Along those lines, I understand what it is you believe, but I don’t feel like I have a very good understanding of why you believe it. I guess a combination of “the closer our environment matches the ancestral environment, the happier we tend to be”, “personal experience introspecting on what I like”, and “experience talking to people about what they like”?
Relatedly I am not clear on how confident you are in your claims but am interested in knowing how confident you are in your claims.
Personally, I spent some time recently digging into lighting. Amongst other things, I did a little (informal) experiment using an app to measure lux (and color temperature) in various places to see how they made me feel. Hopefully I’ll write more about this some time, but in short, I feel like up to 1,000 to maybe 1,500 lux it felt better, but I don’t feel very confident about that. It’s hard to say, and there are lots of potentially confounding variables.
As for CRI, my research wasn’t very fruitful. The impression I got was that 95+ CRI is useful in contexts involving things like photography and art but not in everyday scenarios, and that brightness is way more important for things like focus and mood. I hadn’t realized that outdoor lighting has great CRI though; I find the evolutionary reasoning to be plausible, so the fact that outdoor lighting has great CRI makes me more bullish about CRI having a more meaningful impact on things like mood and focus.
Maybe I’ll write more about this too, but FWIW, I felt like I was spending too much time researching all this stuff and figuring out what products to buy, so I kinda just punted and bought the Brighter Lamp. It should last like 20+ years and at that longevity, it’s like $5/month. Whatever.
A different interpretation as to why high CRI may be preferred by our visual system is from the predictive coding perspective and how color constancy works in visual perception.
If we take color constancy processes to be our mind trying to predict what the surface reflectance of an object is given the available information, then the wider the spectra of the illumination source, the better the cues our visual system has access to for inferring the surface colors of objects. You could imagine an extreme where you have a single wavelength light source like a sodium vapor lamp (the orange lights that might illuminate a parking lot) and how that impacts your ability to differentiate colors of objects in your environment, since different surfaces would give your eyes the same information in that lighting environment. You would be unable to differentiate between several surface colors, and this is a widely done demonstration in psychology perception courses. This would be the worst case scenario and corresponds to a low CRI, whereas a high CRI light would give you better information about the colors present in the environment.
Better information leads to less guesswork by your visual system and minimizing prediction error might be something preferred by your mind.
Relatedly, having bright enough lights to activate your cones for color perception also matters. In dim environments we mostly use scotopic vision through our rods, which does not allow us to perceive color since it is a single receptor system. Anecdotally, I prefer times of the day where sunlight contains the more broad spectrum versus near sunset when it is both distorted by our atmosphere and also dimmer to the point where you start to perceive less color. The latter point can also be observed more saliently during solar eclipses. The spectra remains the same since the sun is not distorted by our atmosphere, but nevertheless dims enough that you start seeing less color around you outside.
If you lived your whole life under sodium vapor light, you just wouldn’t have a notion of color. You would know which objects were bright or dark, and so get low predictive error.
If you walked into a windowless room you had never been in before, and your wearing gloves so you can’t look at your hands etc, then you wouldn’t know if the lighting was high CRI or not.
This would be the worst case scenario and corresponds to a low CRI, whereas a high CRI light would give you better information about the colors present in the environment.
Better information leads to less guesswork by your visual system and minimizing prediction error might be something preferred by your mind.
RGB light (like from a white computer screen) provides just as much color info, it’s just slightly different info.
So this only makes any sense if you are comparing the same objects, under different CRI lighting conditions, which could cause your predictions to be slightly worse.
This theory would also seem to predict that wearing tinted sunglasses would be intensely unpleasant. Which doesn’t seem like a good prediction.
My point was that if you were trying to infer ‘true’ surface reflectance of objects under daylight, while only having luminance info from a single wavelegth light source, you would end up with high prediction error about the properties of those surfaces.
So yes, I was only referring to the case where the observer has a reference with which to compare the objects to. I did not have in mind the case where we would be naive observers having 0 experience with the world around us. My suggestion was motivated by my intuition about our everyday experience, and not meant to be an absolute truth about human biology.
In response to tinted sunglasses, I would venture that you would not wear them if you were trying to perform a task that involved ‘accurate’ color perception e.g. going to an art museum, watching a movie, seeing a sunset. As an aside, I do avoid them because I enjoy my sense of color perception in general.
