Color my world

When you think about it, color perception is really strange.

Just about all of us have wondered whether we all see colors the same way -- if, for example, what you see as blue is the same as what I see as yellow, but we both identify them using the same word because there's no way to know we're not seeing them the same way.  I've always thought that unlikely.  After all, with few exceptions (other than genetic or structural abnormalities, about which q. v.) our eyes and brain are all built on the same basic plan.  I guess it's possible that we each see the world's colors differently, but the most parsimonious explanation is that because the underlying structures are the same, we're all pretty much perceiving identical color palettes.

Of course, there's no way to know for certain, and I ran into two things just in the last couple of days that leave me wondering.

The first is a curious conversation I had with my friend, the awesome writer Andrew Butters, whose books -- especially the staggeringly good Known Order Girls -- should be on everyone's TBR list.  It started out with an amusing discussion of words that sound like they should mean something else.  One of Andrew's was ambulatory, which to him sounds like "someone who is so incapacitated they need an ambulance."  I personally believe that pulchritude should mean "something that makes you want to puke," and not what it actually does, which is "beauty."  And then Andrew mentioned that he always thought the color words vermilion and chartreuse were wrong, and in fact backwards -- that vermilion should mean a light green and chartreuse a bright orangey-red.

This struck me as really weird, because those two words have never given me that sense.  This may be because I've known them both since I was little.  I knew vermilion because I grew up a mile away from Vermilion Bayou, so named because the red mud of southern Louisiana stains the water reddish brown.  Chartreuse I knew because my grandma's employer, Father John Kemps, was an eccentric, bookish, cigar-smoking Dutch expat who was very fond of a post-meal tipple and loved chartreuse, the pale green herbal French liqueur from which the color got its name.

So I asked Andrew where his misapprehension came from.  He said he wasn't sure, but that perhaps the vermilion one came from the French vert (green); Andrew, like most Canadians, is English-French bilingual.  But where his thinking chartreuse should mean "red" came from, he had no idea.

What baffled me further, though, was when he pointed out that he's not alone in this.  There's a whole page on Reddit about thinking that vermilion and chartreuse are backwards, and an astonishing number of people chimed in to say, "Yeah, me too!"  So why those particular words, and not another pair?  Why not citron and azure, or something?

The second is that I'm finally getting around to reading Oliver Sacks's book An Anthropologist on Mars, which has to do with the intersection between neurological disorders and creativity.  The very first chapter is about a painter who was in a car accident that resulted in brain damage causing cerebral achromotopsia -- complete colorblindness due not to abnormalities in the cones of the retina, but because of damage to a region of the brain called the V4 prestriate cortex.  Afterward, he saw the world in shades of gray -- but with some distinct oddities, because pure white surfaces looked "dirty" or "smudged" to him, red looked black, and blue looked a pale gray.

This brought up an interesting discussion about how we see color in the first place, and that color perception (even within a single, normally-sighted individual) isn't absolute, but comparative; we assess the color value of a region by comparison to the entire visual field.  If the whole "what color is this dress?" thing that was going around a few years ago didn't convince you of that, try this one out:

Every one of these spheres is exactly the same color; they were, in fact, cut-and-pasted from a single image.  The only thing that differs is the color of the foreground stripes that cross each one.  But since your eyes judge color based on context, it's impossible to see them as the same even once you cognitively know what's going on.

Don't believe it?  If you go to the link provided, the article author (the wonderful Phil Plait) created an animation that cycles between the image with and without the stripes.  It's mind-blowing.

All of this circles around to the weird topic of synesthesia, which is a still-unexplained sensory phenomenon where people have a sort of cross-wiring between two senses.  Russian composer Alexander Scriabin was a synesthete, who experienced sensations of colors when he heard chords; C# minor, for example, looked a bright emerald green.  (If you want to find out more, the amazing book by Richard Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, is still considered one of the seminal works on this odd disorder.)

I wonder if what Andrew (and the others with the vermilion-chartreuse switch) are experiencing is a form of synesthesia.  A former student of mine is a synesthete for whom printed letters (and whole words) evoke sensations of colors, so his word choices while writing took into account whether the colors were harmonious, not just that the words made semantic sense.  (I hasten to add that he was and is one of the most brilliant people I've ever known, so his synesthesia didn't cause his writing to lack any clarity to non-synesthetes like myself -- although it has been known to slow him down as he struggled to find words that satisfied both meaning and appearance.)  So perhaps the "vermilion = light green" thing comes from the fact that for Andrew and the others on the Reddit page, the word looks green irrespective of its association with an actual (different) color.

