Exceptional colors: Eigengrau
What color do you see in the absence of light? You probably say it’s black.
But this particular color have another name: Eigengrau (German: “intrinsic gray” or “own gray”). Also known as Eigenlicht (German: “own light”).
The term was introduced in or shortly before 1860 by the German psychologist Gustav Theodor Fechner (1801-1887) to denote the disorganized motion of greyish colour seen in perfect darkness. Nowadays the phenomenon is more commonly referred to as “visual noise” or “background adaptation”.
That's how this color looks:
Looks like black, right? That’s because the human visual system is more sensitive to contrast than absolute luminance, we can perceive the world similarly regardless of the huge changes in illumination over the day or from place to place.
This is an approximation of Eigengrau vs. the black color:
Now you can see the difference!