Anyone else pondered about this? The color that you see as red is really the color green that I see, but since you grew up to know that color has a specific purpose it would not make difference.
Heres a chart to grasp this question
To Me: To You:
Red looks like Red Red looks like my Green
Green looks like Green Green looks like my Red
Or am I just talking out of my !@# here?
Many people have such questions when they are young, myself included. This is one of the reasons I went to science in the first place. The answer to this particular question is yes it looks different, but not in the way you describe.
Colors looks different to people because the response of our eyes to different light wavelengths is similar, but not exact between people. The response to "green" range wavelengths in particular tends to vary. What we perceive as color is just a combination of signals from our eye to our brain and so the brain input is different if your eyes are different. Color is not even a particular wavelength - it is just the total response of the eye to the combination of wavelengths that enter. An infinite combination of wavelengths (spectra) can produce the exact same color for a given set of eyes. The interesting part is that while it is easy to produce two spectra that will produce the same eye response from one person, they may produce a different response from another. How the brain interprets the colors and present them to you (itself) as a colored image is something we cannot compare between people. I really do not know enough about the brain to tell if there are limits we can place on how different are two individual brains are from each other in the detailed way they function.
We can say for certain that different people see different color shades as least. It is well known that male color vision is usually inferior to female's. My wife use color threads for sawing that all look the same to me unless I make a real effort to tell the difference and she is stunned that I cannot see what is an obvious "completely different color". I do not have any particular color vision problem. In this case it is likely that the eyes are different and not the brain.
This is text is from Douglas Hofstaders book “I am a strange loop”. It explain this question very good:
Say a person has an inverted perceptions of white and black. This makes no sense as the properties of black and white are dependent on how much light is reflected by a surface. If the case was that the persons perceptions were inverted, he would see better when it’s dark outside. No such person has been found to date.
How does this apply to the other colors you ask? Well, different colors have different properties under different lighting conditions. Take red for example, if you’ve been outside on a dark night you may have noticed that red fades to black much faster than other colors, say a person has inverted perception of red and yellow, he would find that yellow fades faster than red. Nobody has been proven to have this property of vision either.
If you have inverted black and white, you would see in negative. A negative B/W image is not better or inferior to a normal B/W, only looks weird when you are not used to it. When using thermal night vision instruments, some people prefer hot as white and others hot as black.
The argument about color is not exactly valid either since what makes red fade faster into black is the response curves for the different sensing cells in the eye. If yellow was red, yellow would fade faster into black because the signals coming from the eye to the brain would act in the exact opposite way. This is 100% sensor effect and not brain interpretation.
