Experiencing color without sight?

April 20, 2009 12:02 PM

Is there any way for a blind superhero to experience a distinction between colors?

NOTE: I'm writing this trying not to accidentally give spoilers away for those who may read the first book and go "wow, I bet that question on askmefi was about a book in this series."

That said, IS there any way a blind person, with a super-power, could distinguish colors? Could the color/light spectrum be revealed or experienced in any way through touch/sound/reverberating-vibrations, etc?

I'm trying to help a friend of mine (whose most recent, very successful novel was nominated for several distinguished awards) answer a question. He/She has a character who can sense everything around him/her in the environment--animals, the plants, the ground, etc. He/she "hears" their thoughts and/or "sees" their thoughts (movements and intentions), but his/her power seems to be growing--at first he/she could just read minds and barely "feel" the presence of animals, but now he/she can sense everything about the surroundings and thereby "see" by viewing all life (I suppose even at the bacteria level) and perhaps even a "life-force" of some sort...

But could he/she use some form of echo-location or other non-sight-related extra-sensory perception?

posted by whatgorilla to science & nature (20 comments total)

How about super-sensitivity to temperature, so slight surface differences would indicate an object's color by the amount of light it is absorbing or reflecting?
posted by BitterOldPunk at 12:07 PM on April 20 [3 favorites has favorites]

The Marvel character Daredevil is blind, and they coped with that a few times. Sometimes he was able to tell the color of something by touching it and detecting subtle differences in the paint texture.
posted by Chocolate Pickle at 12:07 PM on April 20

Taste! The hero has such sensitive taste buds that he/she can determine color ffrom the chemical composition by tasting the object in question. But that would mean that the superhero would have to lick everything, which would really be a better power for a supervillain (The Licker! Mr. Slurp! The Tongue!)
posted by zerokey at 12:10 PM on April 20

I like BitterOldPunk's suggestion. Another possibility would be to have the character sense the chemical make-up and physical structure of substances nearby, which would give some clues about their color--for instance, certain paints get their color from specific minerals or metals. Here's a list of the chemical makeup of some common pigments in the context of tattoos. This method would require a pretty encyclopedic knowledge of chemistry, or some kind of intuitive knack for it, but I think it'd be neat.

Would it work to have the character pick it up from the minds of creatures nearby? I believe bees have good color vision, for instance.
posted by fermion at 12:17 PM on April 20 [2 favorites has favorites]

i like fermion's suggestion of using his telepathic abilities with the creatures around him to see things, using their eyes. Then you could go into all the different sight abilities different animals have, like how some are partially colorblind, and others can see colors beyond our own spectrum (infra-red and ultra-violet). Could be awesome :)
posted by lizbunny at 12:31 PM on April 20 [2 favorites has favorites]

This is a stretch but I wanted to give you something a bit different: What if you go based off of the ability for this person to "feel light"? Given that colors work in different areas of the light spectrum, different wavelengths, frequencies... If a person was so finely attuned to their body's sense of touch that they could feel light, not just as warmth but as almost a current washing over their body, and different areas in the light spectrum would "feel" different. Further this could allow the person to not NEED to touch the item, if they were so in tune with their own senses that they could determine distance from an object and the location(s) on their own body where they feel the light sense proportionally to their distance and angle to the object, then their sense of feeling could encompass color.

Right? Pseudo-science to be certain but...

This also has added positive and negative effects depending upon how powerful you want the person to be. For example, turning out the lights would blind him to colors just as any of us. Color is light reflected; no light, no reflection. But it also means the person would be so finely attuned to their surroundings, down to color, that what distinguishes them from a sighted person?

Not sure what you're going for but, like I said, wanted to offer something different than what first came to my mind and a previous poster, which was Daredevil's touching.
posted by arniec at 12:40 PM on April 20

Then you could go into all the different sight abilities different animals have, like how some are partially colorblind, and others can see colors beyond our own spectrum (infra-red and ultra-violet)

Ooh, yes! And then he/she could go to an aquarium, or a coral reef, and get his/her mind blown by a mantis shrimp.
posted by fermion at 12:43 PM on April 20 [1 favorite has favorites]

On a slight tangent, some of the deep thinking done about Mary's Room could be useful to your friend.
posted by zamboni at 12:47 PM on April 20

Taste! The hero has such sensitive taste buds that he/she can determine color ffrom the chemical composition by tasting the object in question. But that would mean that the superhero would have to lick everything, which would really be a better power for a supervillain

This could be made a little less weird and gross by associating the same principle with smell rather than taste. Different pigments have different smells, of course, depending on what they're made from. A blind superhero with incredibly sensitive (like, bloodhound times a thousand) super-smell could determine all sorts of properties of an objects s/he's examining by scent alone-- what it's made out of, what color it is, how old it is, etc.
posted by dersins at 1:08 PM on April 20

What kind of blindness is it? Depending on the type of of blindness, she might be feel the signals that are usually translated into visual information in her eyes. So, once she got the hang of it, she could make out things like shapes or colors by recognizing patterns in how here eyes were reacting to light even if the normal process that converts light information to signals in the brain wasn't working. Obviously doing that would be quite a stretch, but it wouldn't be any more outlandish than hearing the thoughts of animals.

