UnRed

I find perception to be a highly interesting topic. When I first started attending college I intended to major in psychology. I changed my mind, but I did love the class in perceptual psychology. And colorblindness is a reminder of why.

Note the two color wheels at this link. On the protanopia wheel blue and yellow aren't much affected. Red is greyed out. Orange becomes yellow and purple, blue. But what's strange is what happens to green. Its essence is leeched out, so that it's barely identifiable as greenish.

Now if you see the two versions of one photograph above―the one depicting a redhead kid in a field―you'll notice that the grass is green in both. So apparently people with protanopia aren't entirely incapable of perceiving green. But it seems a complementary opposite does make something more noticeable.

Hats off to (Roy) G. Biv

 

Seen above are a representation of the visible light spectrum and the color wheel. They overlap, but there are a couple of telling differences.

For one thing, we pick up as children that the three primary colors are red, blue, and yellow. And when you're mixing finger paints or crayons, that certainly checks out. Then when you're older, at least if you take a physics class, you find out that green is the other primary color, and yellow is one of the secondary colors. It's kind of a shock.

But that's on top of what may be an even stranger phenomenon. The color wheel tells us that red and violet/purple are right next to each other, aptly enough since there's a red component to purple. But red and violet lie at opposite ends of the spectrum. How can this be?

The answer comes down to the difference between sensation and perception. The spectrum is an expression of the frequencies of visible light, which may be sensed by the cones in our eyes. But frequencies aren't something that affects us, at least not in a way we know about. So our perceptual brains modify the information in a way we find more useful and pleasing.

One interesting hypothetical: What if our vision were altered so that we could see a low-frequency color in the ultraviolet spectrum, but not red? I believe it would still fill that niche on the wheel between orange and violet, in place of the absent red. But would it be red? No. For one thing, because of where its higher place on the spectrum, it would present to us as a cool, receding color rather than a warm, advancing one.

Had me going for a second

 

The other night I thought of the above song. Thought of it, but didn't know the name. I was pretty sure it was on Sandinista!, but that album has a lot of tracks. So I tried Googling by selected lyrics. No luck. Nothing at all. And as far fetched as it seems, I did idly wonder for a little bit if this was a false memory, something related to the Mandela effect.

As it turned out the reason I couldn't find it by the lyrics was that I was remembering a phrase as "don't pray for your life" when it's actually "don't beg for your life." Cutting out the "don't pray" part and putting quotes around what I could remember brought me the results.

Something this elaborate? If it were a fake memory that would make me a borderline schizophrenic who could write songs like Joe Strummer. Talk about good news/bad news!

Old factory

 It makes sense that smell would be the sense with perhaps the closest relation to memory. For one thing, smell is how humans from the beginning identified which things―fresh fruit, cooked meat, et al―are food, so it's good for an organism to have a catalog of that.

A lot of this goes on below the level of conscious memory, though, which is more auditory and visual. So while olfactory stimuli trigger emotions, it can be difficult to pin down exactly why they do.

For instance, I got a used book recently. It's from the seventies, so the pages have taken on a beery yellow tint. Books that old have a certain aroma that enchants me, takes me back. When and how was this reaction instilled in me? I'm not sure. Not complaining, though.

Personality and strategy

 Are you hot or cold? Are you an irresistible force? Or more of an immovable object? Do you have an ability to sway and influence the behavior of others? Or do you find your gift is more in going your own way and not being easily influenced?

I have my own answers―some more tentative than others―to these questions. But it's not just about me. I think people adopt the personas that will be most effective for them. This is partly a matter of convincing the world around you and partly a matter of convincing yourself. 

This is analogous to the talk of changing faces in the Talking Heads song "Seen and Not Seen." Although I guess David Byrne could tell you it's not a perfect system.

What you see is what you see

What you see

The Thematic apperception test is an odd one all right. Unlike the Rorschach test, it asks subjects to interpret objective, identifiable images.Those images were taken from illustrated magazines of the 1930s. That means that as time has gone on they've become somewhat more archaic.

And ripped out of context, they're fairly eerie in the first place. The one above could be interpreted as vampirism, resurrection, haunting, or just the guy on the bed having a very vivid dream. Among other possibilities.

None of which is to say this test can't work. In fact, the open-ended nature of the test could allow patients to access a more creative side than usually comes out.

Self on the shelf

"Holy shit! What have you fucking lunatics done to my head? And you call yourselves professionals!"

Doodlebugging

In the last couple of days I read this story from The Atlantic on the benefits of doodling. Now there's been at least one painter, Francis Bacon, whose whole artistic method was based on doodling, as Bacon didn't draw or do preparatory sketches for his paintings. The article isn't so much about artists, however, so much as people trying to brainstorm. Heller says that:

While drawing is definitely the artist’s stock and trade, everyone can make doodles, bypassing the kind of refinement demanded of the artist. Drawing, even in a primitive way, often triggers insights and discoveries that aren’t possible through words alone. Just think of all those napkins (or Post-Its) on which million-dollar ideas were sketched out.

