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Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

Ep116 " What is Color? Part 2: Why royals wear purple"

Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman

iHeartPodcasts

Health & Fitness, Education, Science, Self-improvement, Mental Health

4.7620 Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2025

⏱️ 44 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Are there new colors you could see? And why are they impossible to imagine before you've seen them? Can you lose your color vision? And what does any of this have to do with linguistic color terms, why the military likes colorblind people for a particular task, and why Eagleman suggests that the cultural history of Thailand was influenced by one single, unknown neurodivergent? 

Transcript

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0:00.0

Today's episode is part two about color and the brain.

0:09.0

Why did Royals wear purple?

0:12.0

It's not accidental.

0:14.0

And if you rewound history 10,000 years and ran it again,

0:18.0

you'd find exactly the same outcome.

0:20.0

So what's going on? And how do we see

0:23.1

colors that our recent ancestors never saw in their lives? Why can't you imagine a new color?

0:32.1

Are there, in fact, new colors that you could see? Yes, and I'm going to show you how to do that.

0:39.3

Can you lose your color vision? And what does any of this have to do with language or culture,

0:43.3

or why the military likes colorblind people for a particular task?

0:48.3

And why I suggest that the cultural history of Thailand

0:52.3

was influenced by one single unknown neurodivergent.

1:00.4

Welcome to Inner Cosmos with me, David Eagleman. I'm a neuroscientist and author at Stanford.

1:05.7

And in these episodes, we look at the world inside us and around us to understand why and how our lives look the way they do.

1:29.1

Don't let biased algorithms. Don't let biased algorithms or degree screens or exclusive professional networks or stereotypes.

1:38.6

Don't let anything keep you from discovering the half of the workforce who are stars.

1:43.8

Workers skilled through alternative routes rather than a bachelor's degree.

1:47.7

It's time to tear the paper ceiling and see the stars beyond it.

1:51.6

Find out how you can make stars part of your talent strategy at tear the paper sealing.org.

1:56.2

Brought to you by opportunity at work in the ad council.

1:58.6

Adventure should never come with a pause button. Remember movie Pass? All the movies you wanted for just nine bucks? I'm Bridget Todd, host of There Are No Girls on the Internet. And this season, I'm digging into the tech stories we weren't told. Starting with Stacey Spikes, the black founder of Movie Pass, who got pushed out of the company he built. Everybody's trying to knock you down

2:18.4

and it's not going to work and no one's going to like it. And then boom, it's everywhere. And that was

...

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