This is scientific Americans 60 second science. I'm Karen Hopkins. This will just take a minute.

What color is your living room? Beige? Maybe eggshell? or is it cream, buff, echru, khaki or warm desert sand?

Chances are you have no idea.

And you wouldn't be able to pick the shade out of an off-white lineup.

But before you go blaming your eyes, a new study suggests that the fault lies in our brains,

which failed to commit to memory the actual colors we see.

The findings are in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

To figure out why we're not so good at recalling hues, researchers first had subjects look at

what's called a color wheel on a computer screen.

The wheel included 180 shades in a circle, and subjects were asked to find what they considered the best example of, say, the color blue.

It turns out, most people agree on which shades are

most representative of a given color like a Robin's Egg blue for the truest blue

or a parakeet-like color is the greenest green.

Shades like teal, which falls between green and blue,

got the fewest votes.

Then came the memory bit.

A second group of volunteers looked at the computer screens.

This time, a colored square would appear briefly,

and about a second after it disappeared,

subjects were asked to find that color on the wheel.

The result, people tended to skew their answers toward the colors that had

previously been identified as being the best specimen of that color no

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