Your colour is your superpower | Natalia Filvarova | TEDxLviv

[Applause] raise your hand if you have an item of clothes that is purple a few people in the audience now raise your hand if you feel like that item of clothing defines who you are as a person quite a few hundreds of years ago purple was the real color that defined whether you'd belong to royalty or not in the mediterranean hundreds and thousands of years ago you'd need about 250 thousand of teeny tiny sea snails to color a piece of fabric in this beautiful purple and it would cost so so much money that if you

could afford it you'd really want to dress in it and show everybody how rich you are in fact it was so expensive that roughly until the 16th century it was forbidden for the commoners to wear purple only the royalty would be allowed to do that so that you could walk out and say immediately who you are colors have been defining society as we know it for hundreds and thousands of years too in ancient egypt for example papyri and pyramids would be decorated in yellow and gold to bring us closer to sun to the divinity and

joy of the afterlife van gogh would use yellow in his sunflowers to bring summer a little bit closer to you and make you feel cheerful william turner one of the most famous painters to use indian yellow would use it to make you feel joy even in those paintings that in fact depict tragedy and even though yellow has been used for happiness there is also a heavy history of the scholar meaning sadness for instance in nazi germany jews would be marked with a yellow star ships on the sea would fly a yellow flag to show that

people there are dying and are quarantined for hundreds and thousands of years we've used color to tell others what we cannot giorgio o'keefe a famous painter said that she used color to say things that otherwise had to be left unsaid and nature has been communicating in color since the beginning of times evolutionary speaking animals have used their colors to bring mates around to attract their attention there is birds who will be multicolored and rainbowy and yet there's insects like this butterfly who have no color at all who blend into the nature and remain unnoticed and

the communication is sometimes unseen to us look at this bird it's a simple black and yellow and yet to a different bird it looks like that it's full of color and rainbow and in fact all of us see colors a little bit differently dogs for instance have a completely different palette it's a little bit reduced bees on the other hand where we see a simple yellow flower see a burst of red and white and blue and we don't have to look at animals at all in fact about a couple percent of you will see a

pack of skittles like that some others will see it like this and others will see it in this palette and all of you will see one of these four and we only call normal what the majority see even though the reality is truly different my name is natalia i am a neuroscientist and i've spent the past about eight years of my life trying to understand how we make sense of the world around us and how colors combine with other things to give meaning and what was so striking to me is to realize that despite the

fact that all of us see the world in a different color palette the colors in reality don't actually exist at all this is what's called the electromagnetic spectrum it's the waves that surround us in our everyday life and a little bit part of these waves the same waves as you have in your microwave or in your phone can be seen by our eye it's called the visible spectrum let's take an example here is a red apple you might look at it and get immediately excited because it looks so juicy and red but in fact the

apple is not red what happens is that the electromagnetic waves get reflected from the surface of the apple and perceived by your eye the apple is not red the waves that could reflect it from it are also not red the red happens in your brain you see something and about 400 million cells and steps will happen in your brain to make you see the color red and this is where the difference between many of us comes we have three types of special cells in our eyes wild birds have four which allows us to see this

but birds see so much more and the differences go way beyond the biology let's do a little experiment here are three circles a b and c i will ask you which one you think does not belong raise your hand if you think a is the odd one out it doesn't belong there majority what about b a few people and what about c a few more the striking majority of you said that it's a and the reason for that is because for us culturally in ukrainian the colors are zelene in english in fact they are just

green and blue so for them it's completely different and for a little tribe in mexico called the tarahumara tribe this entire color is just one sio name so even though for most of you a was the odd one out for them all of these colors are the same because they are called the same now what this really shows us is that the division of color is artificial we have the spectrum of light and through culture society history we learn to divide it into arbitrary and artificial sections now this division is so arbitrary that in fact

it's possible to map colors onto sounds this happened in the 1800s where a physicist did exactly that he drew parallels between the sound waves and the colors and said that they match together two different realities of the world were brought into one unite complex and for about 10 of our population this happens every day there is a condition called synesthesia and this condition describes where for some reason you can match colors and other senses to something completely different for example some people always know that red is the number four or monday is always yellow and

