Cortically Magnified

In a previous blog post, I reviewed Ellery Queen’s classic detective novel The Greek Coffin Mystery (1932), which manages to involve color blindness in its puzzles. But I am not done yet! I have a couple more. On one hand, it feels to me that color blindness is gimmicky as a plot device. A mystery writer must be quite desperate for new ideas if she or he has to turn to perceptual psychology (or any branch of specialized knowledge, for that matter).

I don’t think mystery novels by Ellery Queen are popular in western countries anymore, but they are still read in Asia. When I was a PhD student, every time I had to travel from my home country Taiwan to the USA, I would buy an Ellery Queen novel at the airport bookstore. This way, I could land in LAX with a solved mystery. Ellery Queen novels are substantial books with very complex plots - perfect for long flights because uninterrupted concentration is needed to tackle them.

Bright Earth by Philip Ball is a remarkably multidisciplinary book about color. In a chapter about renaissance art, he described the technique of cangiantismo, which is most famously associated with the work of Michangelo. Wikipedia’s entry explains: “Cangiante is characterized by a change in color necessitated by an original color’s darkness or lightness limitation”. The effect is unnatural but it’s what fascinates me most about Michangelo’s paintings. This article explains how the technique was used in contemporary art such as Monster Inc.

What was the first time that we know that non-human animals have color vision? From what I can find, the first person who scientifically came to that conclusion was John Lubbock in 1888. What was so strange about it was that he studied Daphnia - a plankton (!). He discovered that the plankton was attracted to yellow light, but not to white light. Lubbock also reasoned that insects must have color vision, but was not able to scientifically demonstrate it.

Interesting articles Impossible colours: You can experience colours that you have never seen before. Some women are tetrachromatic. They can see more colours than most people can. The rainbow does not contain all the colours that we can see. For example, magenta. Dressgate Disrobing the dress:A very detailed webpage about the dress. Lessons from the dress: by vision scientist Pascal Wallisch. The science of why no one agrees on the color of this dress: an article on Wired.