THE LANGUAGE OF COLOUR : why colours speak to us | SCIENCE DOC

The sensation of colour rises up around us to excite, unite and inspire. It's a powerful language that can challenge and confront, but one we don't always understand. Its origins are ancient, expressing something primal and universal. It defines who we are and our place in the world. Colour affects us physically, emotionally and spiritually. But what is really known about this mysterious power? Myths abound. Red excites, while blue calms. White is pure. And black is evil. In this episode, we will look at the power of colour and explore what is myth and what is truth. The modern quest to define and understand colour unites many fields of study. Science. The arts. History. Psychology. Anthropology. Each discipline offers a piece of the puzzle, a chance to crack the colour code. Here in the city's business district, people dress to belong. Their clothes announce their status and their willingness to conform. It's extraordinary what a splash of colour can do. It can amuse or it can confound. By breaking our colour codes, we step outside the group. Could it really be possible for a man dressed like this to rise to the top of the corporate ladder? The odds are against it. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We're going to talk this afternoon about colour. When you think about colour, you have to realise that it's affecting us at three different levels. We're affected sociologically, what the society tells us colour should be and do to us. We're affected physiologically, what is actually going on in our bodies. And we're also affected psychologically. So, I want to show you some colours first and ask for your response to those colours. Just one word response. Blue. Sky. Sky. Blue. The ocean. Ocean. A baby boy. How about violet? Jason. Religious garb. Religious. Royalty. Mardi Gras. Mardi. I like that. How about yellow? You had one for yellow, huh? Happy. Happy, okay. Sun. Energy. Energy, okay. Colour has a tremendous effect on people that they often don't realise. For example, in advertising they will use often blue and white and a rust to stimulate thirst. So, you'll find that often on bottles of water. The rust colour stimulates thirst and then the blue and white are supposed to quench it. So, it all sets up this image of I'm thirsty now, I'm going to buy this water. Another good example would be orange, because orange physically makes you salivate and then you're hungry. You may not be hungry when you walk into the restaurant, but because it's painted that colour, it can really set all those things into motion. The colour language advertisers and manufacturers use is based more on their own market-driven conventions than on scientific fact. But it must work, because they spend billions creating it. It's a powerful code, but where does it come from? The most fundamental use of colour language may be found in the animal kingdom. Birds and fish and other colourful animals are relying on a language of colour to convey information. This is very often to do with whether or not you want to mate with someone. They don't sit down and have a conversation, find out whether or not you have similar interests. Their decisions are much more immediate and they have to make those decisions not on the spur of the moment, but at least probably over a shorter time span. And they are using this language of colour in order to do that. Very often in nature, males are more colourful than females. The basic reason for this is that the female has a much larger investment. For the female to invest her egg in a male is much more of a big decision than for a male to invest his sperm in females. Therefore, the male has to appear as the right choice. As a result, sexual evolution has driven many males to ridiculous extremes of display. They're saying, I'm a very fit individual, look at my colours, I'm brilliantly coloured, I can look after myself well, therefore I'm an animal worth mating with. Fitness, vitality, strength is very much part of what colour is all about. The power of colour in early human societies is still evident in the customs and rituals of many of today's indigenous communities. So colour, for hundreds of thousands of years, has been integral to who we are and what we mean to each other. Communities like the Huli of Papua New Guinea still depend on colour for their survival. We know that we evolved colour vision to improve our ability to perform certain behavioural tasks, such as food finding or finding mates. We know that the red-green axis of colour vision seems specifically to have evolved in order to enable us to better find edible leaves or edible fruit. So it might be that because we use colour in certain behavioural tasks, we then learn to appreciate certain colours more than others. We want to find fruits that are good to eat, so we learn to like the colours of those fruits that are good to eat, and therefore we come to like those colours. Our preference for certain colours has become deeply rooted in our cultural traditions. After the full moon that announces spring, Indians celebrate the festival of Holi. Long ago, an ancient fertility cult started the revelry, and