Brown is just dark orange

There simply is no such thing as brown light as brown is just orange with black mixed into it. As you can only reduce brightness on a light emitting color LED, producing brown light is simply not possible.

In the illustration below both center pieces are brown / dark orange. But our brain perceives those to pieces to have a different color because of the surrounding information (light and shadow).

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When looking at an LCD showing the color brown, the color will be perceived brown only in a lot environment. When other colors or light is added, the perceived color changes to brown. This is easy to test by forming a fist to block almost all light out of the peripheral vision and then looking at an LCD showing the color „brown“.

Culture and language can affect the perception of color and many languages have no special word for dark orange. In Chinese the color brown is often described as „the color of coffee“ or 咖啡色 (kāfēi sè).

It is also another example, where our brain manipulates what we perceive – like with the McGurk effect. Essentially every object, even an apple, is essentially a colorless object.

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