Thinking in Color
Why do people tend to think in black or white? (red or blue? 1 or 0?)
Why do we tend to think in binary, in black and white? Do we think in shadows?
What does it take for us to see shades of gray, not to mention sixteen million colors?
I thought back to my first computer, a Commodore 64, which had among its other features the ability to display 256 colors, an order of magnitude above the 16 colors the old Apple ][ had, but much fewer than the colors my present smartphone can display.
When I considered that question years ago, a rainbow exploded in my mind. I spent the next couple of hours finding out how computers display colors, which gave me an answer to my question: It takes a lot more processing power to think in color.
For each pixel on the computer screen, a number of bits in the computer's memory, usually on the display adapter card, are set to tell the monitor what color the pixel should be. On the old monochrome monitors, only text could be displayed, characters 9x14 pixels. The display adapter card carried 16k of memory to draw the screen.
But to have those first 16 colors, as the early Apples did, required 3 bits per pixel: a red, a green and a blue. At 320 x 240 bits, 230k of memory was required just to draw the bits. Consider today's true color displays with 1600 x 1200 x 24 bits: you need 46 MB just to draw the screen.
Why don't people think in color? It takes a lot more processing. To print in color requires four negatives, four print processes, and hairline resolution. It's easier to think yes/no, black/white, on/off than it is to look at an issue and see the many hues and values represented
People must have their extra memory cards plugged in and configured to see the color of slanted language and manipulated images.
Many of us are so unused to thinking in color that we must have designers tell us what goes together. Ironically, the number of colors considered safe to use on the web, meaning that most monitors represent them accurately, is 216--again limiting processing and thinking.
Open your eyes. Open your mind. Think in color.
That explains everything. I have great difficulty visualizing in color. No wonder ... it takes more processing power - something by neurons apparently struggle with!