Location Taken: Baddeck, Nova Scotia
Time Taken: July 2012
I love how warm this photo is.
Mind you, it’s not going to catch your computer on fire or anything. It’s an art term, ya know.
Reds and oranges and yellows are warm colors, blues and greens and purples are cool. The first make you think of roaring fireplaces and the sun and warm bodies, while the others are the colors of water and nature and all those other things that aren’t as warm.
It’s an odd psychological trick, really. I mean, it’s two things that have only some correlation with each other. One’s a thing you see with your eyes, and the other is a temperature you sense with your skin. Completely different senses. It’s almost like a form of synesthesia everyone has.
That’s an odd condition where people with it have their senses mixed up in a different pattern than normal. They might hear colors (they look at a color and hear a sound) or see words in colors other than what they’re printed on based on what the meaning of the word is, or all sorts of other things that just seem odd to people without it.
But the rest of us do have some of that pattern, and it’s actually quite useful. For most people, it only shows up in places with strong correlations, like the “warm” colors in this photo. It is quite useful to be able to guess at the temperature of an object by its color without having to actually, say, touch it. So that tendency got added to the normal set of human abilities.
Every so often I really wonder what it would be like to be a synesthete. It’s not at all harmful, mind you, just a different state of mind. And it is literally a different way of looking at the world. Sometimes a better way, since the extra mixing of the senses can add valuable information about the world, like telling you that you misspelled a word because that “e” is green and the rest of the word was purple.
And yes, that is how it works for some people.
