Color and body feeling
The changes in the state of the environment have an effect on the human nervous system and are reflected in the affections of the body. If the oxygen content of the air drops, breathing speeds up and the pulse increases, movements slow down and the ability to concentrate decreases, which ultimately triggers a feeling of discomfort in the situation via neuronal and hormonal reactions. We experience these adaptations of bodily activities to changing environmental conditions, which also include the appearance of color and light, through our emotional reactions to every perceptual or imaginative situation.
The atmosphere we experience in a room correlates with the emotional attunement of our body to the visual situation. Our bodily functions adapt to the changing color and light conditions in our living space, they correlate with the course of the day and seasons, as well as with the conditions in artificially created room situations. We experience how our space for action begins to shrink in winter as the light seems colder and weaker, which is linked to the appearance of nature, whereas we regain it with the intensely bright, polyphonic, delicate and pure colors of spring. Our physical feeling for the color and light conditions of each situation determines the visual identity of our living space. It is only when this emotional relationship between man and his environment is disturbed that the significance of color and light for our being becomes apparent.
Blindness, defective vision, color vision deficiency, color blindness or light sensitivity describe disorders in the visual relationships between people and their environment, which are accompanied by limitations and changes in the ability to experience and act. Visual perception disorders can be congenital or occur following damage to the visual system. Cerebral achromatopsia, a form of total color blindness following damage to the associative cortex area of the brain, occurs rarely, but here the importance of color for our physical sensation and our experience of space can be worked out particularly clearly. The visual center of the brain processes the information from the spectrum of electromagnetic radiation of the visual field unaffected by the disorder, but only shades of gray can be seen where colors should actually be experienced. Color disappears from the world of perception and imagination when there is no longer a neuronal representation that can give meaning to the spectral information. What remains of the color for the affected person is only the body sensation, which is the reason why he perceives the appearance of his environment as strange and unreal in every situation.
Color and atmosphere
The neuropsychologist Oliver Sacks describes the case of a painter who lost the colorfulness in the representation of his inner and outer space due to brain damage. All of a sudden, he was no longer able to imagine color, his memories and dreams lost their colorfulness and the world seemed colorless and pale to him. (Sacks, Oliver “Eine Anthropologin auf dem Mars”, Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH, Hamburg
1998) Sacks assumes that after the stroke the painter was only able to name the colors on the basis of his verbal memory. The awareness of the painful loss of color in his habitat results from the sudden contradiction between his physical sensation and the appearance of his habitat. At the beginning of the damage, this feeling of loss was very clear to him, because although it was not visible, it was noticeable in the change in his body sensation in the encounter with the visible environment. His usual living space suddenly looked dirty and unappetizing to him, everything white seemed mouldy and every black dusty. He encountered people as animated gray statues, whereupon he began to avoid them. Human skin no longer appeared “flesh-colored” to him, but “rat-colored“, which had a significant impact on his behavior, from the disgust he felt at being touched to the lack of sexual ideas and needs. Food was suddenly disgusting and unnatural, which significantly reduced his desire and pleasure in eating. Even closing his eyes did not help, as the tomato itself remained black in his imagination. He now preferred black and white foods because he could still reconcile them with his memories and they seemed natural to him. (ibid. Sacks, p. 25) Flowers became indistinguishable to him and could almost only be recognized by their scent and shape. He saw the sky in a pale gray, from which the dirty white clouds could hardly be distinguished. Reds and greens appeared black to him, while yellows and light blues looked whitish. His world seemed lifeless and cast in lead, just as his dreams and memories suffered. He clearly felt that something deeper had been destroyed than his ability to orientate and identify himself, his sense of the identity of his physical states with the appearances of his environment and thus his visual identity. The loss of his emotional states became especially clear to him during particularly emotional events, such as the sunrise, which now seemed to him like a “huge atomic bomb explosion”. (ibid. Sacks, p.33) Antonio Damasio reports similar experiences of a color-blind person for whom even fresh snow still appeared dirty. (Damasio, Antonio R. “Descartes Irrtum”, List Verlag Munich, 1995, cf. Central Achromatopsia)
Color and behavior
It is considered certain that color perception offers humans an evolutionary advantage in their habitat. (Purves, Dale and Lotto, R. Beau “Why We See What We Do”, Sinauer Associates, Inc. USA 2003, P.103) For example, edible fruits and many prey animals or even sources of danger cannot be recognized by colorblind people. In addition to the survival of the human species, there is also the question of the connection between color vision and experience and behavior. The color-blind painter became a night person, whereby he began to use his improved orientation ability in the dark space of the night, he went to dim places whose appearances were in harmony with his sense of space. These night dreams exist in all sighted people because our color receptors in the retina only become active at a high light intensity, while the rods manage with much lower light intensities. At night, all people are color-blind, which gives night dreams a different identity from that of day dreams. They appear to us in many shades of brightness between black and white and not in the grayscale images experienced by the colorblind painter during the day. Night dreams resemble the mood of black-and-white films and photographs, whereas they appear alien in a decolored color image. This enabled the color-blind painter to find his way back to his visual identity in night dreams alone. He described himself as a night person and began to explore distant new places specifically at night, where he was able to resume his work as a painter. (ibid. Sacks, p.65) Alone in the darkness of the night, he felt familiar with the people and things, which is why he was able to behave quite freely there alone or with his acquaintances and friends. A patient with achromatopsia described by Robert Boyle also changed her behavior in this way and only went for walks in the evening hours, stating that this was the only time she felt well.
