What color is your Rainbow?

Many mystical texts speak about "seeing" the world in a new way. Today I saw an article that made me think about this, but it isn't what the mystics have in mind.

This months Scientific American has an article about how color vision evolved. Too much to go over in a short blog, but the article talks a lot about how we see color and how other animals see color. We have cones in our eye that activate from three colors (trichromatic). There are many animals that only have cones for two colors (dichromats), and even a few that only have one. A few birds have sensitivity for four colors (tetrachromatic).

So there's lots of fun territory here, all about "seeing" the world in different ways.

What would it "look" like to see only two? What would it look like to see four? What did the first people who had three colors (and hence could now see many more colors than their two-color friends) experience? Think about all aspects of that experience? We could playfully recreate it, but let's say they could now see orange, and more reds. Would they be suppressed (burned at the stake), resisted, or just tossed off as a bit looney? We join Tribecca (who can see three pigments) and Dick (who only sees two).

Tribecca asks, "Could you hand me that orange?"
Dick replys, "orange? what's that. do you mean this grey?"
T - "well, I suppose. but it's orange."
D - "what does that even mean?"
T - "I'm talking about the color"
D - "Yeah, it's grey"
T - "no, it looks like the sunset"
D - "well, at least you got that right."
T - "so you like all the colors?"
D - "what colors?"
T - "just hand me the grey..."

This article is mostly just to get you thinking about different ways to "see" the world. Nothing too deep or mystical, except that it feels odd to try to think about new - unnamed colors. And what it means to try to see them in your mind. Can you name all the 24 million colors you can display on a Mac? I know I can't. but I can see them. If asked, I can point to 10 or 15 different shades of yellow in a painting and probably name most of them (yellow, yellow green, light yellow, kind of a orange yellow, but not as orange as that one, etc.). But the colors are relative. I might point to a different shade first next time and call that yellow and shift my answers just a little...

So, i keep talking about seeing new colors. Does it seem possible that we all see the world a little differently? Or is the difference probably pretty minimal. One of the points of the article states that some women have four types of visual pigments instead of three. What if you're one of them? Can you picture how the world might look different for other people with more or less than you? That's where all the fun begins.

ok, that's it for now. "See" you later.