An Anthropologist on Mars (1995)

by Oliver Sacks

  Total colorblindness caused by brain damage, so-called cerebral achromatopsia, though described more than three centuries ago, remains a rare and important condition. It has intrigued neurologists because, like all neural dissolutions and destructions, it can reveal to us the mechanisms of neural construction—specifically, here, how the brain “sees” (or makes) color. Doubly intriguing is its occurrence in an artist, a painter for whom color has been of primary importance, and who can directly paint as well as describe what has befallen him, and thus convey the full strangeness, distress, and reality of the condition.

  Color is not a trivial subject but one that has compelled, for hundreds of years, a passionate curiosity in the greatest artists, philosophers, and natural scientists. The young Spinoza wrote his first treatise on the rainbow; the young Newton’s most joyous discovery was the composition of white light; Goethe’s great color work, like Newton’s, started with a prism; Schopenhauer, Young, Helmholtz, and Maxwell, in the last century, were all tantalized by the problem of color; and Wittgenstein’s last work was his Remarks on Colour. And yet most of us, most of the time, overlook its great mystery. Through such a case as Mr. I.’s we can trace not only the underlying cerebral mechanisms or physiology but the phenomenology of color and the depth of its resonance and meaning for the individual.

  On getting Mr. I.’s letter, I contacted my good friend and colleague Robert Wasserman, an ophthalmologist, feeling that together we needed to explore Mr. I.’s complex situation and, if we could, help him. We first saw him in April 1986. He was a tall, gaunt man, with a sharp, intelligent face. Although obviously depressed by his condition, he soon warmed to us and began talking with animation and humor. He constantly smoked as he talked,—his fingers, restless, were stained with nicotine. He described a very active and productive life as an artist, from his early days with Georgia O’Keeffe in New Mexico, to painting backdrops in Hollywood during the 1940s, to working as an Abstract Expressionist in New York during the 1950s and later as an art director and a commercial artist.

  We learned that his accident had been accompanied by a transient amnesia. He had been able, evidently, to give a clear account of himself and his accident to the police at the time it happened, late on the afternoon of January 2, but then, because of a steadily mounting headache, he went home. He complained to his wife of having a headache and feeling confused, but made no mention of the accident. He then fell into a long, almost stuporous sleep. It was only the next morning, when his wife saw the side of the car stove in, that she asked him what had happened. When she got no clear answer (“I don’t know. Maybe somebody backed into it”) she knew that something serious must have happened.

  Mr. I. then drove off to his studio and found on his desk a carbon copy of the police accident report. He had had an accident, but somehow, bizarrely, had lost his memory of it. Perhaps the report would jolt his memory. But lifting it up, he could make nothing of it. He saw print of different sizes and types, all clearly in focus, but it looked like “Greek” or “Hebrew” to him. 2

  2. I asked Mr. I. later if he knew Greek or Hebrew; he said no, there was just the sense of an unintelligible foreign language; perhaps, he added, “cuneiform” would be more accurate. He saw forms, he knew they had to have meaning, but could not imagine what this meaning might be.

  A magnifying glass did not help; it simply became large “Greek” or “Hebrew.” (This alexia, or inability to read, lasted for five days, but then disappeared.)

  Feeling now that he must have suffered a stroke or some sort of brain damage from the accident, Jonathan I. phoned his doctor, who arranged for him to be tested at a local hospital. Although, as his original letter indicates, difficulties in distinguishing colors were detected at this time, in addition to his inability to read, he had no subjective sense of the alteration of colors until the next day.

  That day he decided to go to work again. It seemed to him as if he were driving in a fog, even though he knew it to be a bright and sunny morning. Everything seemed misty, bleached, greyish, indistinct. He was flagged down by the police close to his studio: he had gone through two red lights, they said. Did he realize this? No, he said, he was not aware of having passed through any red lights. They asked him to get out of the car. Finding him sober, but apparently bewildered and ill, they gave him a ticket and suggested he seek medical advice.

  Mr. I. arrived at his studio with relief, expecting that the horrible mist would be gone, that everything would be clear again. But as soon as he entered, he found his entire studio, which was hung with brilliantly colored paintings, now utterly grey and void of color. His canvases, the abstract color paintings he was known for, were now greyish or black and white. His paintings—once rich with associations, feelings, meanings—now looked unfamiliar and meaningless to him. At this point the magnitude of his loss overwhelmed him. He had spent his life as a painter; now even his art was without meaning, and he could no longer imagine how to go on.

  The weeks that followed were very difficult. “You might think”, Mr. I. said, “loss of color vision, what’s the big deal? Some of my friends said this, my wife sometimes thought this, but to me, at least, it was awful, disgusting.” He knew the colors of everything, with an extraordinary exactness (he could give not only the names but the numbers of colors as these were listed in a Pantone chart of hues he had used for many years). He could identify the green of van Gogh’s billiard table in this way unhesitatingly. He knew all the colors in his favorite paintings, but could no longer see them, either when he looked or in his mind’s eye. Perhaps he knew them, now, only by verbal memory.

