The Island of the Colorblind

We stayed longest in a class of five- and six-year-olds, who were just learning to read. There were three achromatopic children in this class – they had not been placed, as they should have been, in the front row; and it was immediately apparent that they could not see the letters on the blackboard where the teacher was printing, which the other children could see easily. ‘What’s this word?’ the teacher would ask – everyone’s hands would shoot up, including the achromatopes’, and when another child gave the answer, they echoed it in unison. If they were asked first, though, they could not answer – they were just imitating the other children, pretending to know. But the achromatopic children seemed to have developed very acute auditory and factual memories, precisely as Knut had developed in his own childhood:

Since I could not actually discern the individual letters even in ordinary book print…I had developed a very keen memory It was usually enough if a class-mate or someone in the household read my home-assignment to me once or twice, in order for me to remember and reproduce it, and to perform a rather convincing reading behaviour in class.

The achromatopic children were oddly knowledgeable too about the colors of people’s clothing, and various objects around them – and often seemed to know what colors ‘went’ with what. Here again Knut was reminded of his own childhood strategies:

A constantly recurring harassment throughout my childhood, and later on too, was having to name colors on scarves, ties, plaid skirts, tartans, and all kinds of multicolored pieces of clothing, for people who found my inability to do so rather amusing and quite entertaining. As a small child I could not easily escape these situations. As a pure defence measure, I always memorized the colours of my own clothes and of other things around me, and eventually I learned some of the ‘rules’ for ‘correct’ use of colours and the most probable colours of various things.

Thus we could already observe in these achromatopic children in Mand how a sort of theoretical knowledge and know-how, a compensatory hypertrophy of curiosity and memory, were rapidly developing in reaction to their perceptual problems. They were learning to compensate cognitively for what they could not directly perceive or comprehend.[29]

‘I know that colors carry importance for other people,’ Knut said later. ‘So I will use color names when necessary to communicate with them. But the colors as such carry no meaning for me. As a kid, I used to think that it would be nice to see colors, because then I would be able to have a driver’s license and to do things that people with normal color vision can do. And if there were some way of acquiring color vision, I suppose it might open a new world, as if one were tone deaf and suddenly became able to hear melodies. It would probably be a very interesting thing, but it would also be very confusing. Color is something you have to grow up with, to mature with – your brain, the whole system, the way you react to the world. Bringing in color as a sort of add-on later in life would be overwhelming, a lot of information I might not be able to cope with. It would give new qualities to everything that might throw me off completely. Or maybe color would be disappointing, not what I expected – who knows?’[30]