over time it was taken up by Hindus. The predominant colour in Holi is red, a colour rich in symbolic meaning. It's the colour of blood, the colour of fire. Its power is fundamental, a status it shares with black and with white. These three colours have a power so ancient and universal, they are almost part of our DNA. Black from charcoal, white from clay or chalk, red from earth. This was the first palette. Its cultural use by earliest man imbues these colours with everlasting power. These young Maasai are preparing for an important ceremony, Yunoto, a time of transition. The red colour is a special place in the history of colours. We will return to it later. It's as if red was appealing to something deeply archaic in humans. It is probably the link that is made through the colour of blood, the blood that influences life. But when it escapes the body, it is also the symptom of death that will come. We will find it in the blood of birth, in the blood that marks the nobility of young girls, in the blood that sometimes pours the initiates during circumcision, at the time of death, at the time of hunting, at the time of fighting. So it is a fluid that follows the history of human life and that also follows the history of humanity. While red is about our basic humanity, our bodies, our blood, white is about our spirit. Central to Australian Aboriginal spirituality is the legend of the rainbow serpent, depicted in artworks and ceremonies. A long time ago, my mother and my father and my family, they taught me when I was a little girl. My father, he was, went to hunting, look for kangaroo. He was painting, paint himself. He put white hookah and he went there. Just because, you know, kangaroo see people, put paint everywhere. There are a number of different stories about white ochre, and many of these involve ancestral beings who created these colours and left them in the landscape. For instance, for many groups of people, it was Nalyod, a rainbow serpent, that left the deposits of white pipe clay in the land. For the Gonwingu people, white is the most significant of colours. They use it to mark the passing from one state to another, for funeral rites and circumcisions. For many cultures, white symbolises spiritual purity. Round the world, many religions use white ritualistically. White, as a symbol of purity, came to signify virginity. The wedding dress is a modern extension of this ancient custom. But it wasn't always that way. For centuries, brides in Europe wore red, the most precious of colours. And then, in the 18th century, white was imposed, probably because now the young woman had to show that she was coming to the wedding as a virgin. And white is the symbol of this virginity. In modern Europe, it doesn't quite go by itself, and there is a moment when it has to be marked by a vestimentary sign, hence the white wedding dress. Are there baths, showers, washbasins, toilets that are not white but still wash effectively? We have the impression that if we wash in a bath that is not white, we are less washed, less well washed. This goes back to very, very ancient times when white and hygiene had extremely close relations. These ancient roots have almost evolved into a neurosis, a modern obsession with hygiene. The antithesis of white, synonymous with death and evocation of evil. While black's dark side can be found throughout the world as an expression of evil, sin and death, the colour is not all bad. Black can be dignified, elegant and luxurious, an expression of moderation, modesty and humility. At the end of the Middle Ages, all princes were dressed in black. It is the most prestigious colour. And in the end, our smockings, our little black dresses, our prestigious packaging for the perfumes of luxury are the heirs of this black, the prince of the end of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Colours have been used to denote status or authority, vocation or membership of a team. The meaning of colour depends on context. The colours a country most treasures are traditionally expressed in its national flag. Along with white and red, the opposing forces of black and blue make up the four original colours of ancient Japan. In the West, the word for colour is derived from Latin and means material on a surface. In traditional Japan, the word for colour, iro, conveys both elaborate sensuality and a gateway to a spiritual world. Japan's formidable neighbour, China, had a powerful impact on the country's colour language. Red, black, white and blue were joined by yellow. Cultural influences have always had a bearing on people's attitude to colour, but they are far from consistent. For centuries, in Europe, blue was the most hated of colours. Perhaps the colour was feared because it conjured up thoughts of barbarian tribes daubed in blue woad, living out beyond the veil of civilisation. But in the Middle Ages, Europeans discovered the fabulous blue that came to epitomise the Virgin Mary. Ultramarine brought blue in from the shadows. During the Reformation, blue joined a range of colours depicting virtue and honesty, a colour for good citizens and good Christians. The mid-19th century Romantic period made blue the colour of poets, the