Colors
[RADIOLAB INTRO]
JAMES GLEICK: And I assume we're live on the air now.
JAD ABUMRAD: We don't do live.
ROBERT KRULWICH: Have you guys ever talked to each other?
JAD: I don't think so, no.
ROBERT: Oh, so this—so this is Jad Abumrad.
JAMES GLEICK: Well, hi.
ROBERT: This is Jim Gleick.
JAD: Hi, how are you?
JAMES GLEICK: Fine how are you?
JAD: Pretty good. Pretty good.
JAD: Rainbows rainbows. Okay so we're gonna start today with author ...
JAMES GLEICK: [clears throat]
JAD: James Gleick.
JAMES GLEICK: As I recall, you wanted to talk about Isaac Newton.
ROBERT: That's right.
JAD: We did call him to talk about Isaac Newton, but more specifically, colors.
JAMES GLEICK: All right, Isaac Newton. He's 23 years old.
JAD: 1665.
JAMES GLEICK: And he's—he's home for the holidays. No, there's no holiday. He's home for the plague.
JAD: There was actually a plague. They sent everybody home from school. In any case, he's in his room, famously solving all these mysteries of the world. And one of the questions that he thinks about during this break is ...
JAMES GLEICK: What are colors? Where do they come from?
ROBERT: Like, when I see the color red, is that red, is it inside my head or is it something that exists sort of out there in the world?
JAMES GLEICK: Yes, the light without or it's the light within.
JAD: Hmm.
JAMES GLEICK: So he pokes a knife into his eye.
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: He what?
ROBERT: He ...
JAD: What do you mean?
JAMES GLEICK: Here's what Newton wrote in his notebook.
[VOICEOVER: I took a bodkin, put it betwixt my eye and the bone as near to the backside of my eye as I could.]
JAD: Ugh!
[VOICEOVER: And pressing my eye with the end of it, there appeared several white, dark and colored circles.]
ROBERT: Huh.
JAD: Did that lead to him some conclusion about where the spots live? Whether they're outside or inside?
JAMES GLEICK: No. This didn't get him very far.
JAD: Because seeing spots when you poke your eye doesn't tell you much about what color is.
JAMES GLEICK: But ...
JAD: But what he did next did. And this one he's a little more famous for.
ROBERT: He got himself a prism which is just a—a bit of glass shaped like a pyramid.
JAMES GLEICK: Wasn't so easy for him to get his hands on a prism, but he did.
ROBERT: Then he shut his blinds so the room was totally dark. But he poked a little hole in one of the blinds and then he waited.
JAMES GLEICK: And the sun had to be at just the right angle.
ROBERT: And he waited. And when the sun got to just the right spot, a ray of light shot through the room. Newton immediately stuck his prism into the light and the light shattered and became ...
JAMES GLEICK: A rainbow on the wall.
JAD: Or in Newton's own words ...
VICTORIA FINLAY: "A colored image of the sun." Now that's gorgeous, isn't it?
ROBERT: Mmm.
VICTORIA FINLAY: "A colored image of the sun."
JAD: That's Victoria Finlay. She wrote a book about color, and she says the thing to understand about this experiment is at the time, people believed that white light ...
VICTORIA FINLAY: Was given by God or given—given by this amazing thing called nature.
JAMES GLEICK: The light from the sun was sort of holy.
VICTORIA FINLAY: Yeah!
JAMES GLEICK: If there was anything that was pure it was white.
JAD: So when the prism did the rainbow thing, which people knew prisms did, they just figured ...
JAMES GLEICK: The colors are in there, in the glass.
JAD: In other words, that rainbow had nothing to do with the light itself. That was just the prism.
JAMES GLEICK: Adding some kind of impurities to the light.
ROBERT: Oh wow! I hadn't thought of the possibility that the prism is muddying the light. It's polluting the light.
JAMES GLEICK: Yeah. Well, how do you know that the prism isn't generating these colors?
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAMES GLEICK: So he got a second prism. And this was the trick.
JAD: While the first prism was still making that rainbow on the wall ...
JAMES GLEICK: He moved a few feet away, and he held up a second prism in the blue area to see what would happen to the blue light.
JAD: Would the prism add more colors to the blue light?
JAMES GLEICK: Or would it be transformed in some other way? And what he found was nothing happened, it remains blue.
JAD: So he thought hmm, if the blue light isn't getting muddied by the prism, then maybe the prism wasn't muddying the white light to begin with. Maybe that rainbow of colors was actually coming from inside the white light!
JAMES GLEICK: He inferred that the first prism is dividing light into its constituent parts.
VICTORIA FINLAY: Which means that that white light we see around us is actually constituted of all of these colors.
JAD: The colors were in the light, they are the light! He had his answer. Light is a physical thing in the physical world. You can tweak it, test it, study it. This was the beginning of everything we know about light today.
JAMES GLEICK: Which Newton put us on the road toward finding.
JAD: That ultraviolet rays, x-rays, radio waves, they're all different energies of light, and colors are just energies within that little sliver that we can see. And that has led to our understanding of the greenhouse effect, knowing what stars are made of, even the age of our own universe.
ROBERT: But not everybody was pleased by this.
VICTORIA FINLAY: Well, a little bit later, John Keats, a romantic poet, was really cross with him in a—in a poem because they said he reduced—removed all the poetry of the rainbow.
ROBERT: And the real challenge to Newton's view of color, one that would really stick, oddly enough, it did come from a poet, not Keats but a—the poet named Goethe.
JONAH LEHRER: Yeah, he was this German romantic poet.
JAD: That is author Jonah Lehrer.
ROBERT: A regular with us who writes about this kind of thing, and always wonderfully.
JONAH LEHRER: One day he's walking in the park and he spots these yellow crocuses. And he looks at the yellow crocuses and admires their petals. It's—you know it's early spring and they're blooming. And then he quickly turns away.
JAD: And in an instant, he suddenly sees ...
JONAH LEHRER: This dash of violet across his eyes.
ROBERT: He still sees the shape of the flower, but now it's violet. It's the opposite of yellow. He hadn't rubbed his eye, he hadn't stuck a needle in it, and yet there it was.
JONAH LEHRER: Seemed just as real.
ROBERT: As real as the yellow crocus.
JONAH LEHRER: And yet he knew it wasn't real, it came from inside his mind. And it was—you know, it's something, you know, we've all hallucinated colors. You can press on your eyeball or close your eyes and you see this riot of fireworks. But for Goethe, that simple observation leads him to think that maybe color isn't simply about the external universe. That maybe our perception of colors began in the world, but maybe it was finished inside the mind.
ROBERT: And today hundreds of years later, this is still an open question.
JAMES GLEICK: A scientist can say color has an objective reality. But the colors we see are tricks of the imagination. And there is no perfectly objective view of color. Personally I like to keep both of those opinions in mind at the same time.
ROBERT: Me too.
JAD: Me three. Well lucky for us, we're gonna do a whole show on this!
ROBERT: You don't say!
JAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab, and today ...
ROBERT: It's all about color.
JAD: Yes.
ROBERT: Where is color?
JAD: Is it in, is it out?
ROBERT: That's the question.
JAD: Yeah! We're gonna explore that question through the eyes of the butterfly.
ROBERT: In the killing fields of Cambodia.
JAD: With a woman who may see colors the rest of us can only dream of.
ROBERT: And we'll go back to a time where the sea apparently looked like dark red wine.
JAD: Stick us in your ear holes 'cause we're about to get colorful. And by the way, just before we get rolling, just wanna say we did something kind of different for us while making this hour. We put out this call to a bunch of musicians—solo artists, bands, to send us their favorite color songs. Their own interpretations of their favorite color song. And we got an amazing response, so throughout this hour, you're gonna hear color songs of various kinds woven into some of the pieces, between the pieces ...
ROBERT: Those songs, by the way, we have plans for.
JAD: Yeah. Big plans. You can go to our website Radiolab.org to get a full list of the songs.
ROBERT: And thank you, by the way, everybody who sent us those songs in.
JAD: Absolutely. Okay so should we go?
ROBERT: Yes. Let's—so to to get things going ...
JAD: Hey! Here—here he is.
ROBERT: Not long after we talked to Jim Gleick about Sir Isaac Newton, we talked to a neuroscientist by the name of Mark Changizi.
JAD: I'm gonna chew grapes if that's all right with you.
MARK CHANGIZI: No.
ROBERT: Who had written a book about color.
JAD: Would you like some grapes?
MARK CHANGIZI: No thank you.
ROBERT: And we threw the question at him.