Along those lines, I understand what it is you believe, but I don’t feel like I have a very good understanding of why you believe it. I guess a combination of “the closer our environment matches the ancestral environment, the happier we tend to be”, “personal experience introspecting on what I like”, and “experience talking to people about what they like”?
Relatedly I am not clear on how confident you are in your claims but am interested in knowing how confident you are in your claims.
Personally, I spent some time recently digging into lighting. Amongst other things, I did a little (informal) experiment using an app to measure lux (and color temperature) in various places to see how they made me feel. Hopefully I’ll write more about this some time, but in short, I feel like up to 1,000 to maybe 1,500 lux it felt better, but I don’t feel very confident about that. It’s hard to say, and there are lots of potentially confounding variables.
As for CRI, my research wasn’t very fruitful. The impression I got was that 95+ CRI is useful in contexts involving things like photography and art but not in everyday scenarios, and that brightness is way more important for things like focus and mood. I hadn’t realized that outdoor lighting has great CRI though; I find the evolutionary reasoning to be plausible, so the fact that outdoor lighting has great CRI makes me more bullish about CRI having a more meaningful impact on things like mood and focus.
Maybe I’ll write more about this too, but FWIW, I felt like I was spending too much time researching all this stuff and figuring out what products to buy, so I kinda just punted and bought the Brighter Lamp. It should last like 20+ years and at that longevity, it’s like $5/month. Whatever.
A different interpretation as to why high CRI may be preferred by our visual system is from the predictive coding perspective and how color constancy works in visual perception.
If we take color constancy processes to be our mind trying to predict what the surface reflectance of an object is given the available information, then the wider the spectra of the illumination source, the better the cues our visual system has access to for inferring the surface colors of objects. You could imagine an extreme where you have a single wavelength light source like a sodium vapor lamp (the orange lights that might illuminate a parking lot) and how that impacts your ability to differentiate colors of objects in your environment, since different surfaces would give your eyes the same information in that lighting environment. You would be unable to differentiate between several surface colors, and this is a widely done demonstration in psychology perception courses. This would be the worst case scenario and corresponds to a low CRI, whereas a high CRI light would give you better information about the colors present in the environment.
Better information leads to less guesswork by your visual system and minimizing prediction error might be something preferred by your mind.
Relatedly, having bright enough lights to activate your cones for color perception also matters. In dim environments we mostly use scotopic vision through our rods, which does not allow us to perceive color since it is a single receptor system. Anecdotally, I prefer times of the day where sunlight contains the more broad spectrum versus near sunset when it is both distorted by our atmosphere and also dimmer to the point where you start to perceive less color. The latter point can also be observed more saliently during solar eclipses. The spectra remains the same since the sun is not distorted by our atmosphere, but nevertheless dims enough that you start seeing less color around you outside.
If you lived your whole life under sodium vapor light, you just wouldn’t have a notion of color. You would know which objects were bright or dark, and so get low predictive error.
If you walked into a windowless room you had never been in before, and your wearing gloves so you can’t look at your hands etc, then you wouldn’t know if the lighting was high CRI or not.
RGB light (like from a white computer screen) provides just as much color info, it’s just slightly different info.
So this only makes any sense if you are comparing the same objects, under different CRI lighting conditions, which could cause your predictions to be slightly worse.
This theory would also seem to predict that wearing tinted sunglasses would be intensely unpleasant. Which doesn’t seem like a good prediction.
My point was that if you were trying to infer ‘true’ surface reflectance of objects under daylight, while only having luminance info from a single wavelegth light source, you would end up with high prediction error about the properties of those surfaces.
So yes, I was only referring to the case where the observer has a reference with which to compare the objects to. I did not have in mind the case where we would be naive observers having 0 experience with the world around us. My suggestion was motivated by my intuition about our everyday experience, and not meant to be an absolute truth about human biology.
In response to tinted sunglasses, I would venture that you would not wear them if you were trying to perform a task that involved ‘accurate’ color perception e.g. going to an art museum, watching a movie, seeing a sunset. As an aside, I do avoid them because I enjoy my sense of color perception in general.