colour of dreams. Gradually, the colour people once feared became their favourite. What's really striking is that old people, whatever the culture, seemed to have a preference for blue. And I say that not based on our own results only, but also on historical studies. There seems to be quite a strong preference for blue. Anja Halbert, from the University of Newcastle in England, is conducting a study to determine the nature of colour preferences. We analyse colour preference in terms of two basic biological mechanisms. The blue-yellow dimension of colour vision and the red-green dimension of colour vision. We found that on the blue-yellow dimension, everyone has a slight preference for blue. And in females, this is a very strong preference. Also in females, there's a stronger preference for the red end of the red-green dimension. So the females have a sort of reddish-bluish preference. That's the region of the hue spectrum where their preference is strongest. Pinks and lilacs tend to be both quite strong in the reddish dimension and in the bluish dimension. These colours tend to be the favourite colours for females. So although we didn't specifically ask girls or women if pink was their favourite colour, we found they consistently chose the redder of the two colours or consistently chose the bluer of the two colours. And if the colour happened to be both bluer and redder than the other colour, they would tend to pick that all the time. And that tended to be a sort of pinkish or lilac-ish colour. So therefore, females look as if they have a strong preference for pink. Now, clearly that's something that every toy manufacturer and clothing designer for little girls has picked up on and reinforced. I've always said that if your mother likes pink, then probably if she had a daughter, she'd dress that daughter in pink. And that daughter seems to grow up liking that colour. So there's been a long tradition of, particularly in Western culture, of tying blue with the male and pink with the female. Okay, we're going to do a little experiment here, and it's a blue and pink experiment. It's a blue and pink experiment, and it is to show in a very low-tech way how colour affects you physiologically. Push up when I push down, okay? So push up now. As I push down on their hands, they push up, and then I have someone stand behind them and cover their field of vision with the blue, and they maintain their strength. And then I give them a shot of pink, as I always put it. So Brian's just going to put this around, we're going to put saturation on it, look at it, push up, Eddie. Push up. Eddie, push up. And they lose all their strength, and they get very angry, especially the males. Push up. Come on, push up. Too bad. Come on, muscles. Push up. Come on, push up. Didn't work, huh? Get her warmed up. Push up. Okay, we gave him his strength back. Oh, do we feel manly again? In 1978, after watching a demonstration similar to the Furman's colour strength test, Dr Alexander Schaus from the American Institute of Biosocial Research in Washington State began exploring the effects of pink. He theorised that the colour may affect hormone production by impacting on the endocrine system. The results of experiments at a US military prison led Schaus to conclude that pink reduced violent or aggressive behaviour among the inmates. He stated... Even if a person tries to be angry or aggressive in the presence of pink, he can't. The heart muscles can't race fast enough. It's a tranquilising colour that saps your energy. Even the colour blind are tranquilised by pink rooms. Schaus acknowledged that more work needed to be done to explore the effect further. All the same, the colour he called Baker Miller Pink came to be known as Drunk Tank Pink. The idea caught on around the world. Now, I don't know if all the prisoners in the world or at least in this country use the right shade of pink. Because there's not been that much care taken in documenting colour. But evidently they did find out what the close shade would be. And in the state of Texas it seemed like Houston really jumped on the bandwagon when it came to painting their prisons pink. I looked it up on the internet, some different literature. And they keep coming back to this colour that they actually call Tiger Pink. And that's one that they say is soothing. And ended up going in and painting the interior of the jail. And that was done in 2005. And since it's been done we've had zero inmate on inmate assaults. And we've had zero inmate on detention officer assaults. Most of the prisoners that pass through this small jail in Mason, Texas are in for short stretches. For burglaries, car theft, drug charges. Obviously you're in jail so you're already stressed out, your emotions are running high. We felt like if we were able to go ahead and paint this colour, put it in there, maybe it would calm them down a little bit and be a little more soothing to them. And it's proven to be so. Inmates' attitude or something, some calms them down. Why pink calms people down, I don't know. But then there's others that get real mad or just got a big problem with it. Pink is, I guess, kind of a quarry colour. It makes you feel sometimes welcome