FMP: Radiolab on Colour

Listened to this Radiolab podcast about colour. And it’s got me thinking that maybe theres a lot more to colour perception than we know. In the podcast, the presenters interview linguist Guy Deutscher. Deutcher talks about William Gladstone’s research into The Iliad by Homer, and how lots of colours are described unusually; honey is described as green, the sea is described as wine red, and the sky is often referred to as bronze. So was Homer colourblind? It turns out not, and his psychedelic palette was common in ancient greek writing. One thing that sticks out is the absolute absence of blue. As it turns out, the Ancient Greeks hadn’t invented the concept of blue yet. This is quite complicated to explain, but it sounds like, seen as blue is quite an uncommon colour outside of the manufactured world, the ancient greeks didn’t ever really need a word to talk about it. So what about the sky? Deutscher makes reference to a slightly anecdotal experiment he performed on his own daughter: He brought her up teaching her all the colours, blue included, but never mentioned that the sky itself was blue. Eventually, he put the question to her: what colour is the sky? And his daughter didn’t understand the question, and couldn’t answer. Eventually, after a couple months, she came to a conclusion; the sky is white.

Supposedly, most older civilisations didn’t have a word for blue either, for similar reasons. In fact, colours tend to be “discovered” in the same order in most cultures. The pattern of these colours’ discovery follows another pattern: the invention of new dyes. Blue dye is hard to make naturally so it comes a lot later. The podcast also interviews Jules Davidoff, professor of neuropsychology at London University. Davidoff worked with members of the Himba tribe, in Nambia. The Himba are similar to the Ancient Greeks in that they also don’t have a word for blue. Davidoff showed preformed a test; he presented members of the Himba tribe with a selection of squares on a laptop. All except one of the squares was green. the final square was blue. A simple question was posed: which square is different? To the Himba participants, there was no difference. Perhaps then, we only learn colours as labels for certain wavelengths of light, and train our brains to interpret them as so; that colour doesn’t intrinsically look like anything at all. This lends credence to the idea of colour being qualia: There really must be no standard for what blue is, or what red is, outside of vague ranges of wavelengths of light. One persons blue really could look nothing like someone else’s, and there would be no way to know one way or another.

What does this mean for colourblindness, then? I supposedly am biologically incapable of seeing green. This helps me understand how I, personally, have an idea of green in my own perception. Grass, for instance, looks “green” to me, and I think of things that look like grass as being green. I know things famous for being green are green. I used to think blonde people had green hair when I was little. But as I’ve grown up I no longer percieve lighter haired people as having green hair. There evidently is so much more going on with colour perception than cones in the eye. Wow.

Colour blindness Research

I’ve been looking at design work pertaining to colour blindness in order to get an idea of what the field has already generated.

I was a little blown away by this project by Kevin Guan; Spectrum: A Colourblind Kit for Kids. The project itself is aimed at young kids and their parents, at the time when colourblindness is often first discovered. It includes things like a simple Ishihara test, what looks like filtered glasses, presumably to show a kid with colourblindness the numbers hidden in the test. Also included is a colour by numbers booklet, with numbered pens; a really nice simple little change allows a colour blind child’s participation. There are also some cue cards in there that seem to demonstrate common objects and their colours, labelled. It seems like this whole project seems centred around turning what could potentially be a negative experience for a colour blind child (Being told something is wrong with you, and you are somehow less than other kids) into something a little bit fun; exploratory and experimental. This is likely specifically because of how much more of an effect colourblindness can have an effect on children over adults with the condition; Lower primary school education tends to use colour as a teaching method, as well as the potential for lower self confidence about it must be much higher. Especially with curious other kids.

Similarly, Boong Chamnanratanakul’s project “Is your child color blind?” takes a similar tact, turning a colourblindness diagnostic tool into a fun game. This puzzle set seems to take cues from the Munsell Hue Test, where you are tasked with sorting colours along a spectrum as a means of determining areas of the spectrum you cant distinguish.

I also watched this video essay by Vsauce, Is your red the same as my red? which philosophises about the ‘explanatory gap’ between everyone, colourblind or not. Even with two regular trichromatic individuals, theres no meaningful way of knowing if both’s experience of the colour red is the same; you can both look at a strawberry, agree it’s red, but have a fundamentally different looking red inside their own heads. The video makes reference to “Qualia”, or ineffable, inexpressible raw feelings and experience. An example of this in reference to colour would be trying to explain blue to a blind person; you can say it’s cool, relaxed, or whatever but this wouldn’t make any sense to someone who’s never experienced colour. More widely, trying to explain the feeling of pain to some sort of alien who is biologically incapable of ever feeling pain would be impossible. The video argues that this could either be a feature of the human experience, or possibly a failure of human language. Either way, the fact is, we are fundamentally alone in our own minds in regards to our perception. I guess following this line of logic would provide a very different project to the above examples. I could widen the whole thing to concern itself with perception, and how much of it is really entirely locked inside our own heads. Perhaps I could do something about how reality; how its’ maybe not so much something we share, and our minds aren’t so much interpreters of reality as generators.

Take Away:
The way I see it, this project can go one of three ways; I can either find a need that needs designing for specifically for colourblind folk, perhaps interviews specifically, as I’ve talked about the anxiety in regards to that already. Similarly, I could direct a project towards non- colourblind people. But I could also direct a project towards those with regular colour vision, to try and inform as I have already discussed. Thirdly I could widen the project entirely to looking at perception in general, as discussed above. This would be a lot more experimental and perhaps slightly less practically orientated.