At some point in our lives I’m sure most of us have imagined what life would be like if we could not see. I’ve had to wear glasses since grade 3, so I’ve been acutely aware of how precious sight is for nearly all my life. Now, as we race headlong into middle-age, it’s quite interesting to see my peers, who were always blessed with 20/20 vision, struggling with the need for some form of corrective lenses.
Along with myopia and astigmatism and my new favourite, presbyopia, there are a number of other visual impairments. I gained firsthand knowledge of colour blindness years ago. A boyfriend in University discovered his partial colour blindness while we were out shopping one day. He repeatedly picked out the same shirt (the wrong one, I might add) because he could not distinguish between beige and mauve. Now, any young man might have trouble if you asked him to find a mauve shirt … purple, yes; mauve, not so much. Once we established that mauve really was a colour I sent him off to look through the piles of shirts for the right size in the right colour. Frustratingly, he kept choosing the same shirt over and over again no matter how many times I told him the shirt he was bringing me was beige, not mauve. Finally, when I found the mauve I was looking for, and held it beside the beige one to show him the difference, he honestly could not tell them apart. For the first time, at age 21, he learned that his “perfect” vision was not so perfect after all. It was a bit of a blow to his ego, but the degree to which it affected his life was negligible. Unlike red/green colour blindness, which could make some everyday tasks like driving and cooking more difficult, his partial colour blindness might just result in an oddly matched shirt and tie or mismatched socks someday – hardly the stuff to lose sleep over.
I recently learned of a further impairment – monochromacy – which is total colour blindness. The following visual is an example of what someone with total colour blindness would see:
Artist Neil Harbisson, who was born with the inability to see colour, has teamed up with cyberneticist Adam Montandon and Peter Kese to develop a prosthetic device he calls an “eyeborg”. This lightweight eyepiece, worn on his forehead, transposes the light frequencies of color hues into sound frequencies.
You’ll be amazed when you watch this video from the TEDtalks series. In it Neil Harbisson demonstrates how he can “hear” colours. His artwork is described as “blurring the boundaries between sight and sound”, and you will see the evidence of that as you immerse yourself in his world for these next few minutes …
Neil Harbisson: I listen to color
After watching this video I was left with a new appreciation for all the colours visible in my day-to-day life … the turning of the leaves on the trees from green to golden to rust … the angry gray clouds tumbling across the steel-blue sky, warning of impending rain … the bright reds of the tomatoes and oranges of the peppers and deep greens of the kale as they lay piled up in the produce aisle of the grocery store, waiting to be added to someone’s shopping basket.
I thought about why I chose to wear a soft, buttery yellow sweatshirt today, on a day when the temperatures are starting to fall but I wasn’t quite ready to let go of summer.
Coming home, I thought about the process we went through when carefully choosing all the colours for each room of our home. Why did we choose the rich dark woods for the floors? The pale soft blues for the walls of some rooms, and warm sandy peaches for others? Colour is so important in our lives. It affects our thoughts and emotions, which in turn affects our behaviour. Yet we all too often fail to appreciate the degree to which our actions are being influenced by the colours that surround us.
Take some time to look around you … think about the colour choices you make, and notice how you feel. And for just a moment, think about those who do not have the gift of sight … it’s remarkable how even the grayest day looks brilliantly coloured after that.
(Many thanks to blogger http://nerdyromantic.com/ for introducing me to Neil Harbisson’s TEDtalks video!)