Why I'm Paying for Typos

Of all the cool things that eye doctors use to test people's vision, none is a better indicator of what's going on in the retina than this simple grid devised by Professor Marc Amsler in 1945.

Cover one eye and focus the other on the dot in the center of the grid:

What do you see? And what don't you see? What's great about the Amsler Grid is that we know that it's a grid—a big square made up of smaller, evenly-sized squares separated by horizontal and vertical lines. But is that what you see? Try it with the other eye.

When I look at an Amsler Grid, here are the sorts of things that happen for me:

To my eyes, entire line segments are missing and others are distorted into moving, twisting shaped, indicating blind spots in the retina. Some of this is normal—the optic nerve occupies a chunk of space in the human retina causing a blind spot in everybody's eyes. The Amsler Grid lets us know where that spot is, and any distortion is what the brain does to fill in the gap.

My grid is bit more extreme because of the dystrophy in my retinal cells, and while the Amsler Grid demonstrates that clearly, it's also happening to everything I look at, including more irregular shapes like printed words. 

If you've read this blog, you've probably seen my typos and articles about them, and this week I had two more that were costly: The poster for CONES came back with "donation" spelled "doantion". No big deal—I'd only printed a dozen. But when 500 palm cards showed up with the wrong date on them, I had to fork out for a reprint:

JUNE 24 = WRONG DATE

JUNE 23 = CORRECT DATE

I had three different people proofread the graphic before I sent it off. No spelling mistakes, just an incorrect date that wasn't spotted. Anyway, they're back from the printer and they look great. Hope you can make it to the show. Just don't show up on the 24th.

Seeing Spots

Dr. Shinobu Ishihara created some of the most beautiful designs of the 20th century. Large spots composed of seemingly random patterns of smaller dots in various diameters and colors. I looked at them occasionally as a kid, wishing that I could have them to keep, as wall paper or curtains or clothing. But the only time that I was permitted to look at Dr. Ishihara's artwork was when I visited the eye doctor.

To me Ishihara's colorblindness tests have the chaotically gorgeous aesthetics of chameleon skin: a jumble of tiny scales whose pigmentation tends to change over time. But someone with better working cones receptors might see numbers or shapes embedded in these designs.

Do you see numerals embedded in these dots? I don't, at least not on the examples I've given here. I do a suggestion of numerals in some of these patterns, but in none of these could I tell you (or an eye doctor) what they are.

For folks with fully functioning cones, this example can clue you in as to what I do see. On the far right is how a person with X-linded reg-green colorblindness might see an Ishihara image with mixed pigment dots—that's not what I see. I'm the example in the middle—"partially colorblind"—and, truth be told, the leftmost image and the center image look identical to me.

When was your last Ishihara test? You can take one version of the test here. 38 plates, starting with number identification and then moving onto counting squiggly lines. It tracks all your answers and then grades each one as "correct", "partially correct" or "wrong", comprising an overall rating of red-green color blindness. I felt like my color blindness was strong, but it rated me as "moderate". If you take the test, I'd love to know your results and experiences. Leave them in the comments below.

Blind Book #1: Girl in the Dark

Anna Lyndsey isn't blind, but she lives in the dark because of her acute photosensitive seborrhoeic dermatitis, an illness that makes all contact with light feel like a blowtorch on her skin. While most blind folks can walk out into the light, they just can't see much, Lyndsey could see were she able to exist in the light. Have a listen to this chapter, "Metaphor", in which she reviews a handful of audiobooks whose protagonists have something in common with her. She also reviews a couple of new age healers and offers a game:

Games to Play in the Dark 5: Scribe 

This is a game to play on your own, when talking books have palled, when you have no visitors in prospect, when boredom eats your brain. 

You will need a large bound notebook and a pencil. A bound notebook so that your pages are disciplined and do not become entangled. A pencil, because a pen could run out and in the dark you will not be able to tell. 

Pick up your pencil and open your notebook. 

Place the thumb of your non-writing hand on the page beneath the start of the first line. 

Your thumb will act as a marker, so that there will be space between each line and the next. 

Write. 

Write what? 

Write what you know. Isn't that what they say? What you know is the darkness. 

