As we enter our section on vision, I find myself again considering what exactly color vision is. Several years ago, one of my friends offered a view on color vision that still botheres me to this day: how do I know that the color I see as blue is the same color that everyone else sees as blue? Obviously when someone asks me what color the sky is, I do not say it is purplr, or orange, but what if another person were able to view the world through my eyes, and actually did see the world in different colors than what they were used to. I don’t know if this will make much sense to anyone else, or if I am describing the question well, but the core of the question essentially comes down to what is a color. A science teacher will tell you that a color is light of a certain wavelegnth reflecting off an object. They will then go on to tell you that each specific wavelegnth in the visible spectrum is associated with a certain color. However, is there any way to prove for certain that every person’s brain interpretes these wavelegnths in the same way. For instance, when I was a very young child, younger than I can remember, someone told me that grass was green. Everytime I see grass I know it is green, and anytime I see a similar color I know that it is also green. However, I was dropped on my head just hours after birth. What if some of the connections in my brain that associate colors got switched around, and what I see as green was actually the color that everyone saw and called red? If i were able to view the world through someone elses eyes, would a cut on my arm start leaking “green” blood? I know that this is a far fetched concept, and usually it comes up as a topic of conversation between me and my friends when were writing papers at 5am and are deleriously tired, and the concept of switching bodies seems plosible, but colors are just our interpretations of certain wavelegnths of light reaching our retinas, and how can we be know that our brains interpret these wavelegnths the same way? If we could experience life through someone elses eyes for a day, how different might the world look?
On a similar, but much less far fetched train of though, I will be interested to see if we cover color-blindness during this section of the class. I am color blind, as is almost every other male in my family, but as far as I am concerned, I see most colors just fine. If you asked me what color shirt you were wearing, I would be able to tell you. I can tell you what color a car is, or what color backpack someone is wearing, but if you hold up a piece of paper with colored dots and a number in different colored dots, I would never be able to find it. As we continue with this section of the course, I will be interested if we cover color-blindness to see, how it is possible for someone who is color-blind to differentiate colors, if “black-and-white” color-blindness is possible, how anyone can be sure, short of dot-tests, that they are not color blind, and how you can know you are saying the grass is green because you can see that it is green, and not simply because when you were a very young child, someone told you that grass is green.
March 16, 2008
