Why do our brains love color so much?

If a book is filled with words, people may easily fall asleep when reading it; but if the book is accompanied by colorful pictures, people's willingness to read will increase by nearly 80%.

Many children would find it boring to sketch bottles and jars, but almost all children do not like to color with colored pencils. Why are colors so popular?

Why is the human brain sensitive to color?

Color is a psychological feeling. Everything is colorless, and the photoreceptors in our eyes transmit the information they receive to the brain, which translates it into the "feeling of color" we are familiar with.

If we are not troubled by color blindness or color weakness, the human brain is very sensitive to colors. It can be said that the brain likes colors.

The left and right pictures show the difference between normal people and people with green vision deficiency seeing the color blindness test picture

Image source: http://colorfilter.wickline.org/

First, the brain is better at recognizing images in color: In 2002, researchers found that subjects were 50 percent better at recognizing realistic color images than black-and-white images on a standard image-recognition test.

So the question is: What is the significance of our evolved ability to recognize colors?

For our human ancestors, strong color recognition ability can help them survive better in nature, such as efficiently identifying red fruits from green leaves, or yellow tigers hiding in green jungles.

Why do children like colors?

In fact, the world in the eyes of a newborn baby is all black, white and gray. It is not until about four months that they gradually begin to have the ability to see colors.

Colors affect mood and have an important influence on children's development. Warm colors like orange and yellow can bring happiness and comfort. Red can increase heart rate, thereby increasing alertness and appetite, while cooler colors like blue and green tend to have a calming effect.

Around 18 months, children begin to learn to distinguish between different colors. At around three to four years old, children begin to recognize and name basic colors. Learning to recognize colors allows them to use color as a visual cue to identify danger.

After about 5 years old, children begin to use texture or lines to describe things, so color is an important language tool for them to describe things. A visually stimulating environment can increase children's attention span and curiosity, while improving memory and nervous system development.

Children like coloring because colors can bring stronger expressiveness, convey more information, and evoke richer sensory experiences.

For children in kindergarten and lower grades of primary school, "favorite color" seems to be a particularly important topic in children's social interaction. Children express their "self" and integrate into the group by choosing one or several "favorite colors". The more secure a child's self-awareness is, the more likely he is to stick to a favorite color for a period of time. Compared with adults, "favorite color" is much more important to children.

How does color help learning?

Color is not only helpful for emotional health, but also important for cognitive enlightenment, thinking training, and memory enhancement. More than 80% of the information humans receive comes from vision, and color is the first visual language.

The difference in the effect of different senses receiving information, among which the combination of audio and video has the best effect. (Quoted from teacher Li Yongle’s video)

Different colors can also give people different psychological cues. For example, fluorescent yellow is the color used to highlight key points in textbooks, so maybe when you see this color on the road, you will involuntarily focus more.

Using this "conditioned reflex" to color, we can color-code the information that needs to be learned and remembered, making the impression in our minds richer and more vivid, and making it easier to recall.

Comparison of the effects of color and black and white word cards (from teacher Li Yongle's video)

Therefore, in our daily life and study, it is not enough to listen to the teacher in class. What is more important is to read and write more, and use color-assisted tools to remember more deeply. Therefore, primary and secondary school textbooks are basically printed in color, which can attract students' attention, make them better understood, and make them easier to remember.

For example, it seems that today's primary school teachers, regardless of the main or secondary subjects, like to assign a holiday homework - to make a tabloid. The topics of the tabloids range from Chinese, mathematics, and English to science and music, from traditional festivals to spring outings.

It takes a lot of effort to publish a tabloid. For math tabloids, you need to draw pictures of ancient mathematicians, and for Chinese tabloids, you need to draw poems and artistic conception. You also need to arrange the colors, borders, and fonts clearly. Colorful tabloids make boring knowledge lively, interesting, and easy to remember, but they are really difficult for middle-aged parents.

The world originally had no color, but in the long process of evolution, humans used their eyes and brains to "paint" the world with color.

References:

[1]Rachel Pancare, “How Do Bright Colors Appeal to Kids?”, sciencing.com, 2018-4-23

[2] "The vision thing: how babies color in the world", theguardian.com, 2017-4-11

[3]Mariam Adawiah Dzulkifli and Muhammad Faiz Mustafar, “The Influence of Color on Memory Performance: A Review”, Malays J Med Sci., 2013-3

[4]Lucinda Rosenfeld, “Red! No, Blue! No, Light Blue!”, slate.com, 2012-4-18

[5] “Is seeing always believing? How do we see colors? How do colors affect thinking and cognition”, Xigua Video “Teacher Li Yongle”, 2021-3-28

Source: Vision