Unthinkable

by Helen Thomson

  Other strange things happened as Rubén was growing up. There was a period when he would perceive a woman dancing when he looked at certain things—his teachers, his friends, even his dog. He couldn’t avoid seeing it.

  These strange perceptions, which had started off as flickers of dancing women and pantomime hands, had, by the time he was a teenager, solidified themselves as auras.

  “There was clearly always something weird happening in my brain,” he says.

  As we wander away from the hustle of the old town, through a maze of small side streets in search of something to eat, I wonder whether the colors that Rubén perceives give him any kind of special insight into his emotions.

  “Do you ever see someone and notice that you’re perceiving a red aura, say, and think, ‘Oh, I must fancy him’?” I ask.

  Rubén laughs.

  “No, it doesn’t work like that. When it’s happening, the color is the effect of the emotion. The order of events are person, emotion, then color. So I already know what emotion I’m feeling.”

  He pauses.

  “Except, actually, sometimes it’s the color, then the emotion and the person.”

  He searches the crowd for a moment, and points at a passing tourist.

  “When your emotions are linked with colors, it tends to go both ways. So I might see someone in bright-red trousers and because I associate red with love or attractiveness, I could be aroused by that person or think better of them. You know it’s something stupid and irrational, but it tends to get inside your brain because you can’t ignore it. You have to tell yourself, ‘This person isn’t nice just because they’re wearing red.’”

  “So might you think someone was nasty because they were wearing a color that you associate with rudeness?” I say, glancing down at my blue dress, wracking my brain to remember what emotion Rubén associates with that color.

  “Exactly,” he says. “If they were wearing something very yellow or I see someone with a green aura because that’s the color I associate with their voice, I might feel tempted to think that person is less nice because their greenness makes me feel a certain way.”

  “Isn’t that kind of annoying?”

  “It could be, but the important thing is that I’m perfectly aware that it is irrational. I know these feelings are stupid, I just have to fight them. None of it is real.”

  “Do you think you’ve been this way ever since you were born?”

  Rubén stops and thinks for a moment. “I have the sense that I could always see colors associated with people, but when you don’t experience anything different, you don’t realize it’s unusual.”

  In fact, it wasn’t until 2005 that Rubén became aware of his synesthesia at all. He was hanging out with a friend who was studying psychology at the University of Granada. She told him that she was involved in an investigation into synesthesia. He had never heard of the word, so she explained what it was.

  Like many others in the past, Rubén didn’t understand why it was worth investigating.

  “I was like yeah, yeah, what of it?” said Rubén. “That’s completely normal!”

  His friend was surprised and told him that she thought he might be a synesthete.

  “Then suddenly she went completely white,” says Rubén. “She remembered that I was color blind.”

  * * *

  In order to see the kaleidoscope of color in our world, we use specialized cells in the retina called photoreceptors. These absorb light and convert it into electrical signals. There are two kinds of photoreceptors, rods and cones. Rods help us to see in dim light but are not sensitive to color. Cones, on the other hand, respond strongly to red, green or blue. When wavelengths of light hit our cones they respond optimally to their favored color or to a lesser extent to wavelengths of light that are close to their favored color. For example, cones that favor red light also respond to orange and slightly to yellow, but don’t respond at all to green and blue. The combination of activity from all three types of photoreceptor is sent to an area of the visual cortex called V4, where it is interpreted as the many shades of color that make up our Technicolor world.

  However, for people who are color blind, like Rubén, some of these photoreceptors are deficient, resulting in the loss of a whole spectrum of color. Rubén has a common form of color blindness that makes it difficult to tell the difference between colors that have some aspect of red or green in them.

  “I can tell the difference between a lettuce green and a lipstick red, but colors in between like purple and some blues and oranges get mixed up,” he says.

  Being color blind has given Rubén a bit of a complex about colors and was the reason, he reckons, that he never really let himself think much about the colors he perceived around people, letters and buildings.

  “What bothered you so much?” I ask.

  “You know when you’re in kindergarten and coloring a picture and you need a crayon?”

  I nod.

  “Well, I would be coloring a picture of a person and I’d ask for the pink crayon. The other kids would give me another color and wait for me to color the face blue. They’d do it as a joke, but I didn’t like it. You’re only three, your only job is to learn the colors and you’re not able to do it. It’s not nice, you know?”

  Rubén remembers one time when he painted a horse. It was a decent horse, he says, but when the teacher came over to take a look, she was really, really impressed. Then she asked him why it was green.

  “I was so embarrassed about it being green,” says Rubén. “I just said, ‘Because it’s nicer.’”

  That particular teacher, not knowing Rubén was color blind, was reminded of a printmaker called Franz Marc who painted a famous picture of blue horses against red hills. Marc used colors to express strong emotional meaning or purpose. Rubén’s teacher wondered whether she was seeing the start of something quite profound in this young boy. She was so impressed with his artwork that she invited his parents to the school to discuss his future.

  “She told them I had been doing these wonderful colorful paintings. She thought I was a genius,” says Rubén. “My mum was like, ‘Er, no, he’s really not!’”

