Spring has finally arrived, and it makes me smile every time I step outside. New green leaves are pushing themselves into the sunlight as plants build the solar panels that will fuel them throughout the year. The first spring flowers are already in bloom, and a bright showcase of cheerful rainbow color is rapidly replacing the gray-brown palette of late winter.

I love the constant small surprises as new flowers appear. But each new sighting makes me wish for a superpower: the sort of expanded vision that could show me all the colors these flowers have to offer. Human beings can see some of them, and birds and bees can see a little more. But the potential range of invisible colors is mind-boggling, and science is only just starting to get a grip on it.

Our color vision is neatly summed up in our perception of a rainbow, sweeping from red, the longest wavelength of light that our eyes can detect, to violet, the shortest. But we can’t detect each shade individually; in order to make sense of this continuous spectrum of colors, we use a clever shortcut. Our eyes have three types of cone cell that respond to different colors—red, green and blue. Our brain figures out how much of the light that we see falls into each category, and it recombines that information to construct the myriad colors that we register. It is both beautifully efficient and frustratingly crude…

~Helen Czerski, from Colors That Only Bees and Birds Can See

Notes:

• Photo: Spring Flowers by Paul.
• Related Posts: Miracle. All of it.
• Inspiration: Inspired by Albert Einstein’s quote: “There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.”