Color and identity
Edwin Land, who also made a name for himself as the inventor of the Polaroid camera, demonstrated as early as 1957 that color and light are not absolute spatial conditions, as Newton still assumed, but that visual perception is based on the relationships between all parts of the visual field. The color and light conditions of a homogeneous surface change with the transformation of its surroundings, which is also known as simultaneous contrast. Land demonstrated that even with a red and a green color filter and two images of a situation taken from slightly different angles, a realistic-looking color impression can be achieved. The wavelength of the light only correlates with the perceived color under artificially produced standard conditions, as it changes with multicolored appearances due to the surrounding colors. Land’s observations were given a neuronal explanation with the discovery of various visual areas in the brain. There is an area in the brain that responds specifically to the wavelength of the electromagnetic radiation of the environment after it has been converted by the retina of the eyes into corresponding impulses that can be decoded by the brain, the cortical field V1, and there are other areas in the associative cortex, the cortical field V4, which are indispensable for the development of color experiences. The intermediate world of spectral information from the visual cortex only enters the consciousness of a sighted person as a result of cerebral achromatopsia. This intermediate realm is illustrated by the color-blind painter’s attempt to arrange a large number of different colored spools of thread according to their brightness. When viewed directly, his arrangement appears incorrect to the sighted person, as the experience of color influences the perception of the brightness of the light. A black-and-white image of his arrangement, however, approximated the viewer’s feeling for the brightness of the light to a large extent. (ibid. Sacks, p.36)
With the loss of color, the constancy in the colorblind person’s visual space also disappeared, which meant that his surroundings suddenly seemed to transform for him when the lighting conditions changed. All things constantly changed their appearance and were always in new relationships to each other, which gave him the impression of an unstable world. (ibid. Sacks, p.44) The color therefore not only increases the density of information in the visual space, it also lends additional stability to this complex network of relationships. Each new usable color channel increases the complexity, stability and information content of our visual representation of the environment. The ability to identify objects, as well as our ability to orient ourselves, improves with the colorfulness of the living space, which can also be seen in the experience and behavior of young children. (Gibson, James J.; “Die Sinne und der Prozess der Wahrnehmung” (1966), Verlag Hans Huber Bern, 1973 and Gibson, James J.; “Die Wahrnehmung der visuellen Welt” (1950), Beltz Verlag Weinheim und Basel1973) We react faster to colorful events, we can follow movements and recognize shapes better, we taste, smell, hear and touch color, so that with the loss of color a part of the experienced living space also ceases to exist. After his injury, the colorblind painter renounced the experience of art for a long time because he could not bear the loss of his access to the level of human cultural engagement with color.
The fate of the colorblind painter clearly shows that the colorfulness of the environment is a construction of the human brain, an ability shared with other living beings. The ability of lower animals to adjust their behavior to the light situations of their environment is already derived from a few photochemically sensitive cells, but we can only speak of vision when organisms can compare the light conditions found in the environmental situation with those they have already experienced and adjust their actions accordingly. The identity of our entire living space, including its representational appearance, is linked to the experience of color. Our environment appears to us in its colorfulness, just as it exists in its materiality, in its smell and taste and in its sound. A surface without the familiar color loses its identity and appears artificial and alien to us, a feeling that is foreign to those who are colorblind from birth. These changes in the colorblind painter’s behavior disappeared as he became accustomed to the state of colorblindness, which turned into complete color amnesia as the feeling of alienation subsided. His dreams, ideas and perceptions seemed increasingly real to him. Only then was it as if there had never been any colors in his life. (Sacks, p.69) In the time after the accident, he did not miss the color itself, as it completely eluded his imagination, but he missed the feelings that arise in people when the environment appears in color. Color is an emotional quality that, like other emotional states, determines our being in the environment in its own way.
