Beyond the Spectrum: Leadership Lessons from Not Seeing Purple

As the modern philosopher Nelly said in his song over and over – “‘Cause it’s all in my head” we often think things are true more than them actually being true.

Before Nelly, Mark Twain was telling us – “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

And before Twain, there was the philosopher, Seneca, who said something similar – “we suffer more often in imagination than in reality”.

And guess what I can show you, the colour purple does not exist and understanding this might help you be a better leader.

The Not Colour Purple

That is right, there is no colour purple; not in the light spectrum. We make it up in our heads. (Note that violet and purple are not the same colour.)

We can only see colours that are on the visible spectrum. These colours exist at particular wavelengths. Red is the longest wavelength coming in around 700 nanometers. On the other side of the visible spectrum is violet at 380 nanometers.

This is why the invisible wavelengths to your eyes are called ultraviolet (UV) which is under 380 nanometers, and infrared, above 700 nanometers.

Light Information

There are many forms of radiation around us all the time. Light is a type of radiation that our eyes can perceive.

We can see colour based on three types of colour receptors in our eyes, also called cones. Each type of cone can see all the range of colours but they all have a preference, or the technical term, get excited by a particular colour, red light, blue light, or green light.

For reference, dogs have two cones so they see fewer colours than us. Bees and butterflies have 4 cones so they can see ultraviolet light. The mantis shrimp is the king of seeing colours, they have 16 cones.

If you look at the chart, orange is a combination of red and yellow. The wavelength of orange is roughly the average of the other two colours. This works for all colours, green is about halfway between yellow and blue and so on.

But not for purple. The colour purple is called by physicists as a nonspectral colour.

It’s All In Your Head

We can make purple by mixing red and blue, but if you look at the averaged wavelength of those two colours we would get a colour closer to green/yellow which is clearly not purple.

So what is happening?

Short answer, Your brain is making it happen.

Purple isn’t a spectral colour, but we can see it. It is a neat little hallucination of our brain, just like all the other colours you see.

Your brain is constantly assessing all the signals of colour it receives and makes judgement calls on all of them. It is very easy if just one colour is received.

It gets more complicated when different colours are coming in and your brain is trying to figure out multiple colour inputs at once.

Incomplete Thinking

Our brains are amazing organs but they can often be tricked. They are very lazy as thinking requires a lot of energy so it has created ways to shorten the thinking time.

These are called heuristics. A common one is Confirmation Bias. We want to believe something so we search for reasons to agree with ourselves rather than seeing the reasons why we could be wrong.

When we connect the dots of things that don’t actually join we are creating our own little hallucinations.

Don’t feel bad, it is completely human. We don’t want to be wrong and we create many work around to protect our fragile ego from ever having to face the possibility that we are not perfect.

The challenge for you as a leader is that you need to be constantly thinking about how you are thinking.

Not in terms of good or bad, but in terms of effective or ineffective.

If we think quickly we will create the links to make the story in our head real. To create improvements we need to make sure all the links are real and not just imagined.

There is a magical thing that happens when you write down a process or thought pattern, you can see immediately where hope has sabotaged your designs.

Think slowly because sometimes it is all in your head.