Alright. So the stimulus for vision is light. And specifically, we're talking about light waves within the visible light spectrum. So the full light spectrum is huge, and humans actually can't see most of it. It includes things like gamma rays, x-rays, radio waves, etcetera.
But humans can see a little teeny tiny portion of it, and we refer to that as the visible light spectrum. So what's going to happen is the physical properties of the light wave are going to relate to different perceived qualities. So essentially, the physical characteristics of light waves are going to affect our perception of them. We are going to go over three physical characteristics of light waves and we'll talk about how each of them can affect perception in different ways. We're going to begin by talking about wavelength, which is essentially how wide the wave is.
You can also think about this as the literal length between the crests of the wave, the crest just being the peak of each wave. So this will give us information about hue, or just color. So what we see is that when we have a wider wavelength or kind of more distance between the crests, humans will perceive that as reds and oranges, and if we have more narrow waves humans perceive that as like blues and purples. Okay, so wavelength, or how wide the wave is, is giving us information about color. Now we also think about amplitude and amplitude is basically how tall the wave is and that is going to give us information about brightness.
So a very tall wave has a high amplitude and we're going to perceive that object as more bright, and brightness basically means like how much light the object emits or reflects. So this would be an object that reflects, like, a lot of light. It would have a tall, kind of nice tall peaks, nice high amplitude. Now, if we have shorter waves, that is going to indicate a less bright color, kind of a duller or, like, dimmer version of that color. So it's still recognizable as the color, just kind of a dimmer version of it.
And then finally we think about complexity, or basically how many wavelengths are visible, or, like, what range of wavelengths are we seeing. And that will give us information about saturation. So you can kind of think about saturation as, like, the pureness of a color. It kind of gives you information about how vivid or rich that color appears to you. So if you think about the wavelengths I showed you earlier, you know, if we just have one wavelength entering our eye, this nice red light, just one of them, we're going to get a very saturated pure version of that color coming in.
However, if we have multiple wavelengths entering our eye, you know, if we have red mixed with white, mixed with brown, or other colors, we're going to get basically a more desaturated version of that color, a much less pure, less vivid, less rich version. A color that is very, very desaturated will basically look almost monochromatic. Alright. So that is the physical characteristics of light waves and how they relate to our perception. Wavelength gives us information about hue, amplitude gives us information about brightness, and the complexity or how many waves we are seeing will give us information about saturation.
Alright, and I will see you guys in our next video. Bye bye.
