Sad preacher nailed upon the coloured door of time

"After about ten minutes I was bashed in the eye by an emerald worm hanging like a jewel from a thread in the canopy, and it was then that I began to notice the butterflies: tiny lilac ones, yellow ones with polka dots and black wing tips, large ebony ones with a blaze of lime across the wing, iridescent ones as blue as lapis lazuli; huge chocolate ones with rows of butter dots, inky-blue ones, shimmering violet in the light, big ginger ones like flying biscuits, gargantuan swallowtails dipping and tumbling, and, my favourite, a velvety brown one smutted with red under-wings which it flashed like naughty knickers."
- Natacha Du Pont De Bie, Ant Egg Soup: The Adventures of a Food Tourist in Laos

Chemistry puts the color back in art

Hearing the voices of colours

Black Bile and Black Dogs - colour and depression

Regaining the Rainbow: A Gene Therapy Approach to Color Blindness

The Colour Range in Atelier Interactive

Bank notes, fraud and butterfly wings | Mimicking the colourful wing scale structure of the Papilio blumei butterfly

Bird of paradise creates colourful dance with microscopic mirrors in its feathers

Blinded in an accident at 21, Zoltan Torey taught himself to visualise the world around him with such clarity that he was able to climb a ladder and replace his house's gutters.

"I use every miniscule clue I can to visualise you - your handshake, height, voice, movements, mood, character, remarks: I factor everything in." [...] What's more, he can control the colours. He likes moss green, sea blue and egg yellow. So if he meets a person he likes, does he dress them in these colours? Laughing, Torey responds: "Well, I don't see people naked! Yes I do clothe people I like in colours I like." And if he dislikes them, he'll probably put them in orange or purple."

- interviewed in the Sydney Morning Herald magazine Good Weekend, 28 June 2003

It's an "unlikely concidence," says Ramachandran, that "the most common type of synaesthesia is number/color synaesthesia and the number area and color areas are right next to each other in the same part of the brain." Experiments showed that when numbers were shown to people with this form of synaesthesia, V4, the colour area, was activated, supporting the idea that there were connections between the two areas. The researchers also met a colour-blind synaesthete: "Because of a deficiency in his cone pigments (in the retina) he couldn't see he full range of colors in the world. Yet when looking at numbers he could see colors that he could never experience otherwise. He referred to them charmingly as 'Martian colours'." His eyes couldn't see those colours, but his brain could.

Another test showed that it wasn't the concept of the numbers which triggered the synaethesia, but the shape of the numbers: the subjects saw no colours when shown Roman numerals (V and VI) instead of Arabic numerals (5 and 6). (I see the colours associated with the letters!)

Colour processing is done in the brain in a series of steps, moving through different areas. Ramanchandran suggests that different kinds of synaesthesia might involve cross-wiring at different steps: for example, a synaesthete who associated colours with days of the week might have a cross-connection in the next step up from V4, the TPO junction, which handles the concept of sequences - a kind of "higher synaesthesia" which is "driven by numerical concept rather than visual appearance."

Ramanchandran suggests that the cross-wiring is the result of a faulty gene which hasn't done its job, in the forming brain, of pruning away excess connections. Faulty genes are normally weeded out by natural selection, so perhaps this one is actually doing something useful. Synaesthesia is much more common in "artists, poets, and novelists". Different kinds of synaesthesia result when the gene is expressed in different parts of the brain, but what it it's expressed throughout the brain? That would make "that person more prone to metaphor, the ability to link seemingly unrelated things." If "high level" concepts are processed in specific parts of the brain, like sequences are in the TPO junction, then "artistic people, with their excess connections, can make these associations much more fluidly and effortlessly". These are fascinating speculations. Ramachandran goes on to suggest that language may have arisen from these sorts of metaphorical connections.

Via drhoz: the peacock spider.

The Munsell colour system makes me think of a map of the Planes from AD&D.

Incomplete and Complete Achromatopsia

HTML Color Names

Color Name & Hue is a colour identification tool for the colourblind.

Lesser Known Colour Vocabulary A-C, D-L, M-R, S-Z

The world's heritage from space. Incredible colours - some of them must surely be artificial.

Pixelscapes

On the Laws of Japanese Painting

Fangblenny has coat of many colours: "The blue-striped fangblenny is the first fish found to be able to change its colour at will to mimic a variety of other fish. Its repertoire of colour changes includes olive, orange, and black and electric blue, and it appears to use colour vision to achieve its incognito exploits, new research shows."