JAD: So one of the sort of debates that became interesting to us is this: where is the color? Is it out there? I mean, is this grape that I'm holding right now, is it red for everything? A bee? A whale? I mean, or—is this—does it exist in a—in a way that you can pin down and say it's outside me, or does it only get to be red when it gets in my head?
MARK CHANGIZI: Well, you can—another—a more severe way to to ask this, and I ask this whenever I'm giving talks is just would aliens see it as red or ...
JAD: Yeah, would aliens see it as red?
MARK CHANGIZI: Right. And the answer is almost surely no.
JAD: Truth is, says Mark, even your dog wouldn't see it as red.
MARK CHANGIZI: Your dog has color vision. It has blue-yellow and black-white.
JAD: Really?
MARK CHANGIZI: Yes.
JAD: So what would a world look like to a dog?
MARK CHANGIZI: I mean, if you've ever known a guy who's colorblind, and 10 percent of men are colorblind, that's roughly what it's like.
JAD: Huh.
ROBERT: Well here's a question: if a dog and a human and a crow were to be staring at a rainbow, would they be seeing very different things?
MARK CHANGIZI: Yes.
JAD: Now this question that Robert just kind of tossed out during an interview, like, about how different creatures would see the rainbow, this ended up taking us down a little wormhole. And we ended up actually getting a choir to help us illustrate what we learned. But just to set a baseline, your normal rainbow goes like this, starting bottom up.
JAD: Three, two, one.
CHOIR: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet!
JAD: Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet. ROYGBIV.
TOM CRONIN: ROYGBIV. Yeah that—I don't know why people put the 'I' in there, but that's it.
ROBERT: If you didn't have the indigo, you couldn't say it, though. It'd be ROYGBV.
TOM CRONIN: That's why you need the 'I,' I think, just to say the ROYGBIV, yeah.
JAD: That, by the way, is Tom Cronin.
CHOIR: Hi Tom!
TOM CRONIN: I'm what's called a visual ecologist.
JAD: Mark suggested we give him a call. He told us that humans see seven colors in the rainbow.
MARK CHANGIZI: And in the case of the dog ...
JAD: Very different rainbow.
MARK CHANGIZI: It's gonna start off ...
CHOIR: Blue ...
MARK CHANGIZI: Blue. He'll be able to see blue just fine.
TOM CRONIN: So it would see a rainbow starting with blue.
JAD: Same blue we see.
TOM CRONIN: And then grading off into green.
CHOIR: Green.
JAD: Same green as us.
TOM CRONIN: And then disappearing. The rainbow would end there.
JAD: With a tiny bit of yellow throw in.
ROBERT: That's it?
TOM CRONIN: Yeah, so the rainbow would only be about half as thick as ours.
JAD: Wow!
MARK CHANGIZI: So ...
JAD: That's a sucky rainbow, dog.
MARK CHANGIZI: Yeah.
ROBERT: That's why when God promised that he would never deliver another deluge and he gave—he made the promise in a rainbow, that dogs just were totally unimpressed.
JAD: [laughs] And what is it about the dog eye that makes it see this way?
TOM CRONIN: It doesn't have red sensitive photoreceptors, no red sensitive cones.
JAD: The weird thing is that the difference between dogs and us cone wise is just one. They have cones tuned to blue and green—so do we. But we have this one extra. Red.
CHOIR: Red.
JAD: Which doesn't really seem like a big difference, I mean it's just one cone. But ...
JAY NEITZ: To have three is so much better than two.
JAD: That's Jay Neitz, vision scientist.
CHOIR: Hi Jay!
JAY NEITZ: Because of this kind of multiplicative thing. Red can get mixed with blue.
CHOIR: Blue.
JAD: Which makes purple.
CHOIR: Purple.
JAY NEITZ: Or red can get mixed with yellow.
CHOIR: Yellow.
JAD: To make orange.
CHOIR: Orange.
JAY NEITZ: And green can mix with blue.
JAD: To get teal or turquoise.
CHOIR: Turquoise.
JAY NEITZ: And that's how we get about a hundred different shades of color that we can see. So by adding one photopigment, instead of adding just one more color, you actually add about 98 colors or so.
ROBERT: All right, let's move on. So now we have a crow. Unless you'd like to change the bird.
TOM CRONIN: Right. Well, the crow is not so interesting, because it's pretty much like us.
ROBERT: Oh.
TOM CRONIN: So let's take a—let's take something like a sparrow.
ROBERT: All right.
TOM CRONIN: Now sparrows have ultraviolet vision.
ROBERT: What do they see?
TOM CRONIN: So they see—the rainbow starts before our rainbow starts. Where we just see sky, it would see an ultraviolet color.
CHOIR: Ultraviolet.
TOM CRONIN: And then it would see the violet.
CHOIR: Violet.
TOM CRONIN: And it would see the blue.
CHOIR: Blue.
TOM CRONIN: And the greens.
CHOIR: Green.
TOM CRONIN: And the oranges.
CHOIR: Orange.
TOM CRONIN: And the yellow first and the orange and ...
CHOIR: Yellow.
TOM CRONIN: And then the red and probably would see ...
CHOIR: Red.
TOM CRONIN: Further into the red than us, because they have ...
CHOIR: Very very red.
TOM CRONIN: ... a more red-sensitive red receptor than we have.
CHOIR: Extremely red.
TOM CRONIN: So they see a much broader rainbow. It would start earlier and it would end later.
JAD: Whoo!
ROBERT: So should we assume that we've now got the sparrow as the champion? That that's the—that's that's as high as it gets?
TOM CRONIN: If you're talking about vertebrates. If you're talking about ...
ROBERT: No, I'm talking about anything that has a heart and a mind and a—and a body.
TOM CRONIN: Once you leave the vertebrates then oh, that's rough. You've got—many animals have much better color vision than the vertebrates do.
ROBERT: Oh, really?
JAD: Like what?
TOM CRONIN: Butterflies are a great example. Butterflies have five or six kinds of color receptors. We only have three, remember.
ROBERT: Butterflies see more colors than we do?
TOM CRONIN: Yeah.
ROBERT: So if a butterfly were looking at a rainbow. [laughs] I never thought we'd get ...
TOM CRONIN: Well they do, I'm sure. I mean, butterflies are out there when the rainbows are out, but would see colors we have no names for between the blues and the greens and the greens and the yellows.
JAD: Ooh!
ROBERT: So it would go from ultraviolet. It would see that.
CHOIR: Ultraviolet.
TOM CRONIN: Yup.
ROBERT: Then it would see violet.
CHOIR: Violet.
TOM CRONIN: And then blue.
CHOIR: Blue.
JAD: And then blue-blue-green?
CHOIR: Blue-blue-green.
TOM CRONIN: Yup.
JAD: And green-green-bluey-bluey or whatever?
CHOIR: Green-green-bluey-bluey.
TOM CRONIN: Right.
ROBERT: And then orange and red and all that?
CHOIR: Orange and red
TOM CRONIN: Yup. They have very complicated eyes.
ROBERT: Huh!
JAD: Okay, just to recap.
ROBERT: All right.
JAD: Here's the dog.
[Choir sings with fewer voices]
JAD: Here's us, humans.
[Choir sings with more voices/harmonies]
JAD: Now the sparrow:
[Choir sings with more voices/harmonies]
JAD: Little bit more bass, little bit more high end so to speak. And finally, the butterfly.
[Choir sings with more voices/harmonies]
JAD: Which is, you know, not so far above the sparrow but it's got more mids in there.
ROBERT: So I'm now thinking butterflies get the crown.
TOM CRONIN: Yeah, but then if you go onto coral reefs, you come across these animals called mantis shrimps.
JAD: What are they called? Meta? Like ...
TOM CRONIN: Mantis, like a praying mantis.
JAD: Oh.
ROBERT: Oh, mantis shrimp.
TOM CRONIN: The shrimp catches prey using an arm like a praying mantis has.
ROBERT: Oh!
TOM CRONIN: Mantis shrimps are are mostly pretty small, about the size of a finger. Some get to be as big as your forearm. They're pretty big animals.
ROBERT: Oh.
JAD: I'm actually looking this up right here. [gasps] Oh my God, they're so colorful!
TOM CRONIN: No, they are colorful though.
JAD: Here look at this. Oh my God, they're just like a—it's like they're electric colored.
ROBERT: Yeah they're like ...
TOM CRONIN: Yeah.
ROBERT: ... turquoise or something.
JAD: Iridescent. And their eyes are like little cartoon eyes. They're gigantic!
TOM CRONIN: Yeah. They have two really big eyes right on the front.
JAD: And you said that dogs have two cones, we have three, how much does the butterfly have again?
