u/GallifreyanGradient

So I fell into a Wikipedia hole and ended up reading about impossible colors. Your visual system literally won't let you see reddish-green. There's opponent channels, red vs green and blue vs yellow, and your brain blocks both sides of a pair from firing at once. It's a hardware limit, not a software one.

But here's the crazy part. If you stare at something red long enough to tire out those cone cells and then switch to green, you can briefly see a chimerical color. A green that's greener than any green you've ever seen. It should not exist but your exhausted cones just let it slide through for a second.

And then there's olo. In April 2025 researchers used a steerable laser to stimulate ONLY the M-cones in the retina and produced a color with more saturation than anything that exists in nature. They called it olo. Nobody in the history of the species had ever seen this color before because natural light always hits multiple cone types at once. It took a precision laser to uncork it.

I do IT for a living and I cannot stop thinking about this in hardware terms. It's like finding out your monitor has a wider color gamut than the firmware allows, and someone figured out you can flash it and unlock a whole range that was always physically there but blocked. Except the monitor is your eyeball and the firmware is your optic nerve.

What's got me is the broader question. If color perception has hard limits we can find workarounds for, what else are we just sitting behind? What perceptual walls are we living inside of because nobody's figured out how to fatigue the receptor or build the laser that bypasses it?