Just finished listening to this fascinating podcast and thought I would chat about it with all you nice folks.

Specifically, the part with the monkeys. For those too busy to listen to an hour long podcast just to understand a blog entry, some scientists wanted to the study how we perceive color, and so they took these color-blind monkeys (who lacked the cones in their eyes for red) (don’t ask me where they got them), implanted the gene for red cones in some virii, and then injected the resulting goo into the monkey’s eyes.

And sure enough, the monkeys grew some red cones. Now just think about that for a moment. When these monkeys woke up, they could see a color that was entirely new to them.

It is fascinating precisely because it is so difficult to actually imagine. We can’t really picture a new color. It’s a place where imagination absolutely fails us. Anything we imagine will be made of the colors we already know. It is quite rare to come across something so completely and perfectly unimaginable.

The first thing the scientists did after upgrading the monkeys was, of course, give them color tests. The monkeys were put in front of a touch screen (man, the rebirth of the touch screen has been good for behaviourists) which displayed what, to the eyes of the pre-upgrade monkeys, would have just been a uniformly grey screen.

But it wasn’t all grey. There was a purple blob in there somewhere. And if the monkeys pressed the purple blob, they got a reward : grape juice.

Twenty weeks went by, and nothing happened. No blobs were pressed, no grape juice was won. But then, suddenly, the monkeys started using those new rods and getting their rewards.

Why twenty weeks, I wonder. What happened to make it twenty weeks and not a hundred, or five. My theory is that there was a random element, possibly monkey attention span, and it took that long for the happy accident to occur.

After all, until one of them actually did it, none of them knew that the purple blob would result in grape juice. That might have been a near-fatal flaw in their methodology. Did they train the monkeys that pressing blobs results in juice before they presented them with the final test?

Anyhow, what really popped my rivets was when the scientist who did this experiment admitted that not only could the technique he used on the monkeys be used to cure colorblindness in human beings, the exact same technique could be used to give humans with normal vision a fourth set of cones.

Mind = blown. Either way, we would have a live adult human being experiencing a new color for the first time in history. They could tell us what it was like. We could find out if they could use those new rods right away, or after twenty weeks, or maybe even… never. (That would suck so bad!)

Honestly, I might sign up for the upgrade, just to find out for myself. It is the kind of unique experience that draws me.

And would there be any practical applications? Would the world suddenly look horribly wrong to you, with everything the “wrong” color, leading to nausea or other neurological symptoms? It would be horrible to have one’s color vision scrambled. Things thar were once uniform in color would suddenly become blotchy and strange looking. Food especially would be a hurdle. Who wants to eat a neon green steak?

Well, me, sort of. But not normal people.

But perhaps it would not take something as radical and frankly icky as putting viral goo in your eyes in order to give us the experience of a new color.

After all, if it is true that we cannot perceive a color until we have a category for it, and that is why the epics of Homer are devoid of all references to blue or colors with blue in them, then it follows that we could learn to see a new color just by exposing ourselves to a new category of colors in the right way.

Homer had the same rods and cones in his eyes that we do. The hardware is identical. Therefore it is a software issue, and it is the nature of software to be… hackable.

Could we really hack our brains to increase the number of colors we can see? Can we put ourselves as far ahead of our current selves as our current selves are ahead of the likes of Homer?

And if so, would we even know? And if so, how would we describe it? We only have words for the colors we know. We would have to come up with a word for the new color (octoroon?) and from that develop a whole new color naming system.

This all fascinates me in part because I fairly recently realized that, despite not being a visually oriented person, color has always had a strong emotional impact on me. Certain colors or patterns will fascinate my eye and I will find it hard to look away from them. This has possibly resulted in a few people thinking I was staring at them quite rudely, when really I am entranced by the color of their sweater or how the light reflects off their earrings.

All part of having the heart of an artist, I suppose. We don’t just perceive aesthetics, we feel them, and that feeling is an inseparable part of the primary sensory experience for us. It is just how we are wired. Thus, things which seem normal and/or indifferent to others are offensive as crime scene photos (or as wondrous as rainbows) to us.

Like I have said many times before, being sensitive isn’t for wimps. It is something we can learn to ignore, but it is not something we can learn not to perceive.

And in its own way, that makes us sensitive creative types like the people with the extra cones in their eyes.