and sometimes it makes you feel mad or you don't like the colour. Me personally, I do like the colour. The original idea is to make you embarrassed and make you not want to come back. And that was the purpose of the pink and pink uniforms and pink walls, as you've seen outside. And it's just, I guess, kind of a mental deal, like I said, that they don't want you here, to want to come back here. The thought process behind it was definitely not to humiliate them. A lot of people think, well, that's what you wanted to do, you wanted to bring them in and degrade them and humiliate them. And that's not the case. I guess that might be kind of a by-product of the whole thing. But it was basically to calm them down and to be some more of a deterrent that, hey, we don't want to come back to this jail. Before the new paint job, one-third of prisoners re-offended and wound up back inside. Now the re-offender rate is down by 68%. But was it really painting the cells drunk tank pink that did the trick? A researcher from York University decided to replicate the study. And when he replicated the study, he used white. And when he tested the subjects, he felt he got the same results. It's less agitated and much calmer. His conclusion was it was not the colour pink. It had all to do with a freshly painted space. Cleanliness being next to godliness, maybe, with no grime on the walls and the environment being clean and not what you would expect walking into a prison. It would seem no pigment, red, blue or pink, has any clearly defied impact on the way we think and feel. While a coat of new paint may brighten up a room, research into the psychological effects of colour is inconclusive. However, we all intuitively sense the effect. Colour can change our mood and our state of mind. It can alter our perception of the world around us. To more clearly define the hidden power of colour, science is looking deep inside the chemistry of our brains and bodies. In Olympic contests, boxers are given either red or blue gloves, helmets and trunks. Within the Olympic Games, colour is randomly assigned to the individuals in, say, boxing, taekwondo and the wrestling competitions. And if colour is having no influence at all on the outcome of these sports, we should expect to see an equal number of red and blue winners across the course of the competition. In his work as an anthropologist, Russell Hill has observed that in some animals red is a signal of dominance. In mandrill monkeys, for example, the dominant males have this very red, intensely red facial colouration and it's only the dominant males that are able to carry this colour. The subordinate males, the red colouration is completely washed out. The red colouration is an evolutionary effect related to breeding. Females see the colour and recognise prospects are good. This intense red colouration is associated with testosterone levels. So the red colouration is effectively a badge of status that's indicating that these individuals have very high testosterone levels. High levels of the hormone in the bloodstream lead to increased mental and physical energy. So would red impact on a sporting contest? Russell Hill has crunched the numbers to assess outcomes in Olympic conflict sports. What we actually saw were significantly more red winners at the end of the Olympic Games than blue winners, suggesting that these innate associations between red and dominance are actually having an influence on the outcome of these sporting contests. So what we suspect is happening in the sports is that the individuals wearing red may be receiving a sort of a testosterone boost before they go out to compete. Or alternatively, their opponents may be seeing an individual completely decked out in red and effectively interpret that individual as super dominant to themselves and may be causing a suppression in the testosterone levels within the blue competitor. The ability of certain colours to influence our hormonal system is still not fully understood. But a recent medical breakthrough has revealed a significant link between the colour of light and the rhythm of our lives. From the dawn of our evolution, the cycle of the day, sunrise and sunset, has influenced the complex physiology of our bodies. The importance of this ancient relationship with the colour of sunlight is the subject of current research. Please indicate your sleepiness during the five minutes before this rating. One, very alert. At Harvard Medical School, scientists are studying the effect of coloured light on the body and mind. I am very sleepy. Great effort to keep awake, fighting sleep. There's been a lot of ideas put forth about colour therapy and a lot of claims made about how different colours of light affect human health. And some of these claims go back several thousand years to other cultures that were using light in this way. It's only really recently that we've started to look systematically at how light affects human health using photobiological methods which really weren't done before. In Harvard's Sleep Medicine Centre, volunteers live for weeks at a time in very controlled conditions. We look at how light affects hormone levels, we look at how light affects