Richard Dawkins’ prophetic vision of ‘new colour’

The scientist reflects on a speculative idea about human perception in a 2004 book he co-wrote and, two decades on, an experiment that has produced a colour no one has seen before

Hue new? Scientists claim to have found colour no one has seen before". Congratulations on a genuinely witty double pun in the online headline on your article, which was also in Saturday'spaper under a different heading.

And - forgive a little self-congratulation - my co-author Yan Wong reminds me that in our book, The Ancestor's Tale (first published in 2004, with a second edition in 2016), we wrote: This raises an intriguing possibility. Imagine that a neurobiologist inserts a tiny probe into, say, a green cone and stimulates it electrically. The green cell will now report light' while all other cells are silent. Will the brain see' a super green' hue such as could not possibly be achieved by any real light? Real light, no matter how pure, would always stimulate all three classes ofconestodifferingextents."