Certainly there's something to be said getting the hands involved in whatever kind of creative or ideas-related enterprise your up to. I've tried doodling myself a little today and found that it can help clear out the cobwebs. No million dollar ideas yet, except for stealing a million dollars. Which seems impracticable at the moment.

Fun in bed

Last night I got a somewhat late bedtime to begin with, certainly for a weeknight.  So it was a little annoying that after I went to bed and relaxed just about enough to go to sleep, there was this noise keeping me up.  Hard to describe, somewhere between a hum and rustling.  Except soon I realized something: It wasn't keeping me up exactly.  I was somewhere between wakefulness and sleep.

A hypnagogic state, that is. 

The sound could have been entirely within my head or it could have been hypersensitivity to the fridge humming.  Either way, I woke myself up and it stopped.  So then I could actually get to sleep.

It's kind of an unsettling experience. yes.  But it's also kind of cool.  I was fortunate in not undergoing anything potentially traumatic like sleep paralysis.  Hypnagogia complements my writerly side as well.

Shock absorber

The Neko Milgram experiment, in which the majority of subjects proved willing to apply massive, even fatal jolts to confederates as long as they had moral permission, has disturbed and depressed many people over the years. The results, however, may have been misinterpreted.

Gina Perry, for her book, Behind the Shock Machine, traced as many participants in the Milgram experiment as she could, and re-examined the notes of the experiment. Milgram claimed that seventy-five percent of the participants believed in the reality of the experiment, but Perry puts the number at about half. The change makes a big difference in the results. The people who didn't buy that they were actually shocking people were far more willing to increase the intensity of the shocks. They wanted to know how far the experimenters would go in the ruse, while the experimenters were wondering the same thing about them. Those that believed that they were shocking people were much more likely to keep the shocks down low. While Perry still thinks about a third of the people would crank up the shocks even if they believed, that's a big drop in overall percentage.

This actually stands to reason. If I were a subject in the experiment, my thinking would go thus: The researcher is legally responsible for whatever goes on here. Obviously, he'll be in deep shit if someone he's experimenting on dies. He'd be stupid to let me harm or kill that person. Ergo, if he's telling me to ignore that person's cries for mercy, something else must be going on here.

Not sure what I'd do after I reached that conclusion.

Now does that mean that people are good? Not necessarily. In truth "Are people good?" seems to me to be a uselessly vague question. But it's nice to know there aren't quite that many Jack-Lint-in-Brazil types.

Submitted for your approval

Okay, this was kind of weird.

I was lying in bed late last night, sort of drifting off.  Upstairs there were sounds of a loud party: stereo up high, a lot of people talking.  Besides being annoying, this struck me as very unlikely.  The building is all studio apartments.  There's not really room for people to throw parties.  On top of that, the landlords are emptying the place out, and most of the tenants have already moved away.  So who were all these people?

Since it looked like they'd be keeping me up for some more time, I changed positions, rolling onto my back.  Right away, the noise disappeared.  Which is to say, it never existed in the first place.  While I was still at least partly awake, I was also asleep enough to dream about the sounds of this get-together.

It wasn't an entirely pleasant experience, but kind of cool nonetheless.  The way you can just conjure things out of your own head.

Medicine for melancholy

Katherine Sharpe here has a deep and rich look at the history of depression as a concept. The idea that melancholy and sadness are in and of themselves a kind of illness, and that they should be treated as such, is fairly new. And as with many things, my own instinct is to follow the money. There is a big profit to be made from psychopharmaceuticals, but to really maximize it, you need a big base of customers. Sort of like how the plastic surgery industry can't simply satisfy itself with burn victims and people born without skin. Sharpe sees more at work, though.

That’s why depression is not a disease like diabetes. Diabetes isn’t a metaphor. It was discovered, not invented. Its cause and nature are known. Depression exists—all those disparate societies acknowledged and named it. But it is among the most conceptually malleable of illnesses. Its borders are fuzzy: at the extreme, depression is eminently disease-like, a true madness, but its mildest forms are fleeting and banal, comprising thoughts and feelings that we’ve all had a taste of. Most of all, perhaps because it affects consciousness, depression cries out for interpretation. Throughout history, each culture has given depression a meaning, or meanings. Each has told a story about it, and the story reflects much about that culture’s values, fears, and aspirations. Chemical imbalance is our chosen story, and it speaks volumes about the way we would like to approach the world.

Breaking thoughts and feelings down into matters of chemistry makes them more manageable, more controllable. What's lost in poetry is, the hope goes, gained in certainty. But that control is quite likely illusory.