TOM CRONIN: Butterfly has five.
ROBERT: Yeah.
TOM CRONIN: Depends on the butterfly. mantis shrimps have 16.
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: 16?
ROBERT: [laughs]
JAD: Oh my God!
ROBERT: Well if you have 16 ...
TOM CRONIN: 16 kinds of receptors.
JAD: What would the rainbow look like to them? I mean, could they even see it?
TOM CRONIN: Mantis shrimp would see a rainbow fine because they live in very shallow water, and so the water is pretty clear, almost like air.
JAD: Huh.
TOM CRONIN: They would start the rainbow way way way inside where we see violet—they would see ...
CHOIR: Super duper ultraviolet!
TOM CRONIN: Extraordinarily deep ultraviolet. And then they would go on through several kinds of ultraviolet, probably five or six kinds of ultraviolet. And then they would get to violet, which which is—now they're reaching our colors. And go through violet and violet-blue and blue and blue-green.
CHOIR: Blue green.
ROBERT: Would they have those green-green-blue-blue-blues as well?
TOM CRONIN: Yep.
CHOIR: Green-green-blue-blue. Yellow orange ...
TOM CRONIN: And then they would go out into the reds. So they would be about about as red as us when they get to the red end.
ROBERT: But only in the reds.
TOM CRONIN: Yeah.
[cheering]
JAD: What a rainbow that must be!
ROBERT: Yeah.
TOM CRONIN: They have the most complicated visual system of any animals by a factor of two of more, so ...
JAD: Wait, wait. You said any. Do you mean—did you mean unequivocally any?
TOM CRONIN: Yeah! No other animal that we know of has a visual system within 50 percent as complicated.
JAD: All right, mantis!
CHOIR: Mantis shrimp! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!
TOM CRONIN: But, you know, on the other hand, their brains are tiny, so who knows what ...
ROBERT: [laughs]
TOM CRONIN: ... it turns into.
JAD: So they not have the ability to perceive the beauty of the rainbow in the way that ...
TOM CRONIN: No, I don't—I don't—no, they're—mantis shrimps are into violence, they're not really into beauty. They go around and—and kill things. That's—I mean really, that's what they do. That's one reason they're so fascinating is ...
JAD: How ...
TOM CRONIN: They have to go around and kill things.
ROBERT: But what do they kill?
TOM CRONIN: Crabs. Other mantis shrimps, shrimps. Octopuses.
JAD: They'll kill octopuses?
TOM CRONIN: Yeah, small ones. A good-size mantis shrimp will—can break the wall of an aquarium.
JAD: Really?
TOM CRONIN: Yeah, there's ones in California that can break aquarium walls if they hit it hard.
JAD: Oh my God!
ROBERT: So you have a pugnacious Muhammad Ali seagoing animal with incredibly great visual sense!
CHOIR: Visual sense! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Mantis shrimp! Mantis shrimp! The mantis shrimp!
JAD: Special thanks to Jim Briggs our engineer for the choir session, which was a blast.
ROBERT: To Mark Changizi for setting us off in this direction.
JAD: To Michael Kershner and the Young New Yorkers Chorus.
ROBERT: And John McClay and the Grace Church Choral Society, and those folks from the Collegiate Choral and the Dessoff Choirs who joined us.
JAD: And to Alex Ambrose of WQXR for getting everybody together.
ROBERT: Thank you thank you thank you.
CHOIR: Hallelujahhhh.
[cheering]
ROBERT: Okay, a very quick update. Since we aired this broadcast, the mystery of the mantis shrimp eye has just gotten deeper. As we mentioned, they don't seem to gaze at sunsets or rainbows. We now think that maybe they use colors as kind of triggers for particular actions. One color says fight, another color says eat. Another color says sex. They still have the best eyes in the world, but what they're doing with those eyes is a bigger mystery now than ever.
[ANSWERING MACHINE: Start of message.]
[TOM CRONIN: Hi, this is Tom Cronin.]
[JAY NEITZ: Hello, this is Jay Neitz.]
[CHOIR: Radiolab is supported in part by the National Science Foundation.]
[JAY NEITZ: And ...]
[TOM CRONIN: And the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]
[JAY NEITZ: Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]
[TOM CRONIN: Enhancing public understanding of science ...]
[VICTORIA FINLAY: Science and technology.]
[CHOIR: in the modern world.]
[VICTORIA FINLAY: More information about Sloan ...]
[JAY NEITZ: At www.sloan ...]
[VICTORIA FINLAY: S-L-O-A-N ...]
[JAY NEITZ: dot org.]
[JAMES GLEICK: This is James Gleick. Radiolab is produced by WNYC.]
[CHOIR: And distributed by NPR.]
[VICTORIA FINLAY: Okay, hope that's good enough for you.]
[JAY NEITZ: Bye.]
JAD: Hey I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab, and today we're talking about color.
JAY NEITZ: Okay.
JAD: And that actually brings us back to Jay Neitz.
JAY NEITZ: I'm a professor of ophthalmology, University of Washington, Seattle.
JAD: Jay has actually spent his entire career trying to get creatures to see colors that they normally can't see.
JAY NEITZ: I—well, yeah.
JAD: And he started—this is kind of an interesting story—by taking some color blind monkeys who couldn't see red.
JAY NEITZ: They have blue cones, green cones, but no red cones.
JAD: Which is not unlike a lot of human males. In any case, he had these monkeys and was able to take the human gene for the red cone, wrap it in a virus ...
JAY NEITZ: And we ...
JAD: Inject it into the monkey's eyes and—bam! The monkeys suddenly had red cones.
JAY NEITZ: Yeah.
ROBERT: Oh my God!
JAY NEITZ: So it had blue, green, and red.
JAD: Was this like Lasik, so it was just like a 10-minute outpatient situation for the monkeys?
JAY NEITZ: I would say close. Close to Lasik.
ROBERT: Could they then now see red?
JAY NEITZ: Well, every single morning before they get their breakfast they have to do their color vision test. So ...
ROBERT: So he'd sit each monkey at a computer.
JAY NEITZ: We had a touch screen.
ROBERT: And the screen looks totally gray. But in that field of gray, he adds a little red blob.
JAY NEITZ: Right.
JAD: Now here's the key.
JAY NEITZ: We use grape juice as the reinforcement.
JAD: For the monkeys.
JAY NEITZ: But ...
JAD: The game is ...
JAY NEITZ: You have the touch the blob before you get your juice.
JAD: So before the surgery they weren't seeing any blobs and they weren't getting any juice because all they could see was gray. So a little red blob could be right there in front of them and they'd never see it. And the morning after their Lasiks color booster shot ...
JAY NEITZ: Okay, you should be able to see it.
JAD: They still couldn't see it. Day after day, they would do their test.
JAY NEITZ: Mm-hmm.
JAD: And every day they would fail.
JAY NEITZ: Every day they would fail.
JAD: No blob, no juice.
JAY NEITZ: But it's fun for them. They get out of their cage, and they talk to their friends and ...
ROBERT: Did you fail? Yeah I failed. Did you fail?
JAD: I failed. [laughs] Another day, another fail.
ROBERT: Until one morning ...
JAY NEITZ: After about 20 weeks.
ROBERT: Jay woke up the monkeys, gave them the test ...
JAY NEITZ: and they began to not fail.
JAD: Really!
ROBERT: Really!
JAD: If you watch the video of this, it actually looks like the monkey is like ...
JAY NEITZ: Wow! You know, I'm not having any failures.
JAD: And check out this dot! Look at this thing!
ROBERT: Check it out!
JAY NEITZ: So I did get some sense, that they felt like that their life had improved.
JAD: Now if this worked so well with the monkeys, couldn't you take a colorblind human and give them back the thing they're missing?
JAY NEITZ: Absolutely. We could cure colorblindness in a human with exactly this technique.
ROBERT: Really!
JAY NEITZ: The only thing that we have to do is convince the FDA that the risks are low enough and the benefit is high enough that it'd be something we could do in people.
ROBERT: Have you tried it?
JAD: You've never tried it, or ...?
JAY NEITZ: No, we've never tried it. Although I get a lot of emails that say "I don't care what the risks are." I've even had offers. "How about if I come to your laboratory, and you don't tell anybody late at night, and you give me the shot in the eye and we won't tell anyone."
JAD: Which brings us back to our original question: if you can take a colorblind human and give them normal color vision, could you take a normal color seer and boost them to make them a little more shrimpy?
JAY NEITZ: [laughs] Well, yes. Yeah.
JAD: He said sure, why not? But then there's the whole FDA thing. But here's the real surprise.