  It was not just that colors were missing, but that what he did see had a distasteful, “dirty” look, the whites glaring, yet discolored and off-white, the blacks cavernous—everything wrong, unnatural, stained, and impure. 3

  3. Similarly, a patient of Dr. Antonio Damasio, with achromatopsia from a tumor, thought everything and everyone looked “dirty”, even finding new-fallen snow unpleasant and dirty.

  Mr. I. could hardly bear the changed appearances of people (“like animated grey statues”) any more than he could bear his own appearance in the mirror: he shunned social intercourse and found sexual intercourse impossible. He saw people’s flesh, his wife’s flesh, his own flesh, as an abhorrent grey; “flesh-colored” now appeared “rat-colored” to him. This was so even when he closed his eyes, for his vivid visual imagery was preserved but was now without color as well.

  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. But this did not help very much, for the mental image of a tomato was as black as its appearance. Thus, unable to rectify even the inner image, the idea, of various foods, he turned increasingly to black and white foods—to black olives and white rice, black coffee and yogurt. These at least appeared relatively normal, whereas most foods, normally colored, now appeared horribly abnormal. His own brown dog looked so strange to him now that he even considered getting a Dalmatian.

  He encountered difficulties and distresses of every sort, from the confusion of red and green traffic lights (which he could now distinguish only by position) to an inability to choose his clothes. (His wife had to pick them out, and this dependency he found hard to bear; later, he had everything classified in his drawers and closet—grey socks here, yellow there, ties labeled, jackets and suits categorized, to prevent otherwise glaring incongruities and confusions.) Fixed and ritualistic practices and positions had to be adopted at the table; otherwise he might mistake the mustard for the mayonnaise, or, if he could bring himself to use the blackish stuff, ketchup for jam. 4

  4. In 1688, in Some Uncommon Observations about Vitiated Sight, Robert Boyle described a young woman in her early twenties whose eyesight had been normal until she was eighteen, when she developed a fever, was “tormented with blisters”, and, with this, “deprived of her sight.” When she w
as presented with something red, “she look’d attentively upon it, but told me, that to her, it did not seem Red, but of another Colour, which one would guess by her description to be a Dark or Dirty one.” When “tufts of Silk that were finely Color’d” were given to her, she could only say that “they seem’d to be a Light-colour, but could not tell which.” When asked whether the meadows “did not appear to her Cloathed in Green”, she said they did not, but seemed to be “of an odd Darkish colour”, adding that when she wished to gather violets, “she was not able to distinguish them by the Colour from the surrounding Grass, but only by the Shape, or by feeling them.” Boyle further observed a change in her habits, that she liked now to walk abroad in the evenings, and this “she much delighteth to do.”

  A number of accounts were published in the nineteenth century—many collected in Mary Collins’s Colour-Blindness—one of the most vivid (besides that of an achromatopic house painter) being that of a physician who, thrown from his horse, suffered a head injury and concussion. “On recovering sufficiently to notice objects around him”, George Wilson recorded in 1853, he found that his perception of colours, which was formerly normal and acute, had become both weakened and perverted—All coloured objects—now seem strange to him—Whilst formerly a student in Edinburgh he was known as an excellent anatomist; now he cannot distinguish an artery from a vein by its tint—Flowers have lost more than half their beauty for him, and he recalls the shock which he received on first entering his garden after his recovery, at finding that a favourite damask rose had become in all its parts, petals, leaves, and stem, of one uniform dull colour; and that variegated flowers had lost their characteristic tints.

  As the months went by, he particularly missed the brilliant colors of spring—he had always loved flowers, but now he could only distinguish them by shape or smell. The blue jays were brilliant no longer,—their blue, curiously, was now seen as pale grey. He could no longer see the clouds in the sky, their whiteness, or off-whiteness as he saw them, being scarcely distinguishable from the azure, which seemed bleached to a pale grey. Red and green peppers were also indistinguishable, but this was because both appeared black. Yellows and blues, to him, were almost white. 5

  5. One sees interesting similarities, but also differences, from the vision of those with congenital achromatopsia. Thus Knut Nordby, a congenitally colorblind vision researcher, writes:

  I only see the world in shades that colour—normals describe as black, white and grey. My subjective spectral sensitivity is not unlike that of orthochromatic black and white film. I experience the colour called red as a very dark grey, nearly black, even in very bright light. On a grey-scale the blue and green colours I see as mid-greys, somewhat darker greys if they are saturated, somewhat lighter greys when unsaturated. Yellow typically appears to me as a rather light grey, but is usually not confused with white. Brown usually appears as a dark grey and so does a very saturated orange.

