Claire Fan - Week 14: Wordle
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| This particular shade—hex code #FFF5CF—is called "Stereotypical Duck." |
Wordle is a daily word-guessing game by The New York Times. Every day, a new five-letter word is chosen, and the user has six tries to guess the word. When a letter is green, the correct letter is in the correct place. When a letter is yellow, the correct letter is in the wrong place. When a letter is grey, the letter is not used in the word.
Colordle is a daily color-guessing game by Ryan Tanenholz. Every day, a new color from a bank of over thirty thousand unique colors is chosen, and the user tries to guess the color. When a color is chosen, a percentage from one to one hundred percent is given. The higher the percentage, the closer the guess to the actual color.
Dialed. is a color-recreation game by Geoff Teehan. Every day, five new colors are chosen. In each round, one color is shown for five seconds. The user must then use the provided hue-saturation-brightness sliders to recreate the color to the best of their ability. A score is given from one to ten, and this process is replicated five times. The higher the score, the more accurate the created color to the original.
The first sentence on the website dialed.gg reads, “Humans can’t reliably recall colors.” But why is this? Why can I remember the lyrics, tempo, and notes of “The First Taste” by Fiona Apple, for example, with startling clarity but not the same for color?
Barbara Kingsolver, a Pulitzer-prize winning author, wrote that “Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.” In the case of color, the brain instinctively categorizes certain shades under a color that’s close enough. Colors are associated with words—like how “Tiffany Blue” conjures more vivid imagery than “electric blue” or “aquatic blue.” It’s more efficient; it would be exhausting and benign to memorize every shade with accuracy when there’s room that absolutely can not be spared for important details (like the lyrics to “The First Taste”).
Despite that, the brain is still capable of recalling specific shades when they’re attached to important memories. The specific shade of a childhood blanket, maybe, or of a favorite food. I, however, will be doing my best to remember arbitrary colors that serve me no purpose other than to excel at the dumb games I like to play in my free time.
Hi Claire, I found your blog this week to be incredibly niche as usual. As someone who prides herself on her reliable memory I completely agree with your theory that colors are better remembered when attached to emotion. For example, that specific shade of green the trees reflect on a cloudy day after it rains is a color I've adored for my entire life and one I could probably point out in a room full of greens. Color itself is an abstract concept, it takes one click of a button, one change of direction, or barely changing the lighting of a setting to transform one color from another, they're all almost a touch away from blending together, and given the large amount of the human population affected by color blindness how could we possibly remember all these vast shades of color. Which is where emotion comes into the equation, from an evolutionary perspective the human race has evolved to remember emotionally charged situations as a form of survival, hence why certain objects, colors, etc are remembered more vividly than others. I enjoyed your blog this week Claire and you've encouraged me to go check out wordle one more time!
ReplyDeleteHi Claire! I found your blog this week to be deeply interesting. I completely agree with your stance on colors and I never actually realized the concept of how it is harder to memorize the shades of colors compared to the song lyrics. For me, I don’t know if it is just that I never actually realized it, but colors come to me so easily. In each of my memories I can always remember the colors of the main parts, and that may even be just how I remember them. Maybe not something as miniscule as the color of a hoodie a person was wearing when I was with them, but overall the shades I can definitely remember. Colors honestly play a vital role in my life and helps me express myself or even whatever I am feeling, for example if it is a warm, sunny day, I’m much more likely to wear something colorful compared to the winter. Or, I associate colors with places. For example, green will always remind me of nature, yellow of the sun, and such. Colors play such a big part in life that sometimes even it's role can be easy to miss and forget, but your blog has reminded me of otherwise. Thank you for helping open my eyes to be more aware!
ReplyDeleteColor brings me immense joy; this makes sense for a person who draws a lot, I suppose. I was immediately caught on the caption for the image you added; “Stereotypical Duck.” If only that was the Pantone color of the year. It conjured such a vivid image…and it also reminded me of when my friend showed me a website where you could name colors yourself. She named a shade of light lime-green “lego toothbrush” once. I went looking for this website and found it, colornames.org (in case you want to name some colors too and look at what other people have come up with on par with “Stereotypical Duck”), it’s an underrated artform. But I digress.
ReplyDeleteAfter reading your blog I also decided to go find the game you brought up, dial.gg, and play a round. My initial theory going into it was that since I think primarily in pictures as opposed to words, combined with my experience with digital art, I’d likely be better at that game than the average person, and I think I was right. For the last color in the round, I got a score of 9.97/10—a hex code guess only three digits off from the right answer! I’m not here to brag though, and this in no way “disproves” the argument you made in your blog about humans not being very adept at memorizing colors; I am an outlier and should not be counted. Maybe I, like Baby Suggs in her last weeks of life, am a little too fixated on the colors of things. Anyway, good job on your blog!
Hi Claire, I really enjoyed reading your blog this week. It is interesting how memory works. I have such a vivid memory for random bits of conversations from years ago but I often cannot recall what I ate for lunch just a few hours prior. Color is another interesting thing. As someone who grew up painting, I have spent a lot of time understanding how colors are developed and what differences in pigments make the difference between a blue highlight and a blue shadow. Regardless of this, it shocked me when I visited Dialed and saw that it was much harder than I anticipated to recall exactly how the color looked. I knew the general color but I couldn’t remember how dark the shade was, or if it was more warm toned than cool toned. Maybe our brains don’t see a need to remember colors. As I learned in Psychology, there is a part of our brain that is constantly taking in information about our environment but because we are not actively using that information, it gets forgotten relatively quickly. I also really love the quote you chose of memory being “relative to truth, but not its twin.” Thank you for sharing this with us and giving me a new game to play in my spare time!
ReplyDeleteHi Claire! Your blog this week was very intriguing, and it sent me on a bit of a reflection. When you described the colors that are involved in the game Wordle, I was surprised that I was able to instantly picture the exact hues of the green, yellow, and grey. Similarly, I was able to recall the exact shade of my water bottle, my favorite sweater, and even the color of the dress I wore on my birthday two years ago. Perhaps these examples are directly proving your point that the human brain is much more likely to remember specific colors when they are significant to us, or when they are reminiscent of important memories. Also, this also made me think about your point about how inefficient and pointless it would be for our brains to try and remember every single exact shade of color. Instead, I think we focus more on prioritizing what is personally important to us.
ReplyDeleteI’ve always thought that color itself is such a personal way of viewing the world, as every person experiences color differently. Even though the vast majority of people are in agreement about standard color names, because of variations in the structures of our eyes, we all have a different perception of the specific shades. Therefore, I think it’s fair to say that the way we (subconsciously) choose to remember a particular color reflects what we consider important or worth it enough to hold onto. When I think about it in that sense, I guess there really isn’t a singular “correct” way to remember colors. Thank you for this interesting read!