ROBERT: Jay says there are some people who are already a little bit mantis shrimp-like. There are color mutants—if I may call them that in the nicest possible way—among us.
JAD: Or they're out there in theory. Okay, so there's the deal. The genes for the cones in our eyes that see color, you know the red, green, and blue cones?
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: They're on the X chromosome. Now men, as we know, only have one of those.
ROBERT: Women have two X chromosomes.
JAD: Which means that women have two sets of these cone-making genes. Normally, one set is just a spare, it's not used, but still they've got two sets.
JAY NEITZ: And so someone said "A ha!"
JAD: It is theoretically possible that in some women, this spare set of genes might mix up, turn on, morph into a whole new cone—a fourth cone!
JAY NEITZ: We're gonna call it the yellow cone.
JAD: So if people with normal color vision are tri-chromats because they've got three cones ...
JAY NEITZ: A woman like that would be a tetra-chromat. So all together she'd have a blue cone a green cone a yellow cone and a red cone.
JAD: But she wouldn't just see more yellow. This new yellow would mix with the red and the blue and the green to create thousands, maybe millions of more shades of color.
JAY NEITZ: This amazing—technicolor is not the right word. It's whatever would be the next kind of color that would be even more super duper.
JAD: This was just a though experiment?
JAY NEITZ: Yeah but ...
ROBERT: Jay actually figured out a way to test for this.
JAY NEITZ: We can look at people's blood and I can say this woman has the gene for blue cones, green cones, yellow cones, red cones.
ROBERT: Oh, so you can do a DNA test, really.
JAY NEITZ: Yeah.
JAD: So he started doing blood tests, and he found this one woman ...
JAY NEITZ: She worked at the same place we did.
JAD: Crazily enough.
JAY NEITZ: At the university.
JAD: He looked at her DNA, and he saw the gene for the fourth cone.
JAY NEITZ: Yeah.
ROBERT: Wow.
JAD: So did she see in super technicolor or—how would you even know?
JAY NEITZ: That was—that was a problem. And so we thought of an experiment in order to be able to see whether or not she had this extra dimension of color vision.
JAD: He was able to produce these two yellow lights that to us, you know, trichromats, normal trichromats, look totally identical.
JAY NEITZ: We're colorblind to that difference.
JAD: But to a tetrachromat, a woman with this fourth cone, they would look totally different.
JAY NEITZ: Yeah. So I brought her in. I said, "Okay, here it is. Do you see these as different?" And she said no.
JAD: No!
JAY NEITZ: I don't see them as ...
JAD: No!
JAY NEITZ: ... any different! But the story doesn't end there.
ROBERT: Good!
JAD: Jay told us about a colleague of his in England.
JAY NEITZ: She's at Newcastle.
JAD: Named Gabrielle Jordan. And she apparently found eight of these women with the extra cone. And out of those eight ...
JAY NEITZ: Seven of those women behaved exactly like the person that I had tested.
JAD: Couldn't see the difference.
JAY NEITZ: But one of them ...
JAD: Took one look at those two yellows and said ...
JAY NEITZ: "No, they look totally different to me."
JAD: Oh ho! One of these women was—saw—saw it as different. So one of them had the cone, but could use it and the others had the cone but couldn't use it?
JAY NEITZ: Yup. So why is that?
JAD: Yeah, why?
JAY NEITZ: Well, this is the part if you'd like I could tell you what my theory is of what's going on.
JAD: Yeah.
JAY NEITZ: So I think that ...
ROBERT: Jay says let's just imagine you grow up in a world without color.
JAY NEITZ: Completely and totally a black and white world. Houses would be painted black and white. Printers would only print in black and white.
ROBERT: Even the TVs ...
JAY NEITZ: They would just have black and white TV. Women's makeup would be just you know, either dark or light.
ROBERT: So it wouldn't make any difference if you had color vision because you would never use that color vision, there'd be no words for color. Now just to make it interesting, let's imagine one day a bright red apple plops into your world.
JAY NEITZ: How would you react to it?
JAD: Would you see it?
JAY NEITZ: So ...
JAD: You think?
JAY NEITZ: Well, so that's a very good question.
JAD: Maybe, says Jay, even though you have the ability to see that red apple—if you've never had a chance to use that ability? To practice? It may just lay dormant. And that he thinks might be what happens to women living with the extra cone in our world.
JAY NEITZ: They're very rarely subjected to colors that would stimulate their extra kind of cone differently.
JAD: So you're saying those other colors just aren't around enough for them?
JAY NEITZ: Yeah. Everything that we make is based on the fact that humans are trichromatic. The television only has three colors. Our color printers have three different colors. There's nothing out there that we make artificially that a tetrachromat could see.
JAD: But Jay says maybe ...
JAY NEITZ: Some women because they're just more aware or—because of the job that they do ...
JAD: Maybe someone who works with color all the time like a florist or a painter.
JAY NEITZ: Little by little -
JAD: Because they're paying such close attention.
JAY NEITZ: Their brain would learn to see that difference.
ROBERT: Huh.
JAD: So naturally we wanted to find one of these mythic ladies -
ROBERT: We're hoping not mythic maybe we -
JAD: The reason I say that is because we tried to find that one woman that he mentioned you know the one out of eight.
ROBERT: Yeah.
JAD: And we had a—a really hard time and we began to doubt that she even existed. And then we began to look online and you see all these websites saying are you a tetrachromat, contact us contact us. Everyone is searching for these women and we we began to feel like we were chasing unicorns a little bit. But then our producer Tim Howard claimed—claimed that he had found one.
[GPS: Recalculating.]
TIM HOWARD: Yeah you are.
[GPS: Turn right on Sarah Street.]
JAD: He'd been in touch with Jay. Jay told him that he tested a woman, determined that she had the fourth cone and this woman was an interior designer.
ROBERT: Oh.
JAD: But Jay had not yet determined whether she could use her 4th cone so we sent Tim to Pittsburgh where she lives.
[door slams]
SUSAN HOGAN: Hi there.
JAD: To see what he could find out.
TIM: Hey how are you?
SUSAN HOGAN: Hi I'm Susan Hogan, I'm a mother of three and an interior designer.
JAD: What was she like?
TIM: She's great.
TIM: Oh you have a jukebox.
SUSAN HOGAN: huh. [laughs] Really—you want me to play something?
TIM: How bout number 307? It just seems appropriate cause it's about color.
SUSAN HOGAN: Whiter shade of pale. [laughs]
TIM: she told me a lot about how she uses color in her work.
SUSAN HOGAN:—you see the different colors of paint.
TIM: Yeah.
TIM: Because she thinks a lot about it in terms of painting walls.
SUSAN HOGAN: I know the way
TIM: Yeah
SUSAN HOGAN: the sun is oriented in a room each wall will look a different color even though you paint ...
TIM: In any case here was my plan. I'd ordered this test before I went to Pittsburgh that Jay had suggested I get ...
TIM: All right open it open it open it -
TIM: It involved these little pieces of brown fabric.
JAD: Okay.
TIM: They all look identical.
LYNN LEVY: They look strikingly the same to me.
TIM: Yeah, Lynn, Brenna, me, Soren ...
SOREN WHEELER: Those are completely indistinguishable.
TIM: Couldn't see a difference.
LYNN: Do they all look the same to you guys?
SOREN: Yes.
LYNN: Okay.
JAD: But I'm assuming they're actually not all the same.
TIM: That's the trick. Jay said if you show them to a real tetrachromat they're gonna be able to see these subtle differences that you know—you and I can't see.
TIM: And back to Pittsburgh.
TIM: How bout we head over to that tree—is that—that look good?
SUSAN HOGAN: I need to take my shoes off.
TIM: Oh yeah.
SUSAN HOGAN: Cause it'll be much more fun [laughs]
TIM: Yeah.
SUSAN HOGAN: For me.
TIM: We ended up doing the test in a nearby park.
TIM: We're gonna do a bunch of these if you don't mind.
TIM: In the first trial ...
TIM: All right.
TIM: I took out three of the swatches. two that were exactly the same and one that was supposedly different.
JAD: And when you took it out could you see the difference?
TIM: No, no.
JAD: Huh.
TIM: So I go behind the tree and whisper into the mic.
TIM: Number three is different. Number three. I hope you couldn't hear me.
SUSAN HOGAN: No, I couldn't.
TIM: I'll let you take a look.
TIM: She steps back from the swatches—gives it a look for a moment, and then she says ...
SUSAN HOGAN: Number three.
TIM: Third one is different.
SUSAN HOGAN: Looks more neutral, less red than one and two on the left.
