Colours and Emotions: Norms for Normal People

Seems that in the world today, everywhere you look there is bright colours flashing ubiquitously trying to grab your attention. Along with the colours, advertisements and commercials use emotions to grab the viewer’s attention and make the possible customer attach a feeling to their product. These recognitions allowed me to think about some things.
Colours and Emotions present in today’s society really are for the normal population and seen as a norm for everyday life. Try, for example, giving a definition for colour without using other colours, shades or brightness to refer to. I did this myself and found it extremely difficult to try and give this definition. Essentially what you’re trying to do is provide a definition suitable for a colour blind individual. Think about this for a second. The colour blue. Quite a common colour that any ‘normal’ person could recognize. Dictionary.com has the definition of the colour blue; The hue of that portion of the visible spectrum lying between green and indigo, evoked in the human observer by radiant energy with wavelengths of approximately 420 to 490 nanometers. Now, I don’t know about you, but unless you aren’t colour blind, can see wavelengths in the air, or recognize radiant energy, this would be quite a difficult description for you. This brings me to the conclusion firstly that it’d be very difficult to attract colour blind individuals from a marketing perspective and even in common every day life. Think about something as simple as traffic lights. If a colour blind individual did not know the order of the lights for go, caution, and stop, it could turn into a disastrous situation.
Moving on in a similar train of thought, emotions comes to mind. To some, this may not seem similar, but take a second and reflect. Staying consistent, dictionary.com describes the emotion ‘happy’ as; Enjoying, showing, or marked by pleasure, satisfaction, or joy. Once again, this may seem quite simple to an individual such as yourself from the ‘normal’ population. Imagine, however, trying to describe an emotion to an emotionless individual or a robot that is only trained to communicate and not feel or recognize emotions. To feel emotions or even sense them, the body has developed amazing methods. Hormonal regulation, neural regulation and neurotransmitters are only a portion of what scientists have speculated in the generation of emotions. Are humans the only life form on Earth that recognize emotions? This becomes quite hard concept to accept. Take animals such as dogs for instance. Is it possible that dogs understand completely what emotion their ‘owner’ feels and that is why they are known as such good companions? Does this mean that in an emotional recognition perspective they are just as ‘smart’ as humans or even superior?

I could go on and on with this concept, but I just want to present the general idea to the public. Its amazing how many things are taken for granted in this world and most individuals have no idea about so many things in this world. Colours and emotions are quite complex phenomenon and scientists have only scratched the surface. Think hard, and think strong, you crazy brain you.

Jay.Concepts.Inc