these mappings are so strong that they are unable to get rid of them and in fact when i was a little girl and something was hurting i would ask my mom it hurts i don't know what to do and she'd tell me okay tell me how much it hurts and i couldn't put a number on it i couldn't say it hurts a lot or a little i would just say it hurts yellow whatever that means and thanks for my mom to understanding that but i was describing my pains in colors and many people keep that

ability for the entirety of their life now this mapping is fascinating here's a picture of a brain and we have a little area highlighted there it's called the orbit of frontal cortex this part of our brain is responsible for helping us make decisions evaluating what's more important what's not and studies show that when we see a color that matches with something else that corresponds to it such as the yellow color with the smell of a lemon this brain area is more active what this really means is that if our colors support and match whatever it

is that is happening in our life our brain will be faster and more efficient at making decisions now let's look at some fun examples of that earlier today you had an opportunity to rate different colored m ms and this is a study that has been done multiple times in research and what research has shown is that consistently and repeatedly people will rate red m ms as sweeter compared to green ones so red because it's so strongly associated with sweetness and ripeness makes the same m m's that have the same composition taste different a different study

showed that women who put pictures on their dating profiles wearing red have a much higher chance of attracting a guy compared to women in a blue dress and that's because for us red is such a strong sexual color that when we dress in it we almost scream to attract attention it's also a color of power if we look at the ties that u.s presidential candidates wore for their election debates about 66 of them were read now it's up to you to decide whether this is a coincidence or whether obama and trump are trying to tell

us that they are the leader that we should go for and the leadership of red is so striking that on the flag of south africa it's there to depict violence that led to freedom on the other hand for example we have green green is such a strong color for us to feel peace and calmness that studies show that when you exercise you will feel much better so if you look at a green screen while exercising compared to a black and white one or red one you will feel more energized and more relaxed afterwards and you

can also exercise your brain and your mind it has been shown that if you write your notes in green or on green post-its you will actually remember better because you will be more at peace more calm and more focused so if you have a test coming up or an exam coming up soon write those post-its in green and surround yourself with green plants now when it comes to our surroundings and environment color also plays a huge role let's look at this example here we see two interiors one of them has a yellow light and another

one has a white light studies show that in the yellow light we will feel more calm and in the white light we will feel more energized and ready to work and the reason for that is millions of years ago when you didn't have your alarm clock on your iphone or your blinds on the windows the sun would tell you and guide your behavior you'd wake up in the morning with a soft yellow light and you'd go to sleep when you're tired with a soft yellow light and yet during the day when the sun wasn't venice

and white you'd have to work now most of us work in offices like this one right now they're pretty dull and boring and yet studies have repeatedly shown that if we put ourselves in an office kind of like this one our productivity will rise about 20 and this is because one in an environment that energizes and makes us feel different things red for passion green for peace we will allow ourselves to dream and imagine and yet despite the fact that color communicates and guides us so much recently we are diverting from it for instance this

is the color palette for fashion shows of 2019. it's pretty subdued and basic and in fact in recent years fashion has shifted from colors to complete absence of color perhaps in an attempt to dive attention away from the garment and to us as individuals it's no more about the purple you wear it's about who you are and at the same time though we use a variety of color a palette of the rainbow to signify that we're all different diversity movements all across the world will use the rainbow flag to show that there is no boundaries

and limits to us modern art installations for example like this one by gabriel dave will use a rainbow of colors to help us understand that there is no limit to our imagination that even having 15 strings of colored thread we can create an endless variety of feelings mark rotco said i am not interested in the relationship of color i am interested only in expressing with color the basic human emotions tragedy ecstasy and doom so whenever you feel that tragedy that you cannot put in words remember that you can use a color whenever you feel the

ecstasy that cannot be expressed in language remember that your brain was given the ability to take the world that is otherwise colorless and transform it into limitless possibilities whenever you feel the doom remember that you can take a color and help yourself and others understand you the tragedy the ecstasy the doom the passion the lust and the peace have been communicated to us by nature and each other through color for centuries so don't forget the power that you have to use the color to express who you are thank you [Music] [Applause] you