We learn our primary colours pretty early on in life, and from that moment forward they’re ingrained into our brains, or so I thought. Because as it turns out I have absolutely no clue what red, yellow, or blue looks like, much less any hues found floating around between them.
The game that’s brought on this existential dread is dialed.gg, the colour game that has me looking at everything in a new and mostly confused way. It starts by making the not-so-bold claim that “Humans can’t reliably recall colours. This is a simple game to see how good (or bad) you are at it.”
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Then it starts. You get a few seconds to look at a colour and then it disappears and all you have to do is pick out the exact colour you saw. After you confirm your pick you get to see how close you were to the original colour. My personal best is 9.68, the original colour was H203 S62 B50 and I picked H206 S60 B55, pretty cool, I know.
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I had another couple of good runs, with a 9.47 accuracy for a forest green and a 9.45 accuracy for a neon green. I’m good at greens. Unfortunately, I wasn’t so skillful with other colours like pinks or reds, with my average score being around 7. Other than the fact that I simply can’t tell these colours apart, I initially thought that my biggest issue was with the hue—my brain seemed to be incapable of storing information pertaining to how bright a colour is. You learn something new about yourself every day.
The next step? Not an eye exam, no. Instead, I’m cranking up the difficulty to try the hardest mode on dialed.gg.
Again, I wouldn’t say I was awful at this, but on the harder difficulty you don’t just get less time to remember the colour but also have a few different colours flash on the screen beforehand, which can be a bit discombobulating.
I’ve now come to realise that my biggest issue when it comes to remembering colours is that I don’t actually know what the original colour is. I’ll see something that is clearly a light mossy green and think: “Oh, that’s mint green”, I’ll then pick mint green from memory and it won’t be anywhere near to the original colour.
So I see dialed.gg’s claim that humans can’t remember colours and raise: I’m bad at this game not entirely because of my bad memory, I simply do not know what colours are in the first place.
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