Green Chambers for better color vision in the brain

If scientists had offered me a pill that would make me see green like people with normal color vision and also grow a tail, I would’ve taken it. Then I could see an amazing new color. And when people suggested more experiments that could give me cool powers, I could wag my tail. 

Nobody came to greenpill me, but I did get the new Enchroma glasses. The pictures are of what I see when I’m blasting my eyes full of the most intense green light possible. I think this might be having good long-term effects on my brain’s ability to process green. 

My color vision problem is deuteranomaly. I have a poorly functioning form of the medium-wavelength opsin, a color-receiving eye protein. This is the receptor essential to the famed “green cone”, though it catches a wide range of wavelengths. The effect of my defective opsin that my eyes have limited sensitivity to pure medium greens and reds. The greens get washed out; pure dark green fades quickly into black. I also get fewer brilliant varieties of red; I might be getting more shades of khaki instead. 

Enchroma glasses correct deuteranomaly with notch filters, which cut down specific wavelengths of light. Given the complexities of visual processing, it’s not clear how removing light in the 480-490nm (red-orange) and 580-590nm (blue-green) wavelengths affects the total picture. Probably my system takes these wavelengths as evidence for things not being bright red or green respectively, but I don’t know how that story will go. It’ll start off with photons colliding with receptor molecules, which could be an unpredictable collision. I don’t know how it goes from there through the rest of the visual system. 

But I do know that the story is full of things blocking light. The defective opsin that isn’t doing well at catching medium green is somehow blocking bright red as well. To deal with it, I block two other 10nm bands of light with the Enchroma notch filters. The glasses generally darken everything in a way that may go beyond the mere loss of the two 10nm wavelength bands – they are sunglasses of a sort, blocking other wavelengths too. The old-model Enchromas I had before made this clear. My first big “wow” moment with them was looking at a green traffic light bright enough to shine clearly in the California daytime. With all sorts of things in the system blocking light, I could get strong results only from very bright things. 

The Green Chambers depicted, in little suburban groves, are the best places I’ve found for seeing green. Dead center in each picture is the strongest light source around here: the sun. You can't see it because it's filtered through perhaps the most paradigmatically green thing on Earth: leaves. More leaves all around filter the light to bathe the whole environment in green. Wearing the Enchroma glasses, I stared into midday sunlight through leaves under treetop canopy for periods of around 5-20 minutes over the past month. It’s probably been over six hours of having that green photon cannon blasting through my Enchromas into my retina. 

I’ve had brilliant and vivid experiences of green. My guess is that the brain is able to receive some sort of bright green-signal if it comes in, but the defective opsin prevents that signal from ever coming in, because no light can make that opsin generate it. The glasses block enough muddling wavelengths to give green a fighting chance even with the eye pigments as they are. And with a green photon cannon blasting right into my eyes for minutes on end, green has the firepower to win.

As the experiences became more intense over time, I began to think that the light was conditioning my brain to see green better. After all, what’s outside of me was basically the same. So what’s inside of me had to be changing. 

Why would this happen? My guess is that visual perception generally gets better at processing stuff as it goes from never having had it before to getting more of it. Most of you finished up with visual processing of color quite early, but those of us who just didn’t get the stimuli because of bad eye proteins didn’t get our brain parts excited. The solution is to put on special glasses and go to a Green Chamber.

My neurons may have awaited a signal that strong for 41 years. Get them going, and maybe they'll respond more.

Enchroma 3x showed me that rose gold was pink!

Enchroma improved their color vision glasses, and now I know why people say my rose gold MacBook Air is pink! 

The entire red-green spectrum had been suppressed for me before. Blue and yellow had been my favorite colors because they were the brightest, and in mixtures they overwhelmed red and green. I thought I was getting slight color vision improvements with the old Enchroma glasses five years ago, but the new ones make it obvious.

There seems to be a way of stimulating my brain into being able to better process the new colors. For green, it involves a lot of staring up into trees under the midday sunshine. As I get to know green, I form emotional associations with it: the strange but beautiful color of plants, whose quiet way of life is friendly to a warm-blooded creature like me.

More color vision posts to follow.

Elizabeth Warren planned Biden staffing

Last year I worried that Joe Biden might hold us back on economic issues. Today the 50-50 Senate is the holdup, and the Biden Administration has been moving things forward impressively fast.

