Impossible Colors

Magenta is just the beginning. Researchers have explored impossible colors - hues your brain normally refuses to create. "Reddish green" and "yellowish blue" sound like contradictions, and under normal conditions they are. The opponent process channels prevent you from seeing them. But in carefully controlled lab experiments, scientists used adjacent opposing-color stripes and eye tracking to lock the image onto the same retinal cells until the boundary faded. Some subjects reported seeing entirely new colors they could not name - shades that disappeared the moment the experiment ended.