Colour me

I have been mulling over an idea for a while now, since watching something on the TV about perception. I think it was Horizon or similar, but it was broadly looking at how the brain works and how we perceive the world around us. Part of this revolved around colours. Colour perception, it seems, is closely linked to language - to the extent that apparently we can only easily perceive colours for which we have a word. This was illustrated through an African tribe who's language only contains 5 colour words one of which covers most of what we would call blues and greens. When shown a selection of coloured shapes and asked to distinguish the odd one out, they struggled to spot the one that was (in our language and to my brain) distinctly a blue amongst greens.

The conclusion was basically that our perception of the world is affected by our knowledge of language - that people with few discernible colour words might see the world differently. This struck me particularly because my sons are colourblind so I already know that they perceive the world differently, but I guess I hadn't considered that language would be such a key factor.

Anyway it got me to thinking that it makes sense to try to help people get as good a grasp of the language of colour as possible. I'd obviously really like my kids to have as rich an experience of the world as they can, but also all those other people who haven't encountered, learnt or experienced a wide variety of colours.

So a project perhaps, to teach people more colours. A simple dynamic interface, I thought, that draws colours with distinct names from a source (like Wikipedia) and presents the name, description (perhaps to aid those who have difficulty with some colours) and then a selection of photographs that give contexts in which the colour appears. This apparently is the other element that's important in aiding perception, and one would imagine, recall. Could use something like the ideelabs api I would think.

Not fully formed but given some time or a helping hand an achievable little project.