The $1.9 trillion stimulus, with its $1400 checks and extended unemployment insurance, is more than twice the size of the Obama stimulus package of 2009. Biden's $2 trillion infrastructure bill is now before Congress (the $45 billion to remove all lead pipes from the water system looks excellent). Vaccine eligibility for all American adults is set for May 1 and may soon be moved earlier, which makes me happy as I'm flying back on April 29 and hoping to get my shots fast.

Biden's staff deserves credit. The White House is run by Chief of Staff Ron Klain, who oversaw the response to the 2014 Ebola pandemic under Obama. His deputy is Jen O'Malley Dillon, who managed Biden's victorious general election campaign. They're basically pragmatic technocrats ending a pandemic and building infrastructure. 

Bharat Ramamurti once drafted Elizabeth Warren's memos to Obama blasting his SEC chair for being too deferential to Wall Street. He was senior counsel in her Senate office when she told the Wells Fargo CEO who had created millions of fake accounts, "You should resign" and "you should be criminally investigated." (The CEO resigned. His successor resigned.) Now Ramamurti is deputy director of Biden's National Economic Council. When Larry Summers criticized the stimulus as too large, it was Ramamurti's job to say on Biden's behalf, "we disagree here."

Warren has always identified staffing as the thing to bargain for in controlling a White House. The SEC is now led by Warren ally Gary Gensler. Rohit Chopra and Julia Margetta Morgan (from her campaign's policy team) are advocating student loan cancellation from Administration policy jobs. I can name 11 Warren allies inside the Biden Administration. Her strategy seems to be working.

First day

Joe Biden is President and Democrats control Congress. Things are as good as I wanted you to hope for on that horrible November 2016 night when I became your Optimism Guy.

With the Georgia Senators seated, Mitch McConnell can't block Biden's nominees, and I like what I'm seeing. Secretary of State nominee Antony Blinken wants to pull the Saudis back from their war in Yemen "immediately". CIA Director nominee William Burns negotiated the Iran peace deal, sneaking around spy-style so other countries wouldn't find out and disrupt it.

On the domestic front, Bernie Sanders is the first democratic socialist to chair the Senate Budget Committee. Elizabeth Warren has gotten her staffer into the NEC deputy directorship, her protege running the CFPB, and an ally as SEC chair. The first Native American Interior Secretary will control the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Rahm Emanuel doesn't have a job.

Thanks to everyone who voted or donated or worked to get us here. A special high-five to anyone who joined my donations to the Merkley Leadership PAC, Stacey Abrams and the Georgia Senators, or those 2018 state Secretary of State campaigns. 

I think especially of our donations to Arizona SoS Katie Hobbs, whose Republican opponent in 2018 wanted to eliminate Spanish-language voting materials. The race was called for him on Election Night, but she won on late ballots. In 2020, Arizona went for Biden by 0.3%, and she withstood violent threats from Trump's hordes in seeing the election through. Where would Arizona be without her, and where would we be without Arizona? If you don't like imagining such things, you're free to focus on this happier reality.

Warnock and Ossoff win!

It's a winning night in Georgia, and it feels like winning all over the world.

With 99% of precincts reporting, Raphael Warnock leads by 1.2%. Jon Ossoff leads by 0.4%, and with a fair share of the remaining ballots in deep-blue Atlanta counties, his lead will likely hold up too. Republican attack ads could darken the black preacher's skin and lengthen the Jewish filmmaker's nose, but they couldn't stop Georgia from making them its new Senators.

This gives Joe Biden a 50-50 Senate majority. With Kamala Harris breaking ties, Mitch McConnell can't block the budget. The filibuster still threatens to hold up any larger business by requiring 60 votes to close debate, and some centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin want to keep it. Our best hope is that McConnell obstructs Democrats enough to change their minds.

The House is organized to pass whatever can get through the Senate. Nancy Pelosi just won another term as Speaker, with votes from young left-wing Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib, Katie Porter, Cori Bush, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez. Pelosi just assigned all four of them to the powerful Oversight and Reform Committee, as I learned from a happy AOC tweet.

A new DNC Chair will be chosen soon. I don't know if Stacey Abrams wants the position -- she may be focused on running for Governor of Georgia in 2022. But after developing a voter turnout operation that saved the first two years of Biden's presidency and gave Georgia its first black Senator, she would be a spectacular person for that job.