Color and Emotion

Reading The Case of The Colorblind Painter, I was struck by the notion of the fragility of sight. This was not simply because Mr. I happened to lose his color vision, but because, after reading about the complexities of vision in Margaret Livingstone’s book, it seemed inherent to the mechanism. The eye, comprised of so many connecting devices each integral to the ability to see, seems like it could fall apart at any moment. Though Mr. I suffered injury to his brain and not his eyes, the result of the loss of a significant element of his sight has the same implications. Indeed, what struck me about Mr. I’s case was the spectrum of damage done to his reality by the loss of his color vision; a point truly driven home by Sacks: “The ‘wrongness’ of everything was disturbing, even disgusting, and applied to every circumstance of daily life. He found foods disgusting due to their greyish, dead appearance and had to close his eyes to eat.” This example illustrates the scope of the impairment, and convinces the skeptical reader that this case is not one limited to sight. Indeed, one could argue that the damage done to his perception of his environment is the shallowest of the layers of his issue. What is being described throughout the first half of the article is the significant emotional trauma that Mr. I endures during the early days of his colorblindness. The idea of “wrongness”, usually so shunned by psychologists who dislike viewing their subjects and their realities as falling into categories of “right” and “wrong”, is the sole way to describe Mr. I’s perspective on his condition. Mr. I must also suffer with the knowledge of this wrongness; denied the blissful ignorance of those born colorblind who only know the world one way. Though he can no longer visualize color, it is the comparison between then and now that gives him added discomfort.
Meanwhile, the first chapters of the Livingstone book describe in physiological terms how sight is achieved, citing photoreceptors, incandescent and luminescent light and photons as agents of how neurotypical people can perceive the world. The mechanism itself is rather astounding; like many basic functions there is much more to it than meets the eye (please excuse that horrid pun). After reading those chapters and the Sacks article, I found myself wondering how the two extremes; the emotion involved with seeing and the mechanism that begets it, are so nicely reconciled in neurotypical individuals to create the functional, colorful atmosphere in which we live our daily lives? In other words, with the understanding that through millennia of evolution we are no longer surprised that the sunset is red and purple, how did emotion become integrated into our physiological devices of perception? Returning to Mr. I, a deficit in his sight had far-reaching implications in his life, all emotional and mental in nature. Unlike Virgil from last week, Mr. I had no difficulty negotiating his physical place in his environment, rather, he had trouble relating his environment to himself. It seemed that color dictated his relationship to almost all elements around him; food, art, music, sex, etcetera. How did this connection develop? Livingstone touches upon a related subject; saying that personal background and experience influences they way in which one perceives the world. Influences, but not dictates. However, in another chapter, she refers to Picasso’s The Tragedy, saying, “The colors carry the emotional content of the painting; the melancholy blue color is highly symbolic.” It is interesting to think about where our conceptions of emotion concerned with color originated, and how essential they truly are to the act of simply living. As demonstrated by Mr. I’s condition, emotional stability is nearly reliant on perceptual stability.