What I find odd still, though, is that so many people have those two particular color words backwards.  Synesthesia is remarkably individual; while one of its hallmarks is a complete consistency within a particular person (Scriabin always saw C# minor as green, for example), it varies greatly from person to person.  The fact that vermilion and chartreuse are reversed for so many people is just plain peculiar.

So there's still a lot we don't know about how exactly we perceive color, and maybe my "parsimonious" explanation that (other than those with colorblindness, synesthesia, and other visual disorders) we're all seeing colors more or less the same way fails to capture the complexity of the real world.  Wouldn't be the first time I've thought things were simpler than they turned out to be.  Maybe it's just my perception because I'm a non-synesthete with intact color vision.

But until we're somehow able to see things through someone else's eyes and brain, that's a limitation I can't escape except for in my imagination.

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A tincture of madness

There's long been a supposed connection between being highly creative and being mentally ill. The list of individuals who were both is a long one.  Ernest Hemingway, Georgia O'Keeffe, Hermann Hesse, Maurice Ravel, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Edgar Allen Poe, Jackson Pollock, Cole Porter, Vincent van Gogh, and Robert Schumann all suffered from varying degrees of mental problems, most of them from severe depression, schizophrenia, or bipolar disorder.  More than one of these spent the last years of life in a mental institution, and more than one committed suicide.

People who have expressed their creativity in technical fields show the same tendencies.  Physicist Ludwig Boltzmann killed himself; Charles Darwin seems to have had severe agoraphobia, and spent most of the later years of his life in virtual isolation; and the wildly brilliant mathematician Kurt Gödel was a paranoid schizophrenic who became so convinced people were poisoning his food that he finally stopped eating completely and starved to death.

"The only difference between myself and a madman," Salvador Dalí famously quipped, "is that I am not mad."  Two thousand years earlier, the Roman writer Seneca said, "There is no genius without a tincture of madness."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Mental illness silhouette, Paget Michael Creelman, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license]

Research has supported that there is a fundamental connection between creativity and mental illness.  One of the chief investigators into this link is Fredrik Ullén, of the Karolinska Institutet of Stockholm, who not only showed that creativity correlates with genetic markers for both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but demonstrated a connection between creativity and the dopamine (pleasure/reward) system in the brain -- the same system that is implicated in several forms of mental illness, including schizophrenia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and tendency to addiction.

Ullén administered a test that was designed to measure a subject's capacity for creative thinking, specifically for developing more than one solution to the same problem or using non-linear solution methods to arrive at an answer. He then analyzed the brain activity of the individuals who scored the highest, and found that across the board, they had lower amounts of dopamine receptors in a part of the brain called the thalamus, one of the main "switchboards" in the higher brain, and responsible for sorting and processing sensory stimuli.

The implication is that creative people don't have as rigid a sorting mechanism as other, less creative people -- that having a built-in deficiency in your relay system may help you to arrive at solutions to problems that others might not have seen.

The connection between the thalamus, creativity, and sorting issues is supported by a different bit of brain research that found that a miswiring of the thalamus is implicated in another bizarre mental disorder, called synesthesia.  In synesthesia, signals from the sensory organs are misrouted to the incorrect interpretive centers in the cerebrum, and an auditory signal (for example) might be received in the visual cortex.  As a result, you would "see sounds." Other senses can be crosswired, however -- the seminal study of the disorder is described in Richard Cytowic's book, The Man Who Tasted Shapes.

Synesthsia is apparently also much more common among the creative.  Alexander Scriabin, the early twentieth century Russian composer, wrote his music as much from how it looked to him as how it sounded.  He describes a sensation of color being overlaid on what he was actually seeing when he heard specific combinations of notes.  The colors were consistent; C# minor, for example, was always green, Eb major always magenta.  And although Alexander Scriabin's synesthesia was perhaps the most intense, he is not the only composer who was synesthetic; the evidence is strong that Liszt, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Olivier Messaien also had this same miswiring.

The studies by Ullén and others have now taken the first steps toward connecting these physiological manifestations with the phenomenon of creativity itself.  "Thinking outside the box," Ullén said, "may be facilitated by having a somewhat less intact box."

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