Also, as a programmer, I would just write an iPhone app that would use the onboard camera to analyze images and convert colors to tones. So purple would sound high pitched and red would sound low pitched. It could also be further extended to recognize mugshots of villains and other things that would be useful to a blind superhero. I understand that having superpowers is more interesting than writing clever iPhone apps though.
posted by burnmp3s at 1:11 PM on April 20

A blind friend told me she has a hand-held device that she puts against fabric and it tells her what color it is. I have no idea what this is or how it works, probably with some sort of light-spectrum identification. If you research this, it might give you some ideas about the bio-mechanism your super-hero would need to do the same thing.
posted by lazydog at 1:17 PM on April 20

Well, when you reduce it down, almost everything we ever experience is electromagnetic. Color is just a perception based on our senses. I have a friend who is almost totally color-blind. He learned from a very young age to distinguish between colors from the shades of grey he perceived. The ones that were too close to distinguish, he just called them "color" and "not-color". Perceiving something non-visually still uses the same energy source, it just doesnt get processed through the eyes. So, some hyper-sensitive fellow might be able to distinguish color, say from light reflected by a prism, because it "feels" different on his skin, but wouldnt be able to tell the difference between blue and red paint, because the color is irrelevant to the composition of the paint (unless of course he knew the different compositions of paint and could perceive that). I suppose, in theory, he might be able to tell the difference between the colors of reflected light off of objects. There are holes big enough to drive trucks through with this reasoning, but hey, we are talking super-heroes here.
posted by elendil71 at 1:28 PM on April 20

Light is a radio wave just like any other - it just so happens that our eyeballs are good "antennas" for frequencies in a certain range (about 400-790 Terrahertz). Perhaps nano-particles in the person's brain could replace these antennas?
posted by RobotNinja at 1:58 PM on April 20

No. Just... no. Seeing color would be pedestrian. They might be able to distinguish something such as composition or density by echo location (not much of a stretch actually) but not color. The cool thing about sensing density/composition is that it is something we "normal" can't detect with vision.
posted by chairface at 2:00 PM on April 20

Look into blindsight.
This paper might be relevant.
posted by DarkForest at 2:22 PM on April 20

The interesting spin on what RobotNinja suggests is that you might not have directional capability ... or you might have full-sphere directional capabilities. All depends how you set those "particles" up. But experience with cochlear implants (and with vision-related tech) tells us that your hero would almost certainly start to perceive those signals as sight, if the sense was always or often available.
posted by spaceman_spiff at 3:14 PM on April 20

Could you read the minds of the photons of light streaming from the object? So the blind explosion of red photons, the piercing ray of violet photons...
posted by alasdair at 3:36 PM on April 20

Are you looking for something that is scientifically feasible, or something a little more interesting with less plausibility?

Ultra-plausible:
-- A clever invention a la Peter Parker or Batman. Some sort of eye-wear that detects color and somehow informs the wearer.
-- Sherlock Holmes-style super-intuition. Can "deduce" the color of an object based on material, context, etc.
-- Asks someone (sorry)

Less plausible, more interesting:
-- Hero has instinctive chameleon skin that changes body to mimic what it's touching. Hero then inherently "knows" the color.
-- Hero fuses the particle and wave properties of light to allow him/her to feel the light patterns reflected off a surface.

Not at all plausible, but different and interesting:
-- Tasting color (zerokey)
-- Feels an object's "mood". Each emotion translates to a different color.
-- Can "speak" with inanimate objects.
-- Something like echolocation but emitting "chirps" of light, not sound.
posted by TimeTravelSpeed at 3:39 PM on April 20

I'll give this a shot...

The color of an object is determined by the wavelength of light reflecting off of an object. Grass is green because during photosynthesis, it absorbs light in the red and blue areas in the range of the visible spectrum, and reflects light in the green wavelengths, which we "see" and interpret as green.

Any object of any color reflects a certain color or combination of colors of light which determine its color. If it absorbs everything but blue, the object will reflect blue light and the object will be blue.

Since we are talking about a super hero here, then perhaps he/she has a biological light spectrophotometer for determining the wavelength(s) of light reflected by an object. This is not necessarily outlandish. Plants, during photosynthesis, absorb light with chlorophyll arrays at distinct wavelengths: 700 and 680 nanometers which delivers the fairly precise amount of energy to excite an electron to a threshold that is then used to power a series of other reactions. If the superhero had a very low threshold biological spectrophotometer for determining the wavelength of light reflected by an object, he wouldn't necessarily have to be able determine that the object was green, only that it has a certain electromagnetic signature in the range of he visible spectrum.

Light is not a "radio wave" as stated above. Light is certainly a wave, and like radio waves, is a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but they are distinctly different in their wavelength and range in that spectrum.
posted by clearly at 6:24 PM on April 20

Light is not a "radio wave" as stated above. Light is certainly a wave, and like radio waves, is a part of the electromagnetic spectrum, but they are distinctly different in their wavelength and range in that spectrum.

Meh, ok, the cost of simplification. Light is like a radio wave - it differs only in its frequency/wavelength, but it's the exact same phenomenon.
posted by RobotNinja at 6:22 AM on April 21