temperature, how it affects alertness and performance. And we do a range of studies where we keep people under different lighting conditions and then look at how different intensities of light or different colours of light affect human biology. How's it going? It's time to get out of bed. Alright. Each subject is thoroughly wired up. Sensors on the skull record brain activity. Changes in body temperature are recorded through a rectal thermometer. A catheter in the arm enables extraction of blood for hormone analysis every 30 minutes. Light's out. Alright, lights out to be momentarily. If you ask people about how they think colour affects their mood, they might say that red is excitatory because it's linked to fire, it's linked to blood, whereas blue might be considered to be calming because it's the colour of the sky and the colour of the sea. In fact, in our most recent studies, we're finding that the opposite is true, that blue is most able to excite the brain and makes us active, whereas other wavelengths of light, such as red light, is in fact able to calm the brain more and doesn't induce such an acute effect on alertness and performance. Okay, we're now going to do the performance test, so please pick up the box, hold it in both hands, and when you hear a noise, press the right button as quickly as possible. We also think blue light might be most effective at alerting the brain, and directly improving alertness and improving performance in the brain. So these studies are continuing now where we're looking at other different colours, such as violet light, green light, red light, at all different intensities to try and work out exactly which wavelengths or colours are able to affect the brain in this way. So we can use it for clinical purposes, for example to try and treat people with circadian rhythm sleep disorders or people who suffer from winter depression, which is a problem with getting the right day length information into the brain. From ancient times, the good health of humans, animals and plants has been linked to our daily cycles, our circadian rhythms. For humans, a disturbance in these cycles can result in disrupted sleep, fatigue, emotional and physical stress, and even bipolar disorders. Coloured light might offer a cure. Annalise Kelly is a senior in high school in New York State. Like many kids her age, she was stressed by her busy schedule. She'd go to bed at eleven, but not get to sleep till one or two. When I wasn't sleeping, it became really difficult to handle everything. It just got to the point where I almost had a nervous breakdown. And so I went to my doctor, and he said maybe I should try a sleeping pill, and so I tried it for a few months. Then I couldn't sleep without taking it, and I wouldn't sleep that great when I did take it. I really didn't like the thought of being on a pill, so I really wanted to get away from that. So I went down to the sleep doctor in Albany, and he recommended that I go outside in the morning at 6.30, right when I wake up. So I'd go out every morning at 6.30, and sit in the sun. What's been learnt recently is that in addition to the rods and cones in our eyes, the retina has separate but allied photoreceptors for absorbing light. These cells are called retinal ganglion cells. The human eye does two things. It not only sees, so it allows us to see the visual world around us, but it also allows us to detect light separate and apart from vision. So we use this novel photoreception system to tell us what time of day it is, to tell us when it's dawn, to tell us when it's dusk, and to use this information to reset our body clock. Blue light impacts on the hypothalamus, the gland in the brain which regulates the production of melatonin, the hormone that makes us drowsy. It's sometimes called the hormone of darkness, or the Dracula hormone, because it is only produced at night, and it's the body clock's way of telling us when to go to sleep. Effectively, it's a signal of darkness. Blue light, even from screens, inhibits the production of melatonin. So, at 6.30 at night, I would put on sunglasses to block out the blue light. They're sunglasses, but you have to get blue blockers. They block the blue light because the blue light is what triggers your mind to think that it's daylight. Going out in the morning and stopping the blue light from coming in at night, I was able to get my clock back in sync. Teenage girls with a stressful life are not the only ones who suffer from upset circadian rhythm. It affects night shift workers, international travellers, and anyone whose lifestyle separates them from regular daylight hours. Many accidents are caused by this, by having shift workers who are awake at night when their body clock is telling them to go to sleep. There's a high rate of road traffic accidents at night because of this, a high rate of industrial accidents at night, and more recently in our studies of medical residents, we've shown that there are more medical errors at night committed because of this. For those of us deprived of the time or opportunity to sit in the morning sun, glasses and eye patches are being developed that allow the timed release of blue light. In the 21st