Our color memory and what we refer to as "Memory Colors" contribute to the challenge of Color Theory and Color Management.

Memory Colors are colors matter more to us because we have strong memory of them. Color is a property of light while memory is a property of our experiences. These are colors such as skin tones, green grass, or sky blue that we are all familiar with. Some colors are more important to get "right" and out ingrained memories of these color are often quite inaccurate. There are psychological aspects of the human color perception that we can't yet model mathematically, so color management simply can't address them. Even the best color management must leave room for human intervention at strategic points.

Then we have the human mind, our experiences and our perception. Take a moment, close your eyes, think of a green grassy meadow. Can you see it in your minds eye? I know what I see, you know what that looks like, but if we were actually about to measure the color in our minds eye-they would be different due to your brains interpretation.

The human mind is adaptable, if we talk about red roses, we've all seen red roses but we know that not all red roses are the same. Our mind knows that it's in a range and when we close our eyes our mind remembers from our experiences what red roses look like.

Yellows are very sensitive to us, and it's hard for the human eye to distinguish ranges of yellow when we look at a gradient.

Here's another example, an artist will spend years painting, with an unlimited number of custom paints he can mix on a whim, to reproduce an image he has in his minds eye. When he's happy with it, he brings it to you and wants you to scan it and print it using 6 colors and make it look like he thinks it should. This is why we use Color Names.