I can’t listen to the news anymore. It’s just too much. Now I just listen to audiobooks during my commute. The one I’m listening to at the moment is by my favorite author, Bill Bryson. It’s entitled, The Body: A Guide for Occupants.
As with all of Bryson’s books, I’m learning things that completely alter my sense of reality, but this particular revelation almost sent me off the road. I love it when something makes me say, “Now, why didn’t I ever think of that?” but at the same time, I feel a slight bit of irritation, because I consider myself to be someone who thinks outside the box. I quite often contemplate things that others couldn’t care less about. So when I’ve missed something, I feel as though I’m not living up to my full potential.
The book is full of fascinating information, but when Bryson mentioned that soapsuds are white regardless of the color of the bar of soap, and that the foam on every sea wave is also white, even though the ocean looks blue, it knocked me off my pins for a second there. Because, yeah, that wouldn’t be one’s logical expectation, would it?
He goes on to explain that it’s due to the way that light is bouncing off their surfaces, and that’s true. (And I could go off on a tangent about wavelengths and cones and rods and reflection and absorption and the light spectrum, but for once I’m not in the mood to be scientifically pedantic, so if you want to learn more about those things, I’d much rather save time by sending you here.)
But he also points out something that I never thought of: color is an illusion. It is by no means a done deal. And further, your brain is telling you what colors things are when it has never been exposed to color in its entire existence. Your brain has been sitting in the dark, moist cave that is your skull for as long as it has been alive. It’s kind of sad to think about, really.
Your brain has never personally “seen” the sun, or a rainbow, or a stained-glass window. It is just sent signals, which it then interprets, and then informs you that the sky is blue, and you believe it. And how did it decide to come to that particular conclusion the first time around?
And if, for some reason, your brain decides to interpret the signals it receives in markedly different ways than the brain interpretations of the people around you (which is often the case for those of us on the autism spectrum), you will likely be questioned, misunderstood, or worse, ostracized, if you’re not deemed mentally ill. But how is your brain supposed to know how other brains are interpreting signals? And why should anyone assume that their brains were given the same rules about the wavelengths of light and so forth, that everyone else’s were? And who’s to say those rules aren’t caught up in evolution just as all elements of life are, on a grand scale? Who makes the rules? They could be changing even as you read this.
Your brain is relying awfully heavily on a visual cortex that you can only hope is playing by the rules, because it is a hostage in that moist cave of yours. And yet you believe it without hesitation. (And lest we forget, the average visual cortex hasn’t actually come in close contact with the world at large either, so it, in turn, relies on other types of information. It’s a slippery slope, and nobody knows what we’d find once we’ve come skidding to a halt.) The bottom line is that there is no way to know if the blue I “see” is the same as the blue you “see”.
Let’s take this even further. Without our brains, who have never seen the sun, we would never see the sun, either. So we owe them a lot. And yet odds are quite high that we’ll never see them face to “face” to thank them.
Bryson also mentioned something fascinating about the colors of our eyes. Every single person on the planet has the same amount of blue and green in their eyes as every other person. It’s just that people with blue and green eyes have a marked lack of other colors in their eyes, and therefore the blue or green we see in them dominates.
But then, how do we know that, really, if color is just an illusion? Who needs religion when every single thing we perceive is a matter of faith? But then, maybe that is religion after all.
I just wanted to give you something better to think about than the current state of the world, Dear Reader. You’re welcome.
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