  Mr. I. also seemed to experience an excessive tonal contrast, with loss of delicate tonal gradations, especially in direct sunlight or harsh artificial light; he made a comparison here with the effects of sodium lighting, which at once removes color and tonal delicacy, and with certain black-and-white films—“like Tri-X pushed for speed”—which produce a harsh, contrasty effect. Sometimes objects stood out with inordinate contrast and sharpness, like silhouettes. But if the contrast was normal, or low, they might disappear from sight altogether.

  Thus, though his brown dog would stand out sharply in silhouette against a light road, it might get lost to sight when it moved into soft, dappled undergrowth. People’s figures might be visible and recognizable half a mile off (as he himself said in his original letter, and many times later, his vision had become much sharper, “that of an eagle”), but faces would often be unidentifiable until they were close. This seemed a matter of lost color and tonal contrast, rather than a defect in recognition, an agnosia. A major problem occurred when he drove, in that he tended to misinterpret shadows as cracks or ruts in the road and would brake or swerve suddenly to avoid these.

  He found color television especially hard to bear: its images always unpleasant, sometimes unintelligible. Black-and-white television, he thought, was much easier to deal with; he felt his perception of black-and-white images to be relatively normal, whereas something bizarre and intolerable occurred whenever he looked at colored images. (When we asked why he did not simply turn off the color, he said he thought that the tonal values of “decolored” color TV seemed different, less “normal”, than those of a “pure” black-and-white set.) But, as he now explained, in distinction to his first letter, his world was not really like black-and-white television or film—it would have been much easier to live with had it been so. (He sometimes wished he could wear miniature TV glasses.)

  His despair of conveying what his world looked like, and the uselessness of the usual black-and-white analogies, finally drove him, some weeks later, to create an entire grey room, a grey universe, in his studio, in which tables, chairs, and an elaborate dinner ready for serving were all painted in a range of greys. The effect of this, in three dimensions and in a different tonal scale from the “black and white” we are all accustomed to, was indeed macabre, and wholly unlike that of a black-and-white photograph. As Mr. I. pointed out, we accept black-and-white photographs or films because they are representations of the world-images that we can look at, or away from, when we want. But black and white for him was a reality, all around him, 360 degrees, solid and three-dimensional, twenty-four hours a day. The only way he could express it, he felt, was to make a completely grey room for others to experience—but of course, he pointed out, the observer himself would have to be painted grey, so he would be part of the world, not just observing it. More than this: the observer would have to lose, as he himself had, the neural knowledge of color. It was, he said, like living in a world “molded in lead.”

  Two paintings done by Mr.I. shortly before his accident.

  A painting of flowers done four weeks after Mr. I.’s accident. The underlying outlines are clear, but camouflaged by a random application of color.

  Mr. I. painted pieces of grey fruit to show us the “leaden” universe into which he had fallen.

  A test painting from Mary Collins’s Colour-Blindness (left), as reproduced by someone with red-green colorblindness, and by Mr. I. (right

  ).

  The sunset scene of which Mr. I could see virtually nothing—an effect simulated by a black-and-white photocopy of it.

  A black-and-white painting done about two months after Mr. I.’s accident, and a painting done two years later—Mr. I. at this time was experimenting with adding single colors, even though he could not see them.

  Subsequently, he said neither “grey” nor “leaden” could begin to convey what his world was actually like. It was not “grey” that he experienced, he said, but perceptual qualities for which ordinary experience, ordinary language, had no equivalent.

  Mr. I. could no longer bear to go to museums and galleries or to see colored reproductions of his favorite pictures. This was not just because they were bereft of color, but because they looked intolerably wrong, with washed-out or “unnatural” shades of grey (photographs in black and white, on the other hand, were much more tolerable). This was especially distressing when he knew the artists, and the perceptual debasement of their work interfered with his sense of their identity—this, indeed, was what he now felt was happening with himself.

  He was depressed once by a rainbow, which he saw only as a colorless semicircle in the sky. And he even felt his occasional migraines as “dull”—previously they had involved brilliantly colored geometric hallucinations, but now even these were devoid of color. He sometimes tried to evoke color by pressing the globes of his eyes, but the flashes and patterns elicited were equally lacking in color. He had often dreamed in vivid color, especially when he dreamed of landscapes and painting; now his dreams were washed-out and pale, or violent and contrasty, lackin
g both color and delicate tonal gradations.

  Music, curiously, was impaired for him too, because he had previously had an extremely intense synesthesia, so that different tones had immediately been translated into color, and he experienced all music simultaneously as a rich tumult of inner colors. With the loss of his ability to generate colors, he lost this ability as well—his internal “color-organ” was out of action, and now he heard music with no visual accompaniment; this, for him, was music with its essential chromatic counterpart missing, music now radically impoverished. 6

  6. Only one sense could give him any real pleasure at this time, and this was the sense of smell. Mr. I. had always had a most acute, erotically charged sense of smell—indeed, he ran a small perfume business on the side, compounding his own scents. As the pleasures of seeing were lost, the pleasures of smell were heightened (or so it seemed to him), in the first grim weeks after his accident.