[Tig] Instinctive contrast

[Jeremy Pollard]

 > Does there exist some kind of simple optical device (a form of
 > eyeglasses) that would desaturate our vision and make it
 > black and white?

There are various accounts from 'achromats', people that are unable to perceive colour at all, that 
may inform how the world appears in "black and white".  Oliver Sacks describes a case where an 
artist loses his colour vision following head trauma (to his occipital lobe) in his book, 'An 
Anthropologist on Mars'.  The story goes on to describe the artist's perception of colour and 
surmise how the brain interprets chromatic and tonal information.

"Everything appears to me as [if I were] viewing a black-and-white television screen," reports an 
achromat in Oliver Sacks' book, An Anthropologist on Mars. "My brown dog is dark gray. Tomato juice 
is black. Color TV is a hodge-podge."

Another personal account written by a complete achromat may be found here:
http://consc.net/misc/achromat.html

Interestingly, the author notes (about halfway through the article) that, "Coloured and B & W 
pictures are usually indistinguishable to me."

Finally, the following article is an interesting (and fairly brief) discussion about colour 
interpretation and its role in motion detection:

http://hno.harvard.edu/gazette/1998/08.06/BrainsColorProc.html


--
Jeremy Pollard
VP Sales
---
jeremy.pollard at risingsunresearch.com
---
Rising Sun Research
p. +61 8 8400 6494 - f. +61 8 8400 6401
http://cinespace.risingsunresearch.com

Rob Lingelbach wrote:
> Thanks to Cintel International for support in 2007.  
> http://www.colorist.org/wiki3
> ====
> 
> 
> 
> 
> On Mar 19, 2007, at 12:06 PM, Joe Owens wrote:
> 
>> aircraft are in "low-visibility" camouflage, usually framed against a 
>> lovely blue sky -- beautiful if you admire these things. When printed 
>> in black and white of course, the camo does its job and the aircraft 
>> winks out of sight, no need to come diving out of the sun-- its gone.
>>
>> It is disturbing how casually most black-and-white from colour is 
>> achieved by simply turning down the saturation dial.  That is just 
>> wrong, wrong, wrong on almost every level.
> 
> Does there exist some kind of simple optical device (a form of 
> eyeglasses) that would desaturate our vision and make it
> black and white?   It would be the opposite of looking at the world 
> through rose-colored glasses.  But it would be really
> interesting, and if I'm not mistaken, the brain might eventually 
> compensate by adding in the color?  So that when the
> glasses are removed after a few days the wearer now sees everything with 
> double the saturation???   I'm not sure about that..
> but I do know that if inverting glasses are worn, so that everything 
> looks upside-down, and they are worn for a few days,
> the brain of the user compensates and reverts the image to 
> right-side-up.  So then she takes the glasses off, and the brain
> takes another few days to compensate, which in the meantime creates a 
> human with upside-down-vision, no glasses required.
> 
> The film I saw explaining this, shown in a junior-highschool science 
> class, showed a POV of the guy with inverted vision
> riding a motorcycle in traffic.  Impressive feat.
> 
> -- 
> Rob Lingelbach
> http://www.colorist.org/robhome.html
> rob at colorist.org  rob at lingelbach.us
> 
> 
> 
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