And as you begin to form words on the page, the darkness around you moves. It starts to gather, to circle, to form a vortex round the end of your pencil, and then — down the pencil's black centre it pours. 

It is unstoppable. It flows faster and faster, funneling down that slim conductive wand, erupting on to the page, staining its purity with straggling struggling words. 

And in your mind, a light goes on.

—Anna Lyndsey, Girl in the Dark

Listen (or read) here.

Cones Cones Cones

First snippet of CONES debuts in Philadelphia April 6+7 as an opener to the group Binge Culture from New Zealand. Here is the event listing on the Medium Theatre's website, and here's where you can RSVP.

And now a question about this photo:

What do you see when you look at it? Which of the three images looks like the "real" one?

I myself really only see differences in the background tiles. The foregrounds look more or less the same to me. Leave a comment below and tell me what you see.

Can you spot the the mistake here?

When I was kid, one of my favorite books was Optricks by Melinda Wentzell and D.K. Holland. It was full of bold, immersive, classic optical illusions, just about all of which you can now find online. Among these was the one that you see in the title of this post—did you spot the the mistake? That's it: "the" appears twice consecutively, but many people don't notice because the repeat word is on either side of a line break. It's also an article, a tiny, auxiliary part of speech that, in print, the brain tends to gloss over more than, say, a flamboyantly flourished adverb.

What Color Are My Clothes? Part 3

Apparently I'm in good company when it comes to not knowing the color of some cloth. Nearly 30 million people are in on the debate about this dress. If you haven't seen it yet, look at the photo and answer the question, "What color is this dress?" before reading any further.

The dress has sparked a Pantone civil war that's spilled off of the internet and into people's private lives. One camp declares it to be blue and black, another decreees white and gold. I myself saw blue and grey, but then the suggestion that the grey was black makes me see it as black.

I'm not interested in the gossip, how this dress broke the internet or destroyed relationships, or even what Taylor Swift has to say about it (what is she a mantis shrimp or something?) What truly interests me is the science behind the dispute. 

Somewhere in the murky depths of BuzzFeed is an explanation for the debate stating that, "it’s not monitor settings" because two people can see it on the same screen and perceive different things. BuzzFeed also says, "It’s probably not about the cells in your eyes," (unless you have a retinal condition like me, in which case retinal cells might be a factor), and then goes on to explain how our brains are always deciding what they're seeing.

“In the case of the dress, some people are deciding that there is a fair amount of illumination on a blue and black (or less reflective) dress," says Cedar Riener, a professor of psychology at Randolph-Macon College. "Other people are deciding that it is less illumination on a white/gold dress (it is in shadow, but more reflective).”

These differences in perception are based on individual experiences and "top-down" processing in the brain. Cognitive neuroscientist John Borghi of Rockefeller University explains, “It could also be that you’ve seen dresses (or fabric) with the same texture or shape before, which could also affect your perception.”

Here's what Adobe has to say about the dress,
though when I did this on a photo of my
sweatshirt, the results were inaccurate.

Aside from all of us having wasted tens of millions of person-hours on what's really just a shoddy photo of a nice dress, I'm glad people are talking about this because top-down cognitive processing has bigger societal implications than mere disagreements about colors of clothes. I touched on this in earlier posts about cultural astigmatism, race, and posted a clip that postulates that people can look right at something and not see it. In each of these posts I discussed how our prior experiences and cultural preferences have us constantly deciding what we each see when we look at the same subject.

Today online, that debate is about the color of a dress. Another day in the street it may be about the color of someone's skin and what that means to me or you or someone who holds power over that hypothetical person. Our experiences compose our vision, our vision comprises our perception, and our perceptions influence our actions. Look forward to more dialogue on this soon.

What Color Are My Clothes, Part 2

Update: The other day I bought a new hoodie, not really sure of its color, so I posted a swatch of it on this blog and asked for clues as to its hue. Someone wrote back saying it was mostly grey, and after hearing this I saw the hoodie as completely grey… Until today. 

This morning I was with my friend, wearing a red shirt and some maybe light grey or tan pants. When I put on the sweatshirt, my friend said, "How patriotic." Patriotic? "Yeah, you're wearing red, white and blue." Two pieces of news: My pants are off-white, and the sweatshirt is not grey, but definitively blue. 

