Listener supported WNYC Studios.

This is Science Friday.

I'm Flor Licksman.

Today in the podcast, what if you could see a color no one has ever seen before?

It was so much more saturated than any teal I've seen before,

in fact, more saturated than any teal I could see in the natural world. Think about the

colors of the world around you, the blue of a cloudless sky, the green of a new leaf, the blazing red of a tulips petals.

We see these colors because of the way our eyes work.

But what if we could change how our eyes respond to light?

Presenting them with light in a form they'd never encounter in the natural world.

Then what would you see?

Well, researchers tried that, and it turns out that trick might

make the eye see a color it's never seen before. Joining me now to talk about it are James Fong.

He's a computer science PhD student at UC Berkeley and one of the authors of a paper describing

this research in the journal Science Advances, and his advisor, Dr. Ren Ung, a professor in electrical engineering

and computer science at UC Berkeley. Welcome to you both. Good to be here. Hey, Floyd. Thanks for having us.

Wren, I want to start with you. You made yourself a study subject, so that means that you are one of the

few people on the planet to have seen this color. Can you just walk me through

what that experience was like? Absolutely. I start by saying it was a pleasure to see this

color in many ways, many dimensions, no pun intended. First, because it was very recognizable as

something new, because it looked like a different

color than the color of the laser, the natural color of the laser that we're using to

...