  But Rubén’s teacher was right—there was something special about him.

  AFTER RUBÉN’S FRIEND RECOVERED from her shock, she took him to the University of Granada to meet her supervisor, Emilio Gómez, a cognitive psychologist.

  “He was quite emotional when we first met,” says Rubén. “I don’t think anyone thought a color-blind synesthete could exist.”

  The reason that Gómez was so excited to meet Rubén was that he believed he might be able to offer a novel insight into the question I’d first considered on the plane back from Sharon’s: Does my world look like yours?

  Scientists call this concept qualia. To understand its meaning, imagine I’m an alien visiting Earth from another planet. I ask you, What do you see when you look at that red apple over there? You could tell me all of the physiological mechanisms that occur when you look at the apple. You could explain how wavelengths of light hit your eyeballs and send signals toward areas of the brain that process color. You could tell me about all the other things that look red, or how it makes you feel. But your description leaves out something completely ineffable: your actual perception of what red is. We are fundamentally unable to transfer the experience of our world to other people.

  What we are starting to realize, though, is that we don’t always see things in the same way. Never was this more obvious than in February 2015, when the world stumbled upon a certain blue and black dress. Or maybe, like me, you thought it was white and gold. In case you missed the year’s biggest debate, it surrounded a simple photo of a perfectly nice, blue-and-black-striped bodycon dress. If you haven’t seen it, I urge you to google it immediately. The photo was uploaded by twenty-one-year-old Caitlin McNeill, an aspiring singer from Scotland, after some of her friends swore the photo showed a white and gold dress. Social media went into overdrive, people in the
blue-and-black camp could not understand why so many of their friends were seeing white and gold. The television host Ellen DeGeneres tweeted, “From this day on, the world will be divided into two people. Blue & black or white & gold.”

  Scientists rushed to cobble together an explanation.14 When light hits an object, they said, some of it is absorbed and some of it is reflected. The wavelengths of the reflected light determine the color we see. The lightwaves hit the retina at the back of the eye and activate our cones. A combination of activity from the cones is sent to the visual cortex in the brain, which processes all sorts of visual aspects such as movement and object recognition, before eventually producing the perception of color. So far, so good. However, those wavelengths of light are actually a product of whatever colors of light are currently around you, reflecting off the object you’re viewing. The light that illuminates our world changes throughout the day, from the pinkish light of dawn to the bright white neon lights of your office and everything in between. Without you being aware of it, your brain considers what color light is bouncing off the object in your vision and makes certain adjustments to compensate. This mechanism allows you to walk through shadows, or in and out of a brightly lit room, while keeping the colors of your world stationary.

  Scientists decided that The Dress must lie on some kind of perceptual boundary. In other words, it wasn’t clear in what light it was taken. Which meant that some people’s brains adjusted for a blueish light and ended up seeing the dress as white and gold, while others—correctly, as it happens—discounted the gold end of the spectrum and ended up seeing it as blue and black.

  I find it difficult to look at The Dress and not be just a little alarmed, because it reveals something of qualia that we so often take for granted: The colors I see are not always the colors that you see.

  And for Gómez, Rubén’s color blindness together with his synesthesia was the perfect way of gaining a unique insight into this unexplainable matter.

  But first he had to prove that Rubén was telling the truth.

  * * *

  Rubén stared at the hundredth image that day and pointed to a color chart that correlated with the aura the image produced. It was 2010, and Gómez had asked him to complete this task so that he had a record of what color auras Rubén associated with certain images of faces, animals, letters and numbers. There were so many images it would have been impossible for Rubén to memorize each one.

  A month later Gómez surprised Rubén by asking him to repeat the task. His answers matched almost 100 percent of the time.

  Satisfied that that test had been passed, Gómez’s team devised a personalized Stroop test for Rubén. The original version of this test asks participants to name the color of a word, not what that word says. For example, if the word “red” was written in blue ink, you would say “blue.” People find this task much easier when the word and color of the ink match. We can read words more quickly than we can process colors, so when the two are incongruent, it makes the brain stumble, meaning it takes longer to reach the correct answer.

  Gómez’s team tweaked this test in a number of different ways to evaluate Rubén’s claims. In one, they asked him to state whether a number was odd or even, but presented these numbers in colored inks. The inks either matched or contrasted with the color of the aura that Rubén perceived when he read the number.

  Rubén’s reaction times were quicker when the color of the number matched the color of the aura it produced. We’re not talking seconds here, but mere fractions of a second quicker every time—something that would be impossible to fake consistently. Since the colors of the numbers are arbitrary for people who don’t see auras, their reaction times were similar across the board.

  Once he was convinced that Rubén really was telling the truth, Gómez began to devise a way of testing whether Rubén’s auras affected his behavior. To do this objectively, he needed to test a behavior over which Rubén had no conscious control: his heart rate.

  Gómez showed that Rubén’s heart rate rose ever so slightly when looking at pictures where there was an incongruence between the aura they produced and the content of the picture—for instance when an attractive man was wearing green. The feelings of attraction were at odds with the emotions that the green clothes produced. It was an image that was described by Rubén as being “emotionally inconsistent.”