century, marketing is the dominant force in colour. Colour sells. The physical and psychological effects of colour are trained upon us. Of course, the creation of colour ranges for a car comes with a fairly precise specifications. Marketing gives us a precise idea of the targeted target. Colour has always been a code that speaks of sex and status, and this is especially true when it comes to bright red sports cars. Red is quite an exciting colour, it's a colour that can be seen from far away, it's a colour that is easily associated with speed, it's almost a colour that moves on its own, so you just have to turn around the car for it to move. It's a colour I'd call kinetic, it's a way of multiplying the speed that the car can take, it gives it a look. When I was a teenager, the owners of red cars paid a higher insurance premium than those who had a car that wasn't red. This was due to the fact that statistically, the drivers of red cars had more accidents than the others, not because these cars themselves were dangerous. It's a car that can still reach 250 km per hour. A driver who chooses a car with such a bright and exciting colour will undoubtedly be able to reveal things to us about his temperament, about his behaviour. Perhaps because, being red, they were driven faster, and above all because, being red, they were bought or driven by younger drivers who, statistics show, had more accidents than older drivers. Sporty and sexy, or classic and conservative, the automobile industry spends up big on research to get the right colours and styling. Colour the world over is used to woo consumers. Manufacturers need their products to appear fresh and enticing. An international industry helps point them in the right direction. With the past couple of years, we have seen so many neutrals, and I really think that the public is going to tire of neutrals, and they're going to want to experience more colour. I've been seeing a lot of this blue again, which is somewhat environmentally inspired, but it's sort of transitioning its way onto the runway in this kind of way. There's a lot of copper at all the shows now, so copper's very, very big. Colour forecasters are an elite group with worldwide influence. Manufacturers will pay handsomely for the colour predictions of these industry insiders as they nominate the palette that will emerge in the seasons ahead. Obviously, in the manufacturing cycle, it may take six months, it may take two years to bring a product to market, so you have to be able to project the colours that people are going to want in the future. As far as what's driving the colour in packaging, we see more and more a grey infusion of the palette because of the influx of post-consumer recycled material. Colour forecasters deliver advice for packaging, homeware, clothing, automobiles, sporting goods and toys. They draw ideas from travel, media and by responding to world events and issues. I'm calling it urban camouflage, and a very interesting book came out just recently called Camouflage, and it's really easy as a traveller right now to go through almost any airport in the United States and see certainly US troops in their camouflage gear walking through, so you sort of have this little background thing in your head. People don't realise that large global issues probably are the ones that we're talking about, so the whole sustainability issue and environment issue that's really the hot button right now, we've been talking about that for probably five or six years right now, and it's been an influence of our palette. We, as a culture, are grabbing to colour, and the feelings that we get from colour and the psychophysiological reactions we get from colour, and so I think that although there will always be neutrals in my industry, that there is this grab of colour, and a lot of it is because we're getting rid of nature and all the beautiful, most wonderful colours ever come from our environment. There are seven major colour forecasting groups serving different markets around the globe, in the United States, Europe and Asia. They debate their opinions, assemble a palette, then sell that palette to manufacturers. Sometimes people don't realise, well, yeah, somebody did have to make the decision of my eyeglasses, of my nail polish, of the colour of my shampoo, the colour of the bottle of the shampoo, my shoes, my socks, my food, the plate that my food goes on, I mean, the list just goes on and on and on. The colour of our car, the brands we choose, and the colours they come in, do these things really say anything meaningful about us? The power of colour is timeless. It's rooted deep in our evolutionary inheritance, linked to light and the cycle of the day. It arouses sensations deep within us, and from those sensations, we derive meaning. We use colour to define who we are and our place in the world. This unspoken, mercurial language possesses a unique energy. It unites us, challenges us and inspires us. Sensuous, spiritual and emotional. Colour makes our world a place of beauty, and will continue to do so for as long as the planet plays host to the miraculous array of inquisitive, creative and surprising individuals and creatures that call it home.