There is something unique about the color purple: Our brain makes it up. So you might just call purple a pigment of our imagination. –Tammy Awtry, Science News Explores, Jan. 28, 2025

Purple is the sweetness of plums, the promise of spring in wild hyacinth, and the richness of royal robes. It’s my mother’s favorite color and the 2018 Pantone Color of the Year. But is it really just a pigment of our imagination? Yes, writes science reporter Tammy Awtry who marvels at “how the brain creates something beautiful when faced with a systems error.”

Although I confess to not deeply understanding the science behind this, I understand the basics. The backs of our eyes contain light-sensitive cells called cones, and this is where we perceive color. Most people have three cone types: red, green, and blue. Our cones don’t actually see color, but they do detect certain light wavelengths, long, mid, or short. Light enters our eyes, and when a combination of codes are activated, this, in turn, creates another code, which our brains translates as a color. Colors in the visible rainbow are created by single wavelengths of light stimulating a certain combination of cones. At the red end of the color spectrum, long wavelengths are at work, while at the blue end, short wavelengths operate. There is no spectrum color, however, created by combining long and short wavelengths. Purple, then, confuses our brains because it’s a mixture of long and short wavelengths. Amazingly, our brain’s response is to bend the visible spectrum–a straight line–into a circle, thereby placing blue and red directly next to each other and filling the gap between them with purple.

Colors that are visible in the spectrum are identified as spectral colors. Colors that are not are called nonspectral colors, for they’re uniquely created from combining a short and long wavelength. Purple, writes Awtry, “arises from a unique quirk of how we process light. And it’s a beautiful example of how our brains respond when faced with something out of the norm.”

Not to be confused with violet, which is more blue, purple is more reddish. It’s only visible naturally on birds, fish, and some plants. In the past, people could harvest just a small amount of Tyrian purple dye from a certain shellfish species, making purple a unique and highly valued hue. Writers and artists have long recognized purple’s magical qualities. Irish playwright and critic George Bernard Shaw believed purple was a hue “where fantasy and reality meet to create something extraordinary.” Artist Vincent Van Gogh claimed, “There’s a kind of magic in the purple shadows of dusk.” Purple may be a creation of our minds, but perhaps this has only heightened its allure.

For many, purple is synonymous with creativity, mysticism, and spirituality:

• “A purple world is one where art, poetry, and love collide.” – Edgar Allan Poe
• “Dive into the purple depths of your mind; that’s where genius lies.” – Leonardo da Vinci
• “Purple is the color of spirituality, connecting the earthly with the ethereal.” – Carl Jung
• “Nature always wears a hint of purple when it wants to speak to your soul.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Purple flowers are nature’s whispers to dream.” – Georgia O’Keeffe

After reading this praise of purple, I think my mom was onto something. She embraced Spanish painter Pablo Picasso’s declaration that “[t]he world needs more purple – more creativity, passion, and a sense of wonder.”

There’s a special power inherent in purple, too. Fashion designer Coco Channel argued, “Purple is not just a color; it’s an attitude, a declaration of uniqueness.” Among utilitarian browns and grays and sweet pastels, purple “commands the room without saying a word” (Edith Wharton). Anne Morrow LIndbergh confessed that although she wanted to be “pure in heart,” she liked to wear her “purple dress.” Unabashedly, uniquely itself, purple announces, “Here I am.”

I think I’m genetically predisposed to color. As a child, I remember my granddad looking up into the summer sky and exclaiming, “Sky-blue-pink!” His brain was gloriously bending the color spectrum and filling the gaps to create new colors. I was the lucky recipient of some seriously good color genes. Since I received my first box of Crayola crayons, I’ve lived and breathed color. I loved the individual crayon names. I especially loved the big boxes with complete rows of various shades of primary and secondary colors. For years, I treasured my favorite colors, using my periwinkle and robin’s egg blue sparingly to prolong their lives. Even today, I find myself magnetically drawn to paint sections in home improvement stores and often stand transfixed before their neat rows of color samples. In another life, I might’ve been a paint mixer, reveling in the hallelujah moment when I opened a paint can to reveal the final color. Or maybe if our brains hadn’t made up purple, I might’ve been its creator, devoting my life to extolling its virtue and nominating my mom as its chief ambassador!

So here’s to purple, a splendid pigment of our imagination. Here’s to the incredible brain and its ability to “respond when faced with something out of the norm.” And lest you fail to take purple seriously, think twice. In Alice Walker’s 1983 Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Color Purple, she cautions: “I think it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.”  

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There was once a time when picking up a phone call was the main mode of communication, but now with endless choices available, some tech-savvy Gen Z are consumed with anxiety by the ringing of a phone. –Sawdah Bhaimiya, “Gen Z battling with phone anxiety are taking telephobia courses to learn the lost art of a call,” CNBC, Feb. 17, 2025

Welches, Shannon speaking. This was the official telephone greeting for the Welch kids when I was growing up. Because the incoming call was invariably for one of our parents, our greeting was quickly followed by just a minute please as we placed the heavy black receiver on the padded seat of our telephone stand and scurried off to locate Don or Marcia.

Like most families at this time, we had one telephone, and ours was a big, black creature who rested on a Duncan Phyfe telephone stand complete with a padded seat and special cubby for housing the local telephone book and designated note pad for taking messages. There were no private conversations, for the phone lived in the main hallway off our living and dining rooms. Let’s just say that it was wholly accessible to any and all who wanted to make–or listen to–a call. As teens, we removed the phone and stretched the cord, pulling it as far as possible into the den or downstairs bedroom. But this was largely futile. Our phone had a mind of its own and remained stubbornly tethered to its home base.

In Bhaimiya’s article, she cites Liz Baxter, a careers advisor at Nottingham College, a U.K.-based school for pupils aged 16 to 18 and older. Telephobia, Baxter claims, is a relatively recent phenomena most evident in Generation Z, those born between 1997 and 2012:

“Telephobia is a fear or anxiety around making and receiving telephone calls,” Baxter told CNBC Make It in an interview. “They’ve [Gen Z] just simply not had the opportunity for making and receiving telephone calls. It is not the main function of their phones these days, they can do anything on the phone, but we automatically default to texting, voice notes, and anything except actually using a telephone for its original intended purpose, and so people have lost that skill,” she explained.

A recent Newsweek article (Alice Gibbs, “Gen Z Have a Problem with Telephobia”) explores this phenomena, citing a 2024 Uswitch survey of 2,000 U.K. adults and revealing that “nearly 70 percent of those aged 18-34 preferred texting over talking, with 23 percent admitting they never answer calls at all.” This study noted that over half of those in this age group perceive phone calls as “bad news” and report being afraid when their phone rings. They also confess they are uncomfortable talking on the phone because they have no visual cues to navigate their conversations. Many prefer a Google Teams or Zoom call for this reason. Truthfully, many of us are often hesitant to answer the phone to avoid political, sales, and scam calls. The authors of these studies claim this phobia is different, though. To address this, some institutions are offering seminars during which participants practice a “series of scenarios where you have to make a phone call, for example, calling the doctors to make an appointment, calling in sick to work, and other everyday scenarios.” Participants are seated back-to-back to simulate a phone call and practice their calls using designated scripts.

I’ve heard many Baby Boomers lament the fact that their children won’t answer the phone (or make actual phone calls). “I’m literally all thumbs when it comes to texting,” they say, “and it’s just so much easier to pick up the phone and call.” Easier and preferable for some of us, perhaps, but clearly not for others. Texting, emailing, or social media posting offers a layer of protection between you and others. You have the advantage of delayed response; there is no “real time” pressure to react. You can think about what you want to say and how you want to say it. Through social media, you can curate the information you want to share, creating the self-portrait you desire. With this degree of control, you may be less vulnerable than committing yourself to a phone call during which you’re put on the spot to respond immediately, whether you’re prepared or not. And, of course, you have the benefit of refusal. You can refuse to respond to a text or message, leaving others to question whether you actually received it, will respond at your convenience, or will not respond at all.

As I read these recent studies about telephobia, I couldn’t help but think of a particular stanza in Gwendolyn Brooks’ poem, “The Chicago Defender Sends a Man to Little Rock, Fall 1957”:

In Little Rock they know 
Not answering the telephone is a way of rejecting life, 
That it is our business to be bothered, is our business 
To cherish bores or boredom, be polite 
To lies and love and many-faceted fuzziness. 

There is this, too. To refuse a call–or message–is “a way of rejecting life,” of rejecting the business of being bothered or bored, of refusing the duty of forced politeness. Most of us are guilty of screening calls for one reason or another. We’re running out the door to go somewhere, we’re in the company of others, we’re too tired and lack the emotional energy to meaningfully engage–the list goes on. Certainly, there are times when it’s not only reasonable but necessary to call back at a better time. Still, I wonder about our current preference for texting and growing telephobia. What does this reveal about us?

In the years since my father’s death, I can still conjure his voice as he answered the phone. His deep, rich Welches resounds in my ears and persists in my memory. Before cell phones and email, a long-distance call to my parents was a real gift, a lifeline to the people and home I cherished. Because I couldn’t afford many calls at that point in my life (and because I was long-winded!), I anticipated and relished them. Although it might’ve been nice to see them via video technology, I could always see them in my mind’s eye: sitting in the hallway, big, black receiver in hand, or later in the living room or den on a cordless phone. It was their voices, more than these images, though, that brought me home.

Cell phones, email, and social media are certainly here to stay. I can’t imagine a world in which we’d willingly return to the days of the rotary or cordless phone. I can imagine a world, however, in which we balance our propensity to text, email, and post with a willingness to pick up the phone and call. I can imagine a world in which my grandchildren will one day conjure my voice in the same way I conjure my parents’ voices. And I can imagine a world in which the audible voices coming into our homes through phone calls are treaured, not feared.