  In contrast, the heart rates of people who don’t have emotion-color synesthesia and who took the same test didn’t fluctuate at all.15

  “It seemed reasonable to conclude,” said Gómez, “that Rubén’s bodily reactions were a unique result of his qualia, or experience of color.”

  Although it doesn’t tell us exactly what Rubén sees, it does answer my question of whether our worlds look alike. The answer is no.

  RUBÉN AND I ARE DISCUSSING this complex concept when he says something that makes me stop quite literally in the middle of the street. Although he cannot tell the difference between shades of green in real life, he says, he sees a number of shades of green aura. “I only have one type of red in my mind, the red I see in real life, but I have a number of greens—not just one.”

  I am startled by his admission. It suggests that Rubén can see colors in his mind that don’t exist for him in real life. He likens it to seeing someone in a dream: “You can’t see their face but you know who it is, despite how they look.”

  There are other qualities of his auras that don’t exist in real life. The colors are textured, translucent, he says. “Some have a sparkly, glitteriness about them.”

  It turns out that there is only one other person known to have this extraordinary, and rare, combination of synesthesia and color blindness. He is Spike Jahan and he is a student of Ramachandran. Jahan approached Ramachandran shortly after he had attended a lecture on synesthesia. He told Ramachandran that he was color blind and had trouble distinguishing reds, greens, browns and oranges. He also had number-color synesthesia. However, the colors Jahan saw in his mind were tinged with colors that he had never seen in the real world. He called them “Martian colors.”

  I asked Ramachandran to explain this mysterious phenomenon to me. He said that Jahan has deficiencies in his cones, meaning he is unable to see certain colors in real life. Yet those deficiencies are in his eyes and not in his brain. The part of the brain that processes color is perfectly normal. Somehow, when Jahan looks at a number, the shape of the number is processed normally, but then crossed wires activate the color area in his visual cortex, which triggers the sensation of colors that he is unable to see in the real world.16

  Although Ramachandran has not studied Rubén, he said he would guess that a similar thing is happening in his brain. Perhaps parts of his brain that deal with emotions are able to stimulate areas of the visual cortex, which enables him to perceive shades of green that he is unable to perceive in reality.

  Despite these being single-case studies, they hint at yet another mysterious aspect of qualia. Jahan and Rubén’s Martian colors suggest that what you call red is not determined purely by lightwaves or the photoreceptors in your eyes, but is an innate concept produced by the activation of certain color regions in your brain. It suggests that color doesn’t have to be activated via visual stimulation, but is an experience that can be a property of shapes, sounds or emotions. Perhaps in the future, says Ramachandran, we’ll be able to stimulate these color regions alone to discover what strange experience they might provoke—a feeling of redness, a sound or taste of redness, a weird mass of redness unattached to a particular object? Maybe then, he says, we’ll be able to find out exactly what “red” is.

  * * *

  Distracted by these thoughts, Rubén and I somehow end up sitting outside a tourist trap selling bad paella. As we push food around our plates, I ask Rubén how his auras affect him day by day.

  He says he is intrigued about what is happening in his brain and more than happy to take part in experiments, but generally he tries to ignore them.

  “I don’t real
ly think about them much on a daily basis.” Rubén frowns, taking a drag on an e-cigarette. “I think it’s because if you stop and think about it too much, you feel very stupid.”

  If it were me, I say, I might think about using my auras to make myself feel better about myself. “Maybe wear something red because it makes you feel attractive?”

  He shakes his head. “You might feel tempted to wear a certain kind of clothing because of the emotion associated with it. You could do that, but that would be stupid because it’s a language nobody else speaks.”

  I tell him about Daniela Kayser’s experiments with men and women wearing red shirts, and that in fact we might all speak his language to some degree. “That’s interesting,” he says. “It’s quite comforting to know I’m not completely weird.”

  He glances down at his black top.

  “I don’t actually own any red T-shirts. I mainly wear black and white. I’ve never thought of it before, but perhaps I wear those colors more because I don’t get much emotion with black or white.” He smiles and looks up. “Or maybe because they’re just more flattering for a big boy like me.”

  As I signal for the bill, Rubén asks me a question. “Do you want to know what color I see myself?”

  “Yes!” I hadn’t considered that his auras would extend to his own reflection.

  He looks slightly embarrassed. “Red,” he says. “I know that sounds like I love myself or something, all very Freudian. But I think it’s because I like myself, I am happy with myself.”

  * * *

  Rubén kindly offers to drive me to the airport. As we walk to the car I find myself contemplating the scenery around us, the deep blue of the Nervión river and the dark green mountains in the background. If it is true that colors are innate, that they can be triggered by any kind of sense, that we are all synesthetes to some extent, then surely we don’t have to have sensory anomalies as extreme as Rubén’s to experience the world ever so slightly differently from one another. Perhaps the only aspect of qualia that we can ever be sure of is that your red is never going to be exactly the same as mine. It gives me an excited jolt deep in my stomach. It was fun to think that my world might look completely unique. That there was something about the world that was mine and mine only.