The eyes have it: scientists claim to discover 'jaw-dropping' new colour

After walking the Earth for a few hundred thousand years, humans may think they have seen it all. But not according to a team of scientists who claim to have experienced a colour no one has seen before.

- Ian Sample

The bold – and contested – assertion is the result of an experiment in which US researchers had laser pulses fired into their eyes. By stimulating individual cells in the retina, the laser pushed their perception beyond its natural limits, they say.

Their description of the colour is not overly arresting – the five people who have seen it call it blue-green – but that, they say, does not fully capture the richness of the experience. "We predicted from the beginning that it would look like an unprecedented colour signal but we didn't know what the brain would do with it," said Ren Ng, an electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley. "It was jaw-dropping. It's incredibly saturated."

The researchers shared an image of a turquoise square to give a sense of the colour, which they named Olo, but stressed that the hue could only be experienced through laser manipulation of the retina.