Color scheme and models
Color and light models always represent a reduction of the complexity of our visual representation of space; they are systems whose statements are only valid within the defined system boundaries. For color and light systems, these can only be laboratory conditions in which the complexity of the visual world is masked in order to make specific relationships visible. As the example of the color-blind painter illustrates, the separation of color perception and the associated meaning on a neuronal level leads to color blindness. This is why it is impossible in practice to generalize the statements made by colour and light systems. A model of the concepts of color and light is not a reflection of reality, but illustrates what is common to the experiences of many. Models are always based on abstractions of concrete experiences to symbolic generalizations, which can become the basis for conceptualization and thus communication. Apart from the conditions of their own construction, they can only make quantitative statements about what qualitative meanings must already be present in the viewer. Without a sense of the manifestations of color and light in our environment, any statement of a color and light system is empty, which prevents blind people from learning anything about the nature of color and light.
The attempt to detach color and light models from our experience and define them as independent cognitive systems seems absurd, as the example of the German DIN standard shows: “Color is the visual sensation of a part of the visual field that appears structureless in the eye, by which this part alone can be distinguished from a simultaneously seen, also structureless adjacent area when observed with one eye with a fixed eye“. Only a one-eyed and almost blind person, who has experienced the world from birth as a diffuse field of brightness and coloration, and who would also have to be so completely paralyzed that body and eye movements would no longer be possible, could fulfil these preconditions. The resting eye sees nothing, as it is only through the constant movement of the receptors, the so-called eye tremor, that the differences in the visual field can be registered. Color and light are not objectively describable measured variables, as they only acquire their meaning through comparison, the establishment of relationships to memory content and to the entire visible environment. The comparison of all these influencing variables does not result in a clear statement, but in a feeling for the situation. All scientific description systems for color and light, such as the spectral theory of refraction, reflection and absorption of light waves, the theory of colour mixing by addition and subtraction, as well as the theory of a colour space spanned by the dimensions of hue, brightness and saturation, enable us to systematize individual aspects of our visual experiences for the purpose of quantifying description in the form of logical models. Schopenhauer already considered it possible that a highly intelligent blind person could independently construct a color theory based on other people’s statements about color. (ibid. Sacks, p.64) These quantifying descriptions are powerful because they lend the subjective experiential content of the phenomena of color and light a terminology that places the work with colorants on a uniform, communicable basis. In the color matrix of the computer display or the pigments of the printing ink, the appearance has long been divorced from its existence as a surface. The aesthetic expectations of the appearance of our living space are in a state of upheaval due to the new technical freedoms in the design of our environment. Color and light remain the mediators of a reality in which feeling alone still allows qualitative statements to be made about the relationship between man and his environment. This begins with the purchase of an apple and extends to the design of our living environment.
Color order and meaning
Every color exists in a subjective space of meaning whose experiential content is based on the memory of past events. The blue sky by the sea, the blue apron of the mother and the blue eyes of the favorite actor are condensed into the feeling of what describes the space of meaning of the color blue. The blueness, greenness, redness etc. of things can already be distinguished from each other in this way by every small child, although the perceived relationships within the appearance of one’s own living space must always be considered against the background of the topographical, climatic, cultural and social background conditions of the individual or the community. The qualities of each appearance of color and light can be described from our feeling for their meanings, just as the intensity and luminosity of a color is always experienced relative to the already experienced appearances. White, yellow and orange hues are more luminous for us than black, violet or brown, so that no linear relationship can be established here between the perceived brightness or intensity and the measurable and therefore scientifically describable intensity. The visual representation of the appearance of color and light is based on the relationship between one’s own body and its environment. The visual relationships within the environment can be organized to the extent that the connection between cause and effect can be represented and illustrated in models. Order can also be brought to our feelings, whereby we have to look for the causes in the meanings of the phenomena of color and light for our physical existence. The environment serves as a memory store, as Gegenfurtner puts it, because the capacity of our brain is limited. (Gegenfurtner, Karl R “Gehirn und Wahrnehmung”, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag 2003) Approximately 60% of the human cerebral cortex is active during vision, so that the question remains as to what of the situations we have already experienced can actually be stored in our memory and whether only a vanishingly small part of our past is present there, which only manifests itself again and again in living encounters. How many phenomena seem familiar to us when we see them again or in a different context and how many of them can we visualize in our imagination. We carry many memories of past experiences within us, but the infinite reservoir of imaginable and perceptible space exists outside of ourselves. The living relationship between our living space and our body is established through the eyes in every new experience of color and light and is represented in the feeling for the situation.
Further reading “The development of spatial-visual competence”