TIM: One for one.
JAD: Luck.
TIM: So I went behind the tree. I—changed up the swatches. So that now—the middle swatch was the odd one out.
TIM: And same same deal ready set go.
SUSAN HOGAN: Easy. [laughs]
TIM: Which number looks different?
SUSAN HOGAN: The middle one.
TIM: Number two.
SUSAN HOGAN: Mm-hmm.
TIM: You're right.
JAD: Really!
SUSAN HOGAN: [laughs] Yeah.
TIM: Wow. Okay.
TIM: Then I figured I gotta make it harder. I switched it up and I made it so all three are different and I didn't tell her.
TIM: All three are different.
SUSAN HOGAN: All three different.
TIM: Wow.
SUSAN HOGAN: Green red, less red.
TIM: Knocking this out of the park.
SUSAN HOGAN: Why didn't I do this well on my SATs, Tim?
JAD: Wow, you found her! I had—I was sure that—that she was not gonna be—there's no way this test can work.
TIM: Well it actually might not have totally worked.
JAD: Wait what—did she start to fail?
TIM: There—there's one little thing I didn't mention.
JAD: What?
TIM: I brought along a friend.
JASON LACROIX: I'm Jason LaCroix.
TIM: Painter.
JASON LACROIX: Landscape, still life.
TIM: Thought I'd try him out as a control.
JAD: Oh cause you were thinking—let's—get someone who likes color but is a boy and can't be a tetrachromat.
TIM: Right.
TIM: Okay so ...
TIM: And—when we tried the exact same test with him -
TIM: I mean these three they look the same, don't they to you? No?
JASON LACROIX: I see different.
TIM: He was amazing.
JAD: Oh.
JASON LACROIX: The first one on the left, two jumped out immediately.
SUSAN HOGAN: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
JASON LACROIX: Number 1. They all three look different to me.
TIM: Wow.
JAD: Was he just as good as Susan?
TIM: Yeah. I was a little bit disappointed I gotta say.
JAD: And there was nowhere where he couldn't do it and she could?
TIM: No, but I mean I only had pieces of brown cloth! You know?
JAD: So it doesn't prove anything I guess. She still
TIM: No!
JAD: might be a tetrachromat right?
TIM: For all I know! And—there was this one moment—I know it doesn't prove anything but I asked her—I asked her about the sky. And the sky was just that quintessential sky blue.
JAD: mmhm
TIM: And she was—I was like what do you see? And she's like -
SUSAN HOGAN: I see um—do you see some of the pink in the blue? See I see a lot of pink like among the blue. There's red in that blue.
JAD: She was looking up at a blue sky and seeing red?
TIM: Yeah yeah.
SUSAN HOGAN: Do you see that?
TIM: No...
SUSAN HOGAN: Oh I see so much red like up—and it's ...
TIM: it's kind of a cop out but it's just kind of that perfect sky blue.
SUSAN HOGAN: No? Okay that's—that's ...
TIM: Where do you where do you see the reds?
SUSAN HOGAN: It's just mixed in there.
TIM: That's cool.
SUSAN HOGAN: One thing I don't see is any green in that blue. I just see reds right—especially around like a white cloud [XX?] -
TIM: And at that moment I felt like—my sky is boring.
JAD: I'm so sorry for you. For us.
TIM: I'm sorry for us.
SUSAN HOGAN: [XX?] I mean how do we know that—any of this makes sense? [laughs] You know that's the fun of it I guess.
TIM: Yeah.
ROBERT: You know what we haven't talked about yet?
JAD: What's that?
ROBERT: where do the colors come from?
JAD: You mean like ...
ROBERT: Like ...
JAD: Sky colors?
ROBERT: no no like painterly colors like like marine blue and and -
JAD: Oh like artificial colors.
ROBERT: Well no they're not ar- that's the thing. You'd think they'd come from a factory or something but originally they came from the earth.
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: And and and there's one story about color that has haunted me hm—for about a—a year and a half. It's so strange.
VICTORIA FINLAY: Mm.
ROBERT: I don't know know if it's true or not but I mean I I don't know if even you know -
VICTORIA FINLAY: It was in my book of course! [laughs]
ROBERT: That's Victoria Finlay again. Her book is called Color. And this story starts with—well a particular kind of goop.
VICTORIA FINLAY: It's a color called gamboge. It's—it's named after Cambodia the French word for Cambodia. And it comes from the sap of a tree that grows in the Cambodia Vietnam Thailand border area.
JAD: And this is a yellow color?
VICTORIA FINLAY: Well it's a yellow color but -
ROBERT: How you get it is really the stick part.
VICTORIA FINLAY: I mean the way they get it is that they cut a slash [wood cutting noise] in the bark—and then hitch up a tube made of bamboo.
ROBERT: About the circumference of a quarter?
VICTORIA FINLAY: Yes.
ROBERT: And then little droplets of goop come out?
VICTORIA FINLAY: Little tiny droplets of goo.
ROBERT: And they fill up the tube. The same way you know you get maple syrup or rubber.
VICTORIA FINLAY: But they leave it for a couple of years.
ROBERT: Years.
VICTORIA FINLAY: Years. All right so it's a really slowwww process.
ROBERT: So slow -
VICTORIA FINLAY: Drop.
ROBERT: That some pretty strange things -
VICTORIA FINLAY: Drop.
ROBERT: can happen in that time.
JAD: What do you mean?
ROBERT: Sap has secrets.
JAD: Secrets. What secrets.
ROBERT: Well you know—wait a minute. So—after two long years. The harvesters come back and each of those tubes.
VICTORIA FINLAY: Is now full of this—quite quite like plastic, it's sort of it's got that sort of plastic resin-y kind of feel.
ROBERT: But that's just the beginning. The resin makes this incredible transformation. Which we actually saw, Sean and I ...
SEAN COLE: Hello.
ROBERT: Hi.
ROBERT: Thanks to this guy.
GEORGE KREMER: My name is George Kremer, I'm a color man.
ROBERT: He owns Kremer Pigments in Manhattan and he sells this gamboge.
GEORGE KREMER: It is an important yellow.
VICTORIA FINLAY: Oh it's amazing when you use it.
GEORGE KREMER: We have it powdered and in the resin form.
VICTORIA FINLAY: Because when you have a look at it -
GEORGE KREMER: Okay this here.
VICTORIA FINLAY: It's just like this dull—[X?] brown color.
ROBERT: Imagine like a—a ball of earwax.
VICTORIA FINLAY: And you think oh that's not a very interesting color.
ROBERT: Dusky sort of -
VICTORIA FINLAY: That's like a really boring color. But then you put a drop of water on it.
[clicking noise]
ROBERT: Or you grind it up in a bowl.
ROBERT: A little water.
GEORGE KREMER:—[X?] it looks like this.
ROBERT: Oh.
GEORGE KREMER: [XX?]
ROBERT: And there it is.
ROBERT: Wow!
GEORGE KREMER: There's a little bit of white-
VICTORIA FINLAY: It's bright.
ROBERT: Very bright yellow.
VICTORIA FINLAY: It's bright fluorescent yellow.
ROBERT: Suddenly it's like pow!
VICTORIA FINLAY: I mean it is—quite an exciting color.
ROBERT: Very very [X?]. Wow.
VICTORIA FINLAY: I I carried one around for ages. Have a look at this color, look how boring it is. Now put a drop of water on it, showing kids, and I was really happy. I even gave it to one kid who was who was just so delighted. And was only afterwards that I found out that it's dangerous I mean I I ...
JAD: Wait it's dangerous why?
GEORGE KREMER: You get bad diarrhea.
IAN GARRETT: When the guys used to chip it in small pieces- there was actually a time built in
from the visit the toilet at least once an hour.
ROBERT: Ian Garrett knows that because he was technical director at this art supply company called Windsor and Newton in England. And here's what really got us interested in all this. Back in the 1980s, Windsor and Newton would get these shipments of gamboge from Cambodia and they would take it to—to this production room.
IAN GARRETT: Quite a a dusty area, just had a a table in there ...
ROBERT: Big ole table where the workers would sit.
IAN GARRETT: And then they would have this hammer- put the gamboge pieces on this—lump of iron and then hit it [hitting metal sound] and shatter it into into small pieces.
VICTORIA FINLAY: Cause that's how they make it into a kind of usable sellable paint.
ROBERT: And one day as one of the workers was chipping it and scraping at the resin -
VICTORIA FINLAY: There they were.
ROBERT: They found something in the resin that they didn't expect.
VICTORIA FINLAY: they found bullets.
JAD: Bullets? Like in the hunks of resin?
VICTORIA FINLAY: Lodged in them yeah.
ROBERT: Sometime in that two year drip drip process—toward the end probably as the resin was getting thick, a bullet went whizzing through the air, went thwack! Into the goop and stayed there. Actually it wasn't just one bullet.
IAN GARRETT: There was a total of about a dozen.
ROBERT: And those are just the ones he found lying around the factory. There were probably many more.
IAN GARRETT: They fall into two thoughts. There's a very sharp pointed one about just over an inch long—and then the other type of—a small sort of barrel shapes. Which are about three quarters of an inch long. About half a dozen of each. And how they g to there and what they pass through on the way into the gamboge I'm not sure.
ROBERT: What we do know of course is that those years in Cambodia were years of war and murder—a million and a half people died there, most of them in the killing fields. And that's the same place where you find the gamboge trees.
VICTORIA FINLAY: I mean it's shocking really, and it cause it—those were just the random little bamboo tubes on—hanging on the trees. What happened in that grove? What terrible things happened?
ROBERT: The proposition here would be that at some point maybe—cause of the famous killing fields ...
VICTORIA FINLAY: mmhm
ROBERT: That some 14 year olds with Kalashnikov rifles after finishing a series of murders or just—shot lots of -bullets?
VICTORIA FINLAY: They would have just sprayed that grove. In order to get into the little tiny bamboo canisters collecting this gamboge.
ROBERT: Yeah wow.
VICTORIA FINLAY: They would have to have sprayed that entire grove with machine—machine gun bullets. And in that year or two years—- somebody—murdered people I should think.
IAN GARRETT: Well I mean they they—it's not necessarily a battle scenario. It could have been target practice. You see these things hanging on the side of a tree you you you wanna practice your—marksmanship.
JAD: But there—I mean there is a way in which—there there's violence in this color. I guess there's vi—it makes me
IAN GARRETT: Yeah.
JAD: wonder about the—does it ever give you pause?
IAN GARRETT: Did it ever give me what sorry?
JAD: Pause?
IAN GARRETT: Pause, oh.
JAD: Yeah.
IAN GARRETT: Uh...not really. We were too remote—bought it from a guy in Holland who bought it from an exporter who got it from—lord knows where in Cambodia.
JAD: But the idea that it could have been attached to—to that—bloodshed. Does that bother you at all?
IAN GARRETT: Are you saying—do I think it's it's morally acceptable? Is that what you're asking me?
JAD: Yeah.
IAN GARRETT: Um...no it wasn't Windsor Newton who discovered these things. These things were damaged by customers.
ROBERT: You're a hard hearted man I feel!
IAN GARRETT: I had never thought about it until you until you pitched it like that.
JAD: As we kept on talking, Ian made it clear, it wasn't that he hadn't thought about the violence per se it's just that—it wasn't like breaking news to him. They sell some pigments that come straight out of hills that are right in the middle of war zones. Okay. Colors are sometimes soaked in blood. That's just how it is.
IAN GARRETT: On the other side of the coin I've made it my career in 40 years to make artists paints on the basis that people who paint tend not to make war. It's a—a peaceful occupation.
GEORGE KREMER: That is more or less what they used in the -
ROBERT: And George Kremer who runs the paint shop—he was pretty much of the same mind.
GEORGE KREMER: Where is their heart -
ROBERT: You could think of it this way. Imagine the first person to ever find this brilliant yellow. Maybe 10,000 years ago. He's walking through the forest after it's rained and he sees it there on a tree and he's amazed so he puts his finger into the yellow and then dabs some on his face and he feels instantly beautiful. Like larger than himself.
GEORGE KREMER: It is about being related to something transcendent.
ROBERT: And that says George is the other side of the coin.
GEORGE KREMER: [XXX?] high or whatever. Therefore you—the [XX?] be used for all sort of ceremonies.
ROBERT: Marriages, feasts, maybe war paint, to feel invincible. Any moment he suspects that needed to be pulled out of the ordinary—and lifted up.
GEORGE KREMER: Whether you need something that is bright, something that is beautiful. And—special. And this yellow—gives you something special. It is a perfect yellow.
JAD: Thank you to Victoria Finley—her book is called Color, short and simple, to the point.
ROBERT: And to Ian Garrett—of Windsor and Newton who did not wither under our withering moral attack.
JAD: On the contrary.
[LISTENER: This is Amy Lantica from Boston Massachusetts. Radiolab is supported in part by the Alfred P Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]
JAD: Hey I'm Jad Abumrad.
ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.
JAD: This is Radiolab. We're gonna keep going with our show on colors now with a story about well -
ROBERT: The color of the sky.
JAD: The most beautiful color.
ROBERT: Well. [clears throat]
JAD: Well I think.
ROBERT: Except red.
JAD: Nah.
ROBERT: Yeah. You gotta -
JAD: It's a story that we find really surprising frankly. And it comes from our producer Tim Howard.
TIM: Yes. Hello.
JAD: Who heard it from—do you wanna ...
TIM: Yeah.
JAD: ... set up who this guy is?
TIM: so Guy Deutscher is a linguist and a writer -
GUY DEUTSCHER: —and -
TIM: I came across his book -
GUY DEUTSCHER: —called Through the Language Glass.
TIM: And he tells this one particular story in it that—starts in I think 1858 with this guy William Gladstone who was incredibly famous politician in England.
GUY DEUTSCHER: He was 4 times prime minister in the second half of the 19th century.
TIM: Every school kid knows who he is even now.
JAD: Mm.
TIM: But there's one thing that not many people know about Gladstone.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Well he was a Homer fanatic.
[VOICEOVER: As the soldiers marched the glean went dazzling from the magnificent bronze, all about through the upper air to the heavens.]
GUY DEUTSCHER: He was a deeply religious man and for him the Iliad and all this—they were almost like second Bible.
[VOICEOVER: Sipping the black blood, the tall shade perceived me. And cried out sharply]
GUY DEUTSCHER: He read them over and over again throughout his life.
JAD: So he was into Homer.
TIM: Yes. And so early on in his career. Gladstone decided to write the definitive history of Homer.
GUY DEUTSCHER: This huge book actually three books.
TIM: Thousands of pages.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Where he discussed a whole range of of issues relating to Homer and his world.
TIM: And here's the thing—as he was reading—doing his research and everything -
GUY DEUTSCHER: He made this very strange discovery. That the way Homer talks about color in the Iliad and the Odyssey is extremely odd.
TIM: It's odd?
GUY DEUTSCHER: Very very odd.
TIM: How so?
GUY DEUTSCHER: To start with—he uses extremely strange [XX?] colors of simple objects—the most famous one perhaps is ...
[VOICEOVER: The wine dark sea.]
TIM: The wine—wine dark -
GUY DEUTSCHER: The wine dark sea it's it's -
TIM: It looks like wine.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Looks like wine.
TIM: Is it possibly like a—a a poetic kind of thing?
GUY DEUTSCHER: That's what you would naturally think but the other thing he calls—wine colored—oxen.
TIM: But but it's more than just wine. Take the color violet which to me and probably to you is like -
JAD: Purple—purple?
TIM: Yeah
JAD: Light purple.
TIM: When Homer uses it -
GUY DEUTSCHER: He talks about the sheep.
[VOICEOVER: The cyclops rams were ...]
GUY DEUTSCHER: And the cyclops caves as having -
[VOICEOVER: A dark violet wool.]
JAD: But that's just fantasy I mean -
TIM: But the other thing that he also says is violet is iron.
JAD: Iron.
TIM: So.
JAD: Okay.
TIM: Chew on that.
JAD: [laughs]
TIM: Or how bout this one. What is both the color of honey and the color of—faces pale with fear.
JAD: no idea.
TIM: If you ask Homer those are -
GUY DEUTSCHER: Green.
[VOICEOVER: Green honey?]
GUY DEUTSCHER: He didn't call his forest green, he didn't call his leaves green—it all seems to be wrong.
TIM: And this was totally puzzling to Gladstone.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Homer was Gladstone's absolute hero so he found it difficult to understand or accept why someone who was so perceptive would use such defective terms as Gladstone called it.
TIM: So he starts going through the Iliad and the Odyssey again page by page. And he counts how many time each color appears.
JAD: You mean like how many times he uses the word black or blue or whatever?
TIM: Yeah. And it only takes a couple pages for him to notice -
GUY DEUTSCHER: The predominance of black of white.
TIM: That the term black -
[VOICEOVER: Black days. Black carrion flies. Black blood. Under his black brows. Black black black black black black black ...]
TIM: Occurred about 170 times in both books.
JAD: Huh.
[VOICEOVER: White arms. White clad. The white sail. White raft.]
TIM: Occurred about 100 times.
[VOICEOVER: White white white ...]
TIM: But—red?
[VOICEOVER: A blood red serpent.]
TIM: Only clocks in at about 13 times.
[VOICEOVER: The red wine to the gods.]
JAD: That's a big drop.
TIM: Yellow?
[VOICEOVER: Dawn in her yellow robe.]
TIM: Under 10 times. Green?
[VOICEOVER: His teeth chatter in green fear.]
TIM: Also under 10.
JAD: Hmm.
TIM: And then—Gladstone realizes something crazy. The color blue?
[VOICEOVER: Um ... [pages flipping]]
TIM: Zero times.
JAD: What?
GUY DEUTSCHER: There's just nowhere that describes the color blue in any of Homer's poems.
JAD: He does not use the word blue at all?
GUY DEUTSCHER: No blue.
TIM: No blue.
JAD: Not even once.
TIM: Nope. So Gladstone thought Bizarre.
JAD: Yeah.
TIM: And he started looking in other classic Greek texts too. And there he kept finding all of these strange uses of color.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Violet hair and things like that.
TIM: And after thinking about this for a long time -
GUY DEUTSCHER: Gladstone concluded that Homer was colorblind. But also that all the Greeks were colorblind.
TIM: Wait he thought all of them were colorblind?
GUY DEUTSCHER: Yes. That they saw the world in black and white—maybe with a touch of red.
TIM: His thought was that they were straining to see these other colors that were kind of just outside of their reach. And then—their kid—would inherit that effort. Or their kid would just be a little bit better.
JAD: Oh so that's how we got color.
TIM: So Homer Jr would be able to see a little bit of yellow cause Homer tried really hard to see yellow and ...
JAD: And then Homer the third would be better than Homer the second and so -
TIM: Yeah and then this would happen again and again every generation down 3,000 years to the present day.
GUY DEUTSCHER: It does seem the only you know the only the only possible explanation.
JAD: That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous!
GUY DEUTSCHER: We know today of course that that there—our color vision goes back probably about three million years.
TIM: You know, so like when we were climbing trees.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Exactly. So generally -
TIM: People mocked him.
GUY DEUTSCHER: No one took him seriously.
JAD: So then how did people explain the no blue in Homer thing?
TIM: Well so here the plot thickens. 10 years after Gladstone's Homer debacle, this other guy -
GUY DEUTSCHER: A German-Jewish philologist called—Lazarus Geiger.
TIM: Lazarus Geiger.
JAD: A German Jewish what did he say?
TIM: A philologist which I thought was a linguist. It basically means he studies ancient texts. He finds pretty much the same kind of weird stuff that Gladstone did. But he finds it not just in Ancient Greek texts but all over the place.
[VOICEOVER: Sorry this one?]
GUY DEUTSCHER: He looked at the old Icelandic sagas.
[VOICEOVER: [Icelandic]]
GUY DEUTSCHER: Ancient Chinese.
[VOICEOVER: [Chinese]]
GUY DEUTSCHER: Ancient Vedic hymns.
[VOICEOVER: [Vedic]]
GUY DEUTSCHER: the Bible.
[VOICEOVER: [Hebrew?]]
GUY DEUTSCHER: And surprise surprise what did he find there?
TIM: No blue.
JAD: Even the Bible had no blue?
TIM: In the original Hebrew.
BROOKE WATKINS: [Hebrew]
TIM: It has no blue.
JAD: Huh.
TIM: So what where—what's this room?
BROOKE WATKINS: Right now we're in the public catalogue room.
TIM: I actually went to the NY public library and talked to this librarian.
BROOKE WATKINS: [German]
TIM: Who can speak German.
TIM: [German]
TIM: And we got out Geiger's book.
BROOKE WATKINS: Development history of mankind.
JAD: Wait a second I know this voice. Really?
TIM: Yeah that's that's my girlfriend.
BROOKE WATKINS: my name is Brooke Watkins and I'm a librarian at the New York Public Library.
TIM: She helped me find some very cool passages in Geiger's book.
TIM: Let's see it first—let's do it in German.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Geiger has this amazing quotation.
BROOKE WATKINS: Okay, [German]
GUY DEUTSCHER: But in the Vedic poems.
BROOKE WATKINS: [German?]
TIM: And what does this say?
BROOKE WATKINS: These hymns of more than 10,000 lines are brimming with descriptions of the heavens. Scarcely is there any subject about more frequently the sun and reddening dawns play of color day and night cloud and lightening—the air and the ether are unfolded before us. And over and over in splendor and vivid fullness. But there's only one thing that no one would ever learn from those ancient songs who do not already know it. And that is that the sky is blue.
TIM: It gets weirder.
JAD: Mm
TIM: You ready?
JAD: I'm—yeah.
TIM: You all ready for this?
JAD: I'm totally ready.
TIM: All right. Cause Geiger then wondered all right if there's no blue in any of these old texts then when did blue come into these languages?
JAD: Yeah.
TIM: So he did this massive analysis to trace when each color term was first introduced to each language. And what he found was -
GUY DEUTSCHER: The order at which languages seem to acquire these color terms is not entirely random.
TIM: First black and white—every language has black and white. Then when they get their first color term.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Red always comes first.
TIM: Always red.
GUY DEUTSCHER: After red it's always yellow.
JAD: Really?
TIM: Yeah
GUY DEUTSCHER: And then green and blue only at the very end.
JAD: So black white red green yellow and then blue?
TIM: Yeah.
JAD: And that's universal?
TIM: Well as people discovered more and more languages they found some exceptions. But a couple things held, even from Geiger. Out of these colors red is always first and blue is always last.
JAD: Why?
TIM: Well.
JAD: I mean why would there be an order at all and why would blue always be last?
TIM: Well here's where you get to the guessing part.
JAD: Okay.
TIM: Guy thinks it might have to do with a couple of things. First—in Homer's world, you wouldn't have actually been exposed to a lot of blue things.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Actually if you think about it blue is extremely rare in nature.
TIM: Blue foods?
JAD: No
TIM: Blue animals?
JAD: Blue animals -
TIM: How bout plants?
JAD: There's a few blu—blue plants.
TIM: Like what?
JAD: Uh...
GUY DEUTSCHER: Flowers that are really blue are extremely rare.
TIM: Lot of flowers that we think of as blue—they're actually -
GUY DEUTSCHER: Artificial flowers.
TIM: We made them blue. -
JAD: Genetically made them blue.
TIM: Yeah.
JAD: What about blue eyes?
GUY DEUTSCHER: Blue eyes at the time were in short supply—among the Greeks.
TIM: But here's where we get to Guy's main point. He says you don't really need a word for a color until you can make that color reliably. And the reason that red might have been first is because red is apparently one of the easiest to produce. You can just take a dried piece of red clay and you can use it as a crayon which is why paints made out of ochre go back something like 60,000 years. And blue? Blue is the hardest of all. For thousands of years no one had it.
GUY DEUTSCHER: One exception, the Egyptians.
TIM: Oh!
TIM: The Egyptians. And they and only they had their own word for blue.
JAD: So that's it? That's your answer?
TIM: Yeah.
JAD: Like—tell—no blue dyes, no blue words?
TIM: That's not interesting?
JAD: I—I want more than that.
TIM: Wait what do you mean more?
JAD: I don't know—something more to say than just about dyes.
TIM: All right well, here you go. As I was calling around I ran into something that made me think -
[VOICEOVER: Is that two?]
TIM: A little differently about Gladstone's whole theory of color blindness.
JAD: Hm.
TIM: Called this guy named Jules Davidoff.
JULES DAVIDOFF: Professor of Neuropsychology, London University.
TIM: And a few years back, he got interested in this particular tribe in Namibia. Called the Himba.
JULES DAVIDOFF: The Himba. Like many languages in the world they don't have a different word for blue.
TIM: You might think of them as like a very poor stand in for Homer.
JAD: All right
TIM: And to make a long story short. Jules went to Namibia. He sat down with a bunch of members of the Himba tribe, whipped out of a laptop and showed them 12 colored squares.
JULES DAVIDOFF: All identical except for one.
TIM: And there's actually some really cool video footage of his research assistant doing this. And they asked them very simply -
JULES DAVIDOFF: Which one is different?
TIM: Now you look at this and you see that 11 of these squares are green.
JULES DAVIDOFF: A color we would call green -
TIM: Very green. And the other one is blue. This blue one it's it's shouting—it's like hey!! I'm blue! Over here I'm blue!
