The ‘Profound’ Experience of Seeing a New Color

The color “olo” can’t be found on a Pantone color chart. It can be experienced only in a cramped 9-by-13 room in Northern California. That small space, in a lab on the UC Berkeley campus, contains a large contraption of lenses and other hardware on a table. To see olo, you need to scootch up to the table, chomp down on a bite plate, and keep your head as steady as you can. A laser will be fired into one of your eyes, targeting more than a thousand of your cone cells. (The scientists will have mapped their location on your retina in advance.) The lasers will activate your color vision like nothing in the natural world: A small square of exotic color will appear, just off-center from the focal point of your vision, against a background field of gray. It may flicker a bit, depending on what’s happening with the contraption, but it will remain unmistakably there.

Austin Roorda, an optometry professor at Berkeley, may have been the first person in the world to experience the new color. At the very least, he was the second, he told me on a recent call. (Ren Ng, the other Berkeley professor who co-leads the research group with Roorda, told me that he thinks he went second.) Roorda’s name is listed 12th among the 13 authors of the academic paper, published last Friday, that announced the new color’s creation—or its discovery, depending on your philosophical view of the matter. I asked him how he’d qualified for such an honor. “I have a habit of wanting to be a subject in all experiments in my lab,” he said. It wasn’t an IMAX-scale spectacle, Roorda said. But even so, in the aftermath, he felt a kind of euphoria. He described the color as a beautiful, ultra-intense teal. “As a scientist, the experience was profound.”

James Fong, a Ph.D. student at Berkeley, was the first author on the paper—and the one to name olo—but he has never seen the new color. He and the other grad students on the project drew straws to decide who would get their retinas mapped, and he was unlucky. As a result, Fong has become afflicted by a very specific kind of color blindness, which he wishes urgently to cure: When the next set of slots for retina mapping opens up, he will raise his hand, he told me. “I would be disappointed if I finished my Ph.D. program without seeing the color that I spent a good fraction of my time here studying.”

As a rule, scientists do not lead especially glamorous lives, especially not right now. But they do occasionally get to see extraordinary things before anyone else. Sometimes, this privilege is enjoyed—or seized—by one person, as when Howard Carter allowed himself a candlelit glimpse into King Tut’s unsealed tomb the afternoon before he fully surveyed its glittering wonders with Egyptian authorities. Other times, a whole group gets to revel in the exclusivity: The Soviet scientists who launched the Luna 3 probe in 1959 kept the first images of the moon’s dark side to themselves for days. The exclusivity period can run much longer than mere hours and days: more than 50 years passed from the moment that Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh saw the bottom of the Mariana Trench from the porthole window of their bathyscaphe to James Cameron’s return trip there in a high-tech submersible. These experiences are rarefied, but they do not always trigger joy. The astronaut Mike Massimino has said that he felt an extreme loneliness upon seeing Earth from space, because he could not share it with the people whom he loved most in the world.

Roorda had an inkling that his research team was going to see something special. For more than five years they’d been trying to conjure up novel human experiences of color. They seemed to have a lead on others who work in the field. Human beings are visual creatures; sight is our primary sensory window onto the world. For most of us, the waking mental experience is dominated by a constant stream of color images generated by the eye and the cortex, but exactly how those images are constructed by the mind is not yet understood. By giving the visual system an entirely new stimulus—a color that does not exist in nature—Roorda’s team was hoping to tease out the different roles that the eye and the brain play in creating the cinema of our lives.

Verifying that Roorda and the other participants had indeed seen a novel color was tricky. Only one person witnesses the experience of color: the person who sees it. Philosophers have fretted about color’s inescapable subjectivity since the late 18th century, when John Dalton discovered red-green color blindness—his own. (Dalton noted that a pink geranium looked dramatically different when viewed in broad daylight than in evening candlelight, and was astonished when his friends told him that they experienced no such effect.) Zed Adams, a philosophy professor at the New School who specializes in the experience of color, told me that many 20th-century philosophers were haunted by the idea that we’re all trapped in our own perceptual world. Everyone wants to believe that they see the true rainbow, but no one can be sure that they do, Adams said.

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The team at Berkeley eventually hit upon a way to confirm that the colors that were experienced by the five people who took part in the experiment were roughly similar. Their method was ingenious, according to Adams, who was not involved in the work. First, the team produced olo by targeting a specific set of color-sensing cone cells in each participant’s retina—the so-called M cones, which are never activated on their own in natural settings. Then, while the subjects were experiencing that color, they rated its intensity and performed image-matching exercises, comparing olo with its nearest natural cousins. This process couldn’t tell the researchers what olo was, in a deeper sense, but it did suggest that the five subjects of the study had experienced an image with roughly the same degree of color saturation. All five also described the color as being a sort of teal or a mix of blue and green. Whether they were experiencing the same teal or blue-green remains a mystery, of course.

Olo does not—and cannot—exist outside this peculiar technological setup, or one very much like it. In that sense, it’s a cyborg experience that a human being can have only with the help of a machine. But Fong hopes that it might be a first step toward enhancing human color vision in the everyday world. Scientists have already used gene therapies to add a third set of cone pigments to the retinas of male squirrel monkeys, which are born with only two. It appears to give the monkeys the ability to access new colors, although that research is not yet definitive.

Some human females have four types of cones in their retinas, instead of three. For most of them, the fourth cone doesn’t lead to richer color vision, at least not measurably. But there is one woman, perhaps the most famous research subject in all of color science—cDa29—who is able to distinguish among hues better than those of us who have three cones. Researchers in Roorda and Ng’s lab are trying to figure out whether this sensory superpower can someday be engineered into an adult human. They’ve been laying the groundwork by using their targeted lasers to mimic the patterns of retinal stimulation that a person with four kinds of cones would experience, but in people with three cones. If (and it’s a big if) people’s brains are able to process the same fine color distinctions that cDa29 can, gene therapy could perhaps be used to add a fourth kind of cone to human retinas. In just weeks or months, they could find themselves in a new sensory world, populated by 10 times as many gradations of color.   

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Those kinds of treatments are still a ways off. In the meantime, Fong is having fun fielding all the reactions to the olo paper. Reporters from all over the world have stormed into his inbox, demanding interviews. Many have asked to be rigged up to the machine in Berkeley to get a glimpse of the new color. Artists have also been in touch. (Maybe James Turrell could make use of this technology.) Stuart Semple, an artist from the U.K., has started taking preorders for a paint based on olo. It’s called “YOLO.”

Fong told me that he takes particular pride in having named the color. The name olo is a play on 0 1 0, which corresponds to the types of cone cells—the 1 is for Ms—that were stimulated to generate it. The team had considered all kinds of alternatives but agreed that his solution was the most elegant. Fong was delighted just thinking about it. “How many people have named a color?” he asked me. Fong said that he has come to love olo. He said he now prefers it to red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple. He might be the only person in the world who has never seen their favorite color.