An Anthropologist on Mars (1995) (3 page)

A number of accounts were published in the nineteenth century—many collected in Mary Collins’s Colour-Blindness—one of the most vivid (besides that of an achromatopic house painter) being that of a physician who, thrown from his horse, suffered a head injury and concussion. “On recovering sufficiently to notice objects around him”, George Wilson recorded in 1853, he found that his perception of colours, which was formerly normal and acute, had become both weakened and perverted—All coloured objects—now seem strange to him—Whilst formerly a student in Edinburgh he was known as an excellent anatomist; now he cannot distinguish an artery from a vein by its tint—Flowers have lost more than half their beauty for him, and he recalls the shock which he received on first entering his garden after his recovery, at finding that a favourite damask rose had become in all its parts, petals, leaves, and stem, of one uniform dull colour; and that variegated flowers had lost their characteristic tints.

As the months went by, he particularly missed the brilliant colors of spring—he had always loved flowers, but now he could only distinguish them by shape or smell. The blue jays were brilliant no longer,—their blue, curiously, was now seen as pale grey. He could no longer see the clouds in the sky, their whiteness, or off-whiteness as he saw them, being scarcely distinguishable from the azure, which seemed bleached to a pale grey. Red and green peppers were also indistinguishable, but this was because both appeared black. Yellows and blues, to him, were almost white.
5

5. One sees interesting similarities, but also differences, from the vision of those with congenital achromatopsia. Thus Knut Nordby, a congenitally colorblind vision researcher, writes:

I only see the world in shades that colour—normals describe as black, white and grey. My subjective spectral sensitivity is not unlike that of orthochromatic black and white film. I experience the colour called red as a very dark grey, nearly black, even in very bright light. On a grey-scale the blue and green colours I see as mid-greys, somewhat darker greys if they are saturated, somewhat lighter greys when unsaturated. Yellow typically appears to me as a rather light grey, but is usually not confused with white. Brown usually appears as a dark grey and so does a very saturated orange
.

Mr. I. also seemed to experience an excessive tonal contrast, with loss of delicate tonal gradations, especially in direct sunlight or harsh artificial light; he made a comparison here with the effects of sodium lighting, which at once removes color and tonal delicacy, and with certain black-and-white films—“like Tri-X pushed for speed”—which produce a harsh, contrasty effect. Sometimes objects stood out with inordinate contrast and sharpness, like silhouettes. But if the contrast was normal, or low, they might disappear from sight altogether.

Thus, though his brown dog would stand out sharply in silhouette against a light road, it might get lost to sight when it moved into soft, dappled undergrowth. People’s figures might be visible and recognizable half a mile off (as he himself said in his original letter, and many times later, his vision had become much sharper, “that of an eagle”), but faces would often be unidentifiable until they were close. This seemed a matter of lost color and tonal contrast, rather than a defect in recognition, an agnosia. A major problem occurred when he drove, in that he tended to misinterpret shadows as cracks or ruts in the road and would brake or swerve suddenly to avoid these.

He found color television especially hard to bear: its images always unpleasant, sometimes unintelligible. Black-and-white television, he thought, was much easier to deal with; he felt his perception of black-and-white images to be relatively normal, whereas something bizarre and intolerable occurred whenever he looked at colored images. (When we asked why he did not simply turn off the color, he said he thought that the tonal values of “decolored” color TV seemed different, less “normal”, than those of a “pure” black-and-white set.) But, as he now explained, in distinction to his first letter, his world was not really like black-and-white television or film—it would have been much easier to live with had it been so. (He sometimes wished he could wear miniature TV glasses.)

His despair of conveying what his world looked like, and the uselessness of the usual black-and-white analogies, finally drove him, some weeks later, to create an entire grey room, a grey universe, in his studio, in which tables, chairs, and an elaborate dinner ready for serving were all painted in a range of greys. The effect of this, in three dimensions and in a different tonal scale from the “black and white” we are all accustomed to, was indeed macabre, and wholly unlike that of a black-and-white photograph. As Mr. I. pointed out, we accept black-and-white photographs or films because they are representations of the world-images that we can look at, or away from, when we want. But black and white for him was a reality, all around him, 360 degrees, solid and three-dimensional, twenty-four hours a day. The only way he could express it, he felt, was to make a completely grey room for others to experience—but of course, he pointed out, the observer himself would have to be painted grey, so he would be part of the world, not just observing it. More than this: the observer would have to lose, as he himself had, the neural knowledge of color. It was, he said, like living in a world “molded in lead.”

Two paintings done by Mr.I. shortly before his accident.

A painting of flowers done four weeks after Mr. I.’s accident. The underlying outlines are clear, but camouflaged by a random application of color.

Mr. I. painted pieces of grey fruit to show us the “leaden” universe into which he had fallen.

A test painting from Mary Collins’s Colour-Blindness (left), as reproduced by someone with red-green colorblindness, and by Mr. I. (right
).

The sunset scene of which Mr. I could see virtually nothing—an effect simulated by a black-and-white photocopy of it.

A black-and-white painting done about two months after Mr. I.’s accident, and a painting done two years later—Mr. I. at this time was experimenting with adding single colors, even though he could not see them.