JULES DAVIDOFF: It's easy enough for us to do.
TIM: It's a no brainer. But the Himba who don't have a separate word for blue in their language -
JULES DAVIDOFF: They find this distinction a little difficult.
TIM: When they stare at this screen—they just stare and stare ...
JAD: They don't see the difference between the blue and the green?
TIM: No.
JAD: Well is there something wrong with their eyes?
JULES DAVIDOFF: No definitely not. We completely rule that out. They don't see color—the individual colors differently.
JAD: But then wait ...
JULES DAVIDOFF: It's so easy to say they're seeing different colors to us, and they're not.
JAD: Well then how does he explain it?
JULES DAVIDOFF: Okay. When we when we decide to put colors together in a group.
TIM: And then give those colors a word like blue.
CHOIR: Blue
JULES DAVIDOFF: Something happens.
TIM: He says what happens is that now that there's a category for that thing—the thing in the category jumps out. It gets louder and louder to your eyes. The category actually feeds back on your perception—so that you notice it more.
JAD: You're saying that having the word for blue unlocks your ability to see blue?
TIM: I mean it—that's how it feels to me and Jules says ...
JULES DAVIDOFF: No it's not quite that.
TIM: He says without the word you're still seeing the blue no matter what. You're just not noticing it. Your your eyes are just kind of glossing right over it.
JAD: So you don't see it.
TIM: [laughs] It's hard it's it's—it's harder to spot sees Jules.
JAD: But whatever I don't quite understand that difference but -
TIM: The blue would not jump out and and say hi five! The way it does with us.
JAD: But if it doesn't
TIM: Um
JAD: jump out to that extent—then—this is starting to sound very Gladstone-y to me.
TIM: [laughs] Yeah
JAD: I mean maybe he was a little right! Like cause if Homer had no word for blue and the word somehow enables the blueness of the blue—then maybe his world was less blue than it would be for us. I mean maybe the blue went through his eyes in the same way but it—perhaps didn't get into his mind in the same way.
TIM: Yeah blue didn't matter.
JAD: Wait a second. Do you know where this breaks down?
TIM: Where?
JAD: The [bleeped out] sky! I mean you look up and there's the bluest blue in the world and then it's right there above our heads it's been there since the dawn of time. So why wouldn't blue matter more. I mean why wouldn't it be the first color instead of the last?
TIM: Well that's what I thought too and I asked Guy about that.
TIM: Yeah why is the sky blue is is the the the first question that you always think of.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Exact—allegedly the first question that all children ask.
TIM: Yeah.
GUY DEUTSCHER: But I wanted to see how obvious or striking this blueness of the sky is. So I decided to make an experiment.
TIM: Guy has a very young daughter.
GUY DEUTSCHER: About 18 months. She was learning to speak.
TIM: What's her name?
GUY DEUTSCHER: Alma. I talked a lot about colors with Alma and taught her all the colors including blue. And we would play all these games that that dads play with their children.
TIM: You know pointing at objects.
GUY DEUTSCHER: I would point at a blue question and ask her what's the color of this—she would say boo. Boo for blue.
TIM: Oh okay. [laughs]
TIM: Soon enough Alma was a total pro she could identify any color.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Show me the red object show me the this—and -
TIM: Right.
GUY DEUTSCHER: The only thing I didn't do and I asked my wife not to do was ever mention that the sky was blue.
TIM: [laughs]
GUY DEUTSCHER: That was the setup.
TIM: So one day Guy and Alma were taking a stroll and they're practicing the colors.
GUY DEUTSCHER: What's this tree what's this what's this—and then I pointed at the sky and said—what color is that? And...she wouldn't give me any answer.
TIM: Huh.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Although she had just a second before would—was happily telling me that something was blue and red or green. She just looked up and looked at me incomprehendingly. Sort of—what are you talking about?
TIM: She thought you were kidding?
GUY DEUTSCHER: I think she didn't understand what I was on about.
TIM: Huh.
GUY DEUTSCHER: In retrospect there was no object there. There was nothing with color for her.
TIM: You're just pointing into the void basically.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Pointing into nothingness. So she wouldn't say anything.
TIM: But Guy kept asking every single time they went out.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Of course I would do it only when the sky was blue.
TIM: And she would never answer him. And this went on for two months.
GUY DEUTSCHER: And then finally she did consent to give me a color name but it wasn't blue, it was white.
TIM: [laughs]
GUY DEUTSCHER: For for a few times she said white and then finally after month and a half or two more months she she said blue for the first time.
TIM: Wow.
GUY DEUTSCHER: But even then it wasn't consistently blue. So she—then she said once blue—mm no white mm no blue.
TIM: Did she eventually decide though—you know what dad it is blue.
GUY DEUTSCHER: Well no she never said it this way but eventually when I asked it became consistently blue. So she just would say blue.
TIM: Okay.
GUY DEUTSCHER: This was for me—really the point where I I could you know convince myself—convince at least my heart that this sort of allegedly perfect example of blue is not -
TIM: not so perfect.
GUY DEUTSCHER: So you know for Homer who never ever probably saw a blue object except the sky and the sea—never had a dad who sort of went on about blue objects and asking what the color of the sky was—the fact that he didn't lose sleep over it—doesn't seem so strange anymore.
JAD: you know it's kind of—now that I've heard this I'm a little—I'm a little rueing the moment when when Alma decided the sky was blue. Let her have whatever color she wants it to be. Doesn't have to be blue.
ROBERT: Weirdly then color is a loss of innocence.
JAD: Yeah.
ROBERT: It's like
JAD: Kinda.
ROBERT: having something fixed that for a while is just between you and your frenzied heart you know just -
JAD: And the sky is many colors truthfully. On the other hand though—I'm disagreeing with myself now. If we all agree the sky is blue then that's something we can share—that she can share.
ROBERT: And then she's in conversation.
JAD: And then eventually she'll understand you know—this kind of blue.
ROBERT: Yeah there aren't blue moons but but there—but you know what one would—you know what one would—you know what it feels like.
JAD: Oh yeah.
ROBERT: It's not a happy night.
JAD: Mm mm
Masc Singer:—call me Mr. Blue
JAD: Still think it's the most beautiful color.
ROBERT: I just took red just to be contrary—I'm trying to think what my favorite color is, I don't -
JAD: I wanna thank all the musicians who were so generous to let us use their music this hour and joined in in our covers of the rainbow project.
JAD: You heard Reggie Watts with Rainbow Connection. Barbara Bennery with Over the Rainbow, Lonesome Organist with Green Onions, Nymph with Brown Rice, Yellow Ostrich with Sound and Vision, Rya Brass Band with Painted Black, Nico Mulley with Big Yellow Taxi, Shearwater with Black with the Color, Eric Freelander with Blue in Green, Marcy Playground with Whiter Shade of Pale, The Heat with Mellow Yellow, Tao Win with Blue, Snow Blink you just heard with Blue Moon. Dan Deacon right here with Colors. Busmans Holiday, Mr. Blue and our very own Tim Howard, aka Soultero—performing Green River. We'll be doing some cool things with these songs for the moment. Visit Radiolab.org.
[GUY DEUTSCHER: Hello Radiolab, this is Guy Deutscher.]
[BROOKE WATKINS: This is Brooke Watkins.]
[JASON LECROIX: This is Jason LeCroix.]
[GUY DEUTSCHER: Here's the notice. Radiolab is produced by—I don't know how to pronounce this—Jad Abumrad]
[BROOKE WATKINS: Our staff includes Ellen Horne, Soren Wheeler ...]
GUY DEUTSCHER: Pat Walters, Tim Howard ...]
[JASON LECROIX: Brenna Farrell ...]
[BROOKE WATKINS: Lynn Levy ...]
[GUY DEUTSCHER: Dylan Keefe,]
[JASON LECROIX: Melissa O Donnell and Sean Cole.]
[VICTORIA FINLAY: With help from Douglas T Smith, Brendan McMullon, and Rafael Bennin.]
[GUY DEUTSCHER: Okay.]
[VICTORIA FINLAY: Special thanks to Sarah Montague,]
[JASON LECROIX: Paul Heck, Nick Capudiche,]
[VICTORIA FINLAY: Ryan Levitt,]
[JASON LECROIX: Ivan Zimmerman,]
[VICTORIA FINLAY: [XX?]]
[GUY DEUTSCHER: [XX?]]
[BROOKE WATKINS: Winter Woodie,]
[JASON LECROIX: [XXX?] Walter,]
[VICTORIA FINLAY: And Carver Throdson.]
[GUY DEUTSCHER: Thanks, bye.]
-30-
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