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Your intuition is right, and can be explained by looking at both the visible spectrogram and also the CIE diagram. In the former, what we call green takes up an

Your intuition is right, and can be explained by looking at both the visible spectrogram and also the CIE diagram. In the former, what we call green takes up an inordinate amount of the spectrum. In the latter, green clearly takes up the largest amount of area of any well defined color. Your eye is most receptive to green, in both the narrow and broad sense. The absolute peak is a green, and of any reasonable, well defined broad grouping of spectra, the greenest one is the one your eye will be most receptive to. Also interestingly, the two colors that dovetail into colors we cannot see on either end, red and violet, we are the least receptive to. You can see this play out in real survey results from XKCD: https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

quietbritishjim 2y ago
> Your intuition is right ... Your eye is most receptive to green ... of any reasonable, well defined broad grouping of spectra, the greenest one is the one your eye will be most receptive to. Hmm, but doesn't that disagree with my intuition? Unless I misunderstood you? I'm saying green looks similar to nearby colours so should take up less space on a perceptual colour wheel (e.g. blue and green look much more similar than blue and red to me, so blue and green should be much closer to each other). But you're saying we can perceive many shades of green, presumably with the implication that it should take up more space on perceptual colour wheel. That xckd article seems to agree with me: a huge chunk of the physical colour space is simply lumped into "green", rather than given lots of different names at you'd expect if different bits appeared visually distinctive. In fact, this all is not necessarily a contradiction: perhaps we can distinguish between extremely similar shades of green, better than other colours, but experience even very different shades of green as feeling subjectively similar.

quietbritishjim 2y ago

> Your intuition is right ... Your eye is most receptive to green ... of any reasonable, well defined broad grouping of spectra, the greenest one is the one your eye will be most receptive to. Hmm, but doesn't that disagree with my intuition? Unless I misunderstood you? I'm saying green looks similar to nearby colours so should take up less space on a perceptual colour wheel (e.g. blue and green look much more similar than blue and red to me, so blue and green should be much closer to each other). But you're saying we can perceive many shades of green, presumably with the implication that it should take up more space on perceptual colour wheel. That xckd article seems to agree with me: a huge chunk of the physical colour space is simply lumped into "green", rather than given lots of different names at you'd expect if different bits appeared visually distinctive. In fact, this all is not necessarily a contradiction: perhaps we can distinguish between extremely similar shades of green, better than other colours, but experience even very different shades of green as feeling subjectively similar.