Red Socks and a Blue Blanket
A certain red spot of paint on the wooden stairs of a St. Paul play structure.
Red socks, toddler-size, from the Gap.
When Charlie was two years old, he used to stop on the stairs and stare and stare and stare at that red spot, and when we tried to get him to move away, was he enraged. Around the same time, he began only to wear red socks because those were the only pair he pulled out.
How Do We See Red? Count the Ways in today’s New York Times says of the color red:
Red is the premier signaling color in the natural world, variously showcasing a fruitful bounty, warning of a fatal poison or boasting of a sturdy constitution and the genes to match…….. “Our visual system was shaped by colors already in use among many plants and animals, and red in particular stands out against the green backdrop of nature,” said Dr. Nicholas Humphrey, a philosopher at the London School of Economics and the author of Seeing Red: A Study in Consciousness “If you want to make a point, you make it in red.”
Because humans have more of the “two cone types set to red and yellow wavelengths than … those sensitive to short, blue-tinged light,” we are able to distinguish more different varieties of red than of the color blue and hence are (according to the New York Times article) more drawn to red.
Though I have to wonder. We slowly taught Charlie to move on past the red spot and up the play structure and down the slide; we rotated the colors of the socks in his drawer. And then there are Charlie’s current favorite color choices, for his blue blanket and his green squishy ball: It is that all he used to see was red, and now he prefers the less-varied hues of blue?
1 opinion for Red Socks and a Blue Blanket
Autism Vox
Mar 14, 2007 at 2:30 am
[…] Closing his eyes and taking “several deep breaths” restores a “tingling” to Tammet’s head and he is able to continue. Tammet’s evocation of the number-scape of pi recalls his lyrical description of the qualities of the numbers and of his synesthaesia in the first chapter of his book, “Blue Nines and Red Words“: I have visual and sometimes emotional responses to every number up to 10,000, like having my own visual, numerical vocabulary. And just like a poet’s choice of words, I find some combinations of numbers more beautiful than others……. A telephone number with the sequence 189 is much more beautiful to me than one with a sequence like 116. (p. 5) […]
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: