação de: Feliperj em 26 de Dezembro de 2012, 23:36:58

Pergunta boba : como unificar essa visão da origem da visão em cores, com o evolucionismo, o desenvolvimento das estruturas, etc?

Abs
Felipe

Primeiramente evoluiu a capacidade de visão a cores em primatas primatas arborícolas frugívoros, favorecendo o reconhecimento e distinção de frutas e qualidade delas. Isso deve ser o que você quer dizer por "desenvolvimento das estruturas", imagino.

Então essa "estrutura" se manteve na linhagem que gerou os humanos, na qual surgiram novas "dimensões" de capacidades cognitivas, como linguagem, e maior reflexão/premeditação. Então os humanos examinam mais trabalhadamente os estímulos sensoriais, e eventualmente dão nomes, categorias, etc. Isso por sua vez deve ter tido alguns "impactos" nas capacidades predecedentes. E/ou apenas faz com que tenhamos consciência limitada delas, de acordo com a atenção dedicada.

Acho que algo similar acontece com sons, na distinção das notas musicais. Isso deve fazer parecer algo menos esquisito e até "familiar". A evolução do nosso aparelho auditivo precede a "formalização" da música, mas apenas as pessoas com algum treinamento musical têm facilidade em distinguir as notas. Mas isso não se deve tanto a diferenças "graves" no sistema auditivo ou mesmo nas áreas do cérebro que lidam com isso. E parece que inclusive mesmo as pessoas sem treino musical são capazes na maior parte do tempo de fazer essas distinções em testes concebidos para tornar desnecessário o treinamento musical (assim como a maioria dos animais). Algo parecido também ocorre com sotaques e dislexia, que parecem ser "falta de treino" em distinguir alguns fonemas (ou associar fonemas a sílabas de acordo com o contexto), sem estar necessariamente acompanhados de qualquer problema no aparelho auditivo.

Também há de qualquer forma a possibilidade que o uilinili colocou, disso ser um fenômeno meio ilusório e não haver diferença significativa nem na percepção (acho que diferentemente então do que ocorre com sons/notas), mas a explicação evolutiva seria mais ou menos a mesma.

Mas o problema que vejo, são os casos que vc citou onde existe um "daltonismo", mesmo com as estruturas presentes. Isto, em tese, reforçaria a hipotese que a capacidade de ver uma determinada cor, veio de algum tipo de aprendizado cultural . Me parece um pouco a estória dos navios espanhóis que não foram vistos pelos índios.......Qual a teoria para explicar essa teoria ?rs

Abs
Felipe

Acho que esse "daltonismo" viria de não se exercitar partes do cérebro a fazer esse reconhecimento, meio como deve ser com os sons/notas.

Outra instância possivelmente relacioanda foi mencionada em outro segmento do mesmo episódio, onde tinha uma mulher que era supostamente "anti-daltônica", teria cones e/ou bastões diferentes adicionais e poderia assim fazer mais distinções de cores, e, quando comparada a pessoas comuns, de fato tinha a capacidade de distinguir cores que pareciam iguais aos olhos dos outros. Mas essa capacidade não era diferente da de um homem (que portanto não poderia ter a mesma capacidade em nível estrutural por questões genéticas) que era pintor, presumivelmente porque ele dedicou boa parte do seu tempo a fazer distinções entre cores mais sutis. O "daltonismo cultural" seria possivelmente análogo à situação do homem comum/não-pintor, numa situação onde as cores "conhecidas" pela cultura são poucas, abaixando assim o "nível mínimo" da população.