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.
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.