With this new information, I now see my hoodie and as a vivid blue, when just a few hours ago it appeared as a drab grey, and a couple days back I was unsure of it being any particular color. My friend's certainty has stddenly cemented my certainty: it is blue. And that's all my eyes can see.

A Stigma 'Tis Him

How an astigmatist might see
a Snellen eye chart

In the past day lots of friends asked for the address to this blog.

Thanks for that, friends.

If any post provokes insight, we hope that you'll leave a comment. This is a dialogue.

My vision can obscure knowing who people are. On the street the other day someone said hi to me and I stopped and talked to her for a minute and then said goodbye. I have no idea who she was. Maybe you? Let me know.

And just now a Facebook friend requested the link to this blog. I looked at their profile. "Who the heck is Mike Miles?" The guy in the picture looked vaguely familiar—Someone I met in passing? Who's the woman next to him—Oh! It's my friend Mika. But her boyfriend's name isn't Mike…

Duh. My brain changed Mika's «a» into an «e» because this brain plays the odds that a name starting with "Mik" is going to be "Mike" not "Mika". And then, assuming Mike is male, brain tells eyes to look at the taller person with the most facial hair in the photo, essentially invisibilizing the woman right next to him—you know, the one that I spent six hours a day with last summer? That one.

How my brain blurred out Mika
and invented "Mike"

Many things can factor into astigmatism, a visual condition where a person can look at two equidistant objects and one seems sharper, the other blurrier. It's what optometrists are testing when they ask you to read a bunch of equally sized letters on an eye chart. Faulty cone cells in my retina contribute to my astigmatism—parts of my eye see better than others, so the start of a word might come clear while the end of it blurs, and I may discern one friend's face but not another's even when they're both a few feet away. 

But there's also a component of astigmatism that's taught and learned, like seeing the word "Mike" instead of "Mika." It isn't pure optics, but also experience that leads to bias and a visual preference for the brain chooses to see. Besides favoring "Mike" over "Mika" in print, my brain might have taken visual information from the photo and favored taller over shorter, male over female, and a plethora of other variables based on my own experience growing up and living in this world.

Cultural astigmatism test: What parts
of this sign attract your attention?

In that sense, astigmatism is as much a social construct as it is an optical one. When I walk down a street in Chinatown or West Bengal, it's the Latin characters that pop into my eyes and brain over the Mandarin glyphs or Devanagari script because I grew up speaking English, not Chinese or Bengali.

My own street has many businesses that don't register with me visually because they aren't places that offer things to someone of my gendered and cultural profile. There are African hair braiding and nail salons within a block or two of my home, but because I've got European hair and keep my nails short and plain, I can't tell you how many of these businesses there are or even what streets they're between, even though I might go into shorefronts right next door to them every day.

I'm curious as an astigmatist: Do people with "normal" vision have cultural astigmatism? When you look at this warning sign from India, which scripts and symbols draw your gaze and which do you tune out? Are you more aware of some places and people and things in your environment than you are of others? And how do you see or not see them? Share your thoughts in the comment section below

Blind Games + Blind Song #4

Tonight we hosted the first of three public workshops toward developing this theatre project. For two hours, 32 people interacted through a series of games where some or all of the participants had their eyes closed. These blind games get us in touch with our ability to trust and also to be uncomfortable, and specific games dynamize specific senses. Many of the games worked with the sense of touch, and also with spatial awareness, proprioception and teleception. We played some games to a musical soundtrack, and one game had a soundscape created by half the people in the room guiding the other half through animal-like sounds. But really, this song was everyone's favorite part of the evening:

A Query

Based on sound alone which animal sounds like it would have the strangest appearance?

Welcome Rods, Welcome Cones

You have found us: two fellows with two lifetimes of vision and blindness under our brows. One of us grew up with night blindness, the other has been blinded by the light since birth. We met in 2011 and have collaborated on seven theatre projects since, all informed by our unique visions, yet our blindness has remained in the background. Until now.

In 2015, Mason Rosenthal and Morgan FitzPatrick Andrews embark on a new endeavor called Rods & Comes, a play, perhaps, about vision lost and blindness found. