One afternoon last fall, in the basement of Gilman Hall, a classroom filled with orange light. In the absence of all other hues, the students inside couldn’t tell red felt-tip markers from green ones, blue M&Ms from yellow. A briefly opened door revealed, Wizard of Oz-like, the shock of natural color in the hallway.
The Krieger School’s social media manager captured the scene on her cellphone, and that 26-second video (at right) drew an audience. With 11 million views and over 1,000 comments on Instagram, viewers revealed their fascination with this monochromatic world.
But why? What was happening in that room, and how did it strike such a chord with so many?
“I think it’s the alien-ness of it; people are drawn to strange and wonderful things,” says chemistry lecturer Jamie Young, who conducted the demonstration in his First-Year Seminar, The Science of Color. “It’s weird, and so people think it’s cool to look at.”
Young borrowed a set of sodium lamps that day, taped over the LED display on every device in the windowless room, and turned out the overhead lights. To help students explore their amber world, he gave them M&Ms and Skittles to sort, and felt-tip markers to complete pages from a coloring book. He inquired if the absence of color affected the candy’s flavor. He warned students they might feel disoriented, even nauseated.
The course leads with the physics of color, then moves into its chemistry, and then biology. The hands-on demonstration takes a step into color’s psychology. “This experiment is a really nice bridge between the hard science of color and the question of how are we actually perceiving this as people in the real world,” Young says.
I think it’s the alien-ness of it; people are drawn to strange and wonderful things.”
—Jamie Young
Excited electrons
For a simplified refresher on the science, let’s say you’re making a salad in your kitchen. When you turn on the light, the electrons in your lightbulb get a jolt of energy and almost immediately crash back down, releasing the extra energy in the form of photons, or little bits of light. When the photons smack into your lettuce, their green wavelengths rebound into your eye while the red ones— green’s complementary color—are absorbed. When they hit the tomato, the green ones are absorbed and the red ones travel to your eye.
But while most lightbulbs—and the sun, and candles, and almost any light source—emit a full spectrum of wavelengths to bang into objects and get sucked in or reflected out, sodium lamps emit a very narrow band of light—right around 589 nanometers. Which means that in a sodium-lit environment, the only wavelength available to bounce into your eye is that slightly sickly yellow we might remember from pre-LED streetlights.
Since we’re used to seeing the full spectrum of colors, it’s disconcerting to experience just a tiny range, Young says. It upends our expectation of how the world looks. There’s an eeriness to it, like a solar eclipse or a foggy morning. Our sense of vision evolved to identify threats swiftly, where distinguishing colors can be an act of survival. “Everything just feels kind of wrong,” Young says.
In his orange classroom, students had to switch from organizing their visual cues by hue to organizing them by value, or light vs. dark. They had to navigate an alternate version of the world. Combined with what they’ve learned about how color operates on the scientific level, the novelty gives students a new appreciation for color, Young says. Which prepares them for the seminar’s next phase: exploring color in natural phenomena, history, and art.
The big screen
The history of color is a crucial topic in film studies because it’s such an important factor in how humans respond emotionally when we look at art, says Meredith Ward, the Faxon Director of Film and Media Studies.
Every spring, Ward teaches films shot in black and white to help students appreciate how their tonalities affect the audience’s interpretation. Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese’s 1980 classic, for example, “essentially aestheticizes the world of boxing in such a way that the wounds and the blood become beautiful even as they’re brutal, which would have read differently in color,” Ward says.
Raging Bull, along with The Artist and the more recent Roma, are examples of black and white as an artistic choice, in contrast to early films where it was the only option. Early film theorists said their grayscale removed these movies from our everyday world, setting them apart as art and not just a reflection of reality. Their very alien-ness is what nudges us to think critically about what we see.
It also sets the art cinema mode apart from the mainstream cinema mode in a kind of cultural code that we grasp implicitly. Just as, Ward says, we grasp that sepia tones in a film often connote nostalgia, or that cold bluish ones—like in the Bourne franchise—connote the tough, postmodern realism of the early 2000s.
Lighting technology and color stocks that emphasized various palettes have been part of cinema since the early 20th century. A pop of green and red is a hallmark of Technicolor, for example. But most films are shot digitally today, meaning their creators make conscious decisions about the aesthetic and connotations they’re aiming for. And with filters flooding every social media app, everyone who wants to be is now a color artist.
What they’re saying
Social media offers a powerful window into our evolving zeitgeists because the ways we engage with it reveal underlying cultural associations, says Ward, who researches and publishes on social media in addition to film history and theory.
In the Science of Color viral video’s comments on Instagram, viewers raise topics like movie genres and TV shows, tunnel entrances, the massive 2003 The Weather Projectinstallation by artist Olafur Eliasson, and a desire to enter the monochromatic setting and remain there for a period of time.
Ward says such remarks suggest that many viewers are connecting with the “edutainment” that social media can provide. There’s nothing wrong with that. “We learn something in these small doses through these short-form media, and then some people go off on these interesting associative tracks,” she says.
Viewers also seem to be searching for a sense of immersiveness, Ward notes. A way to sink into the video’s sensory experience and share the feeling with others even while scrolling alone on their phone. “It’s kind of exciting that a video like this would get 11 million views, because it’s competing with the hypersensory overload of social media,” she says. “There’s something a little contemplative to this one, which I think is a nice sign that we’re still able to focus on good things.”
It’s kind of exciting that a video like this would get 11 million views, because it’s competing with the hypersensory overload of social media.”
—Meredith Ward
It’s all relative
It’s easy to think of color as primarily aesthetic, says perception psychologist Jason Fischer, until it goes away and you realize how much you depend on its cues to form judgments about your environment.
The owner of the sodium lamps Young borrowed, Fischer uses them in the classroom to demonstrate cortical colorblindness—the most extreme form—and in his research to study the role of color in the cognitive processes behind everyday physics, like predicting whether one object can balance atop another.
Even in normal lighting, our perception of color is far less straightforward than we realize, says Fischer, who recently moved from the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences to the University of Coimbra in Portugal, where he’s an associate professor in the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences. Color is inferred: To perceive our yellow shirt as the same shade of yellow in an office or a soccer field or by firelight, our brain has to constantly estimate the variations in illumination and cancel out their individual effects.
To do that, our eyes contain three classes of light-sensitive neurons, or cones. S-cones, which stands for the short wavelengths they’re sensitive to, are activated by blue or violet; M-cones, for medium, respond to greens; and L-cones, for long, pick up the reds. A strawberry activates the L-cones strongly, the M ones a little bit, and the S ones not much at all. The brain perceives the color by reading the relative activations of the three cone classes.
But under that 589-nanometer wavelength of sodium illumination, the brain loses its ability to compare activations across the classes. Objects differ only in how much of that one wavelength they reflect, so we only perceive varying shades of gray.
Everyone’s a scientist
In those conditions, the brain keeps doing its job of comparing the data points it’s receiving, but it’s also aware that something is missing. “On one hand, it’s business as usual for the cones in your eye and the color perception processes in your brain,” Fischer says. “On the other hand, it is a weird, uneasy feeling. And I think that largely comes down to the kinds of information in the environment that we’re used to perceiving through color.”
Often, without being aware of it, we take in details like the pallor of a person’s skin. This alerts us to whether they might be healthy or sick. We judge the ripeness of fruit or the doneness of meat based on color. We use color to discern time of day or whether a storm is brewing.
Everyone is something of a perception scientist, Fischer says, because we all use our senses to tune into the world. Sodium illumination, which makes us realize how much we use color in daily life, raises questions about why and how.
“To experience ways in which your reality can be shifted around, and have that reveal the ways in which your brain is constructing a story about the world, it’s a really stunning experience,” he says.
It’s similar, Fischer adds, to how great art sometimes prods us to see the world in different ways by playing tricks on our perceptual systems.
The language of color
Impressionist painters aimed to mimic nature not with direct representation, but by applying various colors near one another and allowing the viewer’s eye to do the blending, says painter Margaret Murphy, director and teaching professor at the Center for Visual Arts.
Other movements danced with color in other ways. The Fauvists’ exaggerated, heightened colors went straight for the emotions, Murphy says. In the abstract color field paintings of the 1940s and ’50s, color became its own subject as artists drew on spiritual associations with both color and shape. Cubists’ muted palettes flattened their subjects’ planes.
Some painters wield black and white, like the grayscale figures of portrait artist Amy Sherald. “They’re conveying that they’re not tapping into this universal understanding of color; by the absence of color, they’re speaking to that,” Murphy says.
Making meaning
In Murphy’s advanced projects course this semester, senior Shylah Healy painted a skull. It’s a common enough element in art studios—but changed everything by tinting the entire painting red. Viewers bring their own perceptions, personal associations, and cultural connections to any work of art. But Healy’s monochromatic choice shifts the read for all of us, Murphy says. It creates meaning that would not have been there otherwise and calls us to ask deeper questions about the environment and our relationship with color.
Young’s orange-hued demonstration reminds Murphy of related activities she and her colleagues practice in their own classes, where they might direct students to paint outside, or to turn off the lights and incorporate the illumination from a cell phone or candle within the painting.
“It’s so illusionistic; just by changing the light, you change your perception of what things look like,” Murphy says. “That’s pretty powerful.”
Skull painting by Shylah Healy
Seeing more
PhotographerJohn Steck Jr.’s students shoot black and white film before they tackle color, and they tell him they “see more” that way.
Minus color’s distraction, they delve into composition, light, and form through a new vantage point, says Steck, senior lecturer and photography coordinator in the Center for Visual Arts. He asks students to consider how attending to tones instead of hues changes their perception, and what it means to see things through a tonal range. Perversely, peeling away color unveils a perspective they don’t normally see. When they bring color back into the equation, it opens up more possibilities.
Through its unfamiliarity, grayscale takes us on our own individual journeys of seeing anew, Steck says. Many students embrace the opportunity to shoot in black and white because it feels vintage or nostalgic to them, and they enjoy connecting to older processes. Some sense bleakness in it, where the absence of color reads as dystopian or void of life. When he looks at black and white images, Steck finds himself in a choose-your-own-adventure scenario, envisioning colors to fill in the gaps.
The sodium-accented video is a journey too, he says, tapping into our twin loves of learning and being mystified. The video manages to fulfill both. Its otherworldly orange glare lends a sense of magic, while its everyday, real-life setting deconstructs it. “To actually see it with our own eyes, it’s like, ‘oh, maybe it’s not as magical as we thought. It’s just pure science,’” he says.
Turning point
Steck loves to imagine himself at the point in history when color photography first emerged. It was an experience opposite the video’s plunge into colorlessness. “How does your head wrap around that?” he asks.
But a similar surprise occurs in the video when the door opens and we glimpse the familiarity—but now wonder—of everyday color saturation. “If the whole video was just monochromatic,” chemistry lecturer Young points out, “there would be no point of reference. You’d see that it’s different, but you wouldn’t know how it connects to the real world.”
That gateway between weird and ordinary, Young says, is what turns the moment into a pivotal one within the story the video tells. It might even be the key to its viral fascination.
Shooting black and white film helps John Steck Jr.’s photography students focus on composition, light, and form before adding the element of color. Below is a selection of their photographs.
“Where the Light Waits,” Gabriella Sun
“Sundial,” Meghaa Parvathy Ballakrishnen
“Violin in Fair Condition,” Katherine Wang
11 Million Views and Counting
Jamie Young’s class attempts to distinguish colors under the monochromatic glow of sodium lights.
By Elizabeth Voss
Last fall, without expecting much, we posted a 26-second clip of Johns Hopkins students experimenting with color markers under sodium lamps. Don’t get me wrong—chemistry lecturer Jamie Young’s First-Year Seminar is a cool class. The Science of Color explores the physics, chemistry, biology, and history behind color and light. It covers everything from sunsets to chameleons to the Aurora Borealis. But a monochromatic lighting experiment? On Instagram? It felt niche, even for our mostly academic audience.
That video now has more than 11 million views and 1.2 million engagements. As a social media manager, I’ve spent 10 years analyzing trends, optimizing posts, and timing uploads. Yet this video’s success reminds me of one harsh truth about social media: You can’t predict virality.
It’s a fascinating experiment, but it’s not flashy or dramatic. So why did it go viral?
Maybe it’s the relatability. The students’ reactions— the “What is happening?” energy—reflect the universal human curiosity about the world around us. Or maybe it’s the novelty. Sodium lamps aren’t something people encounter every day. There’s also the element of surprise when the light changes.
Virality is unpredictable
But even with those explanations, predicting virality is like predicting the weather. You can gather data and make educated guesses, but you’ll never control the outcome. For every post that explodes, there are thousands that don’t. We’ve shared other engaging content from JHU—fascinating student research, student life activities, trendy videos, and stunning campus photographs. They have performed well, but none of them have hit millions of views. This was different.
Timing might have played a role. The video landed on a weekday afternoon, a sweet spot for Instagram engagement. The algorithm’s mood that day also mattered. Early likes and shares helped it gain traction, triggering Instagram’s amplification loop. Then, once it started appearing on Explore pages and getting reshared to Stories, it hit critical mass.
The comments section added another layer of engagement. People were tagging friends, sharing their own experiences with colorblindness, and debating how light affects perception. A few science educators even chimed in to explain the phenomenon in detail. The post became a conversation starter, extending its reach far beyond our usual audience. Teachers mentioned wanting to replicate the experiment in their own classrooms. Artists discussed how lighting affects their work.
But even with all that, there is no magic formula. You can’t reverse-engineer a viral post.
Social media thrives on unpredictability. It’s what keeps the platforms dynamic and engaging. The randomness can be maddening, but it’s also part of the fun. You never know when a simple post about coloring under sodium lamps will captivate millions of people.
