Seeing in the Dark

Further Adventures in Vision Therapy

Soundwaves

If a tree falls in a forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound? If color, like sound, is a vibration, and no one sees a bright red flower, is it really red?

If rhetorical questions cause a reader to stop reading, does the rest of the essay matter?

I am still trying to figure out why vision therapy has affected my ability to perceive and utilize color.  I recently started a new round of vision therapy “tune up” sessions and discovered even more surprising things.

I restarted therapy after a long absence – longer than intended (see August 2013, September 2011, and August 2011 in the archives for earlier episodes in this serial).  I was supposed to come in for assessment and maintenance sessions, but life intrudes on the best laid plans, and I went a whole year without therapy.  I expected that testing would show a little slippage in my acuity and functionality.  If you don’t do any exercise for a while, the muscles get slack, and I assumed the eyes are not an exception.

Blue Veils

I had improved.  My vision had continued to improve, even though I had discontinued therapy.  Cue the Theremin music in the background.

Now if I could just get my damn stomach muscles to do the same thing.

The artwork I have been doing is nothing like the artwork I used to do.  It has evolved (devolved?) into abstract swaths of pure color, some of which seem to move as you look at them.  If they start to talk to me, I’ll let you know and you can send for the head doctors.  I have no idea how this came about.

Untitled

Or maybe I do.  When I was in high school, I fell in love with the work of Morris Louis.  He was one of the color field painters, and with Helen Frankenthaler, one of the giants of modernism.  Later, in art school, however, I was all about contrast and value and tones – in other words, black and white and shades of grey.  In fact, my father, who I always bounced artistic stuff off of, thought I had an unusually muted sense of color.  He thought some people see colors more brightly than others, and I wasn’t one of them.  I remember talking to him about driving and how he hated to drive at twilight because it is so hard to see.  He said he would much rather drive in full dark.  My husband feels the same way.  I never knew what they were talking about, because I can see perfectly well to drive at dusk.  Nighttime is a different story.  We concluded that I have owl eyes – all rods, no cones.  The monochromatic blue-greys of twilight don’t limit my ability to see, but unfortunately I don’t have the acuity to see well in full darkness.

In the Darkness

Now all I want to do is play with color.  I have no use for the tonal work I used to find so fascinating.  I wonder if my eyes and brain have progressed/regressed to the same level it was a few years after the injury that affected my vision, when my ability to perceive and enjoy color was still strong.  I suspect that that ability faded as I got older and my vision continued to deteriorate.

I’m like a kid in a candy shop.  I have no interest in making pictures of things.  I just want to see what happens when certain colors start to dance, with themselves and with each other.  I want to explore the emotional responses that colors create.

Purple Veils

A funny thing happens when you start making all abstract art.  Your friends stop asking if they can have some of your stuff.

I started researching color as a result of these weird things happening with my eyeballs, and discovered that the science of color is even weirder than my experiences.  For instance, when you look at an object, that object is absorbing all the colors but the color it appears to be: the perceived color is bouncing off that object.  That suggests that the object might be all the colors except the one you see. 

Wait, it gets freakier.  Colors, like sounds, are wavelengths.  Synesthetics, people with synesthesia, perceive that each color has a corresponding sound, and sounds have colors.  Apparently, it’s more like a chord than a single note, in most cases.  It used to be the conventional wisdom that people with synesthesia had some crossed wiring somewhere in the brain.  Now neuroscientists are considering the possibility that “normal” people have a mild case of combined blindness/deafness.  Since color is a wavelength, and sound is a wavelength, we should be able to read them both as frequencies.

The Sound of the Aurora

It must be cool to listen to music and literally see it as a kaleidoscope of colors as well as sounds.  Similarly, I would love to brush a swath of paint across a canvas and hear it sing its own special song.

If it ever happens, I will let you know.  Please promise not to alert the head shrinkers.


My Behavioral Optometrist is Dr. Steve Gallop: 610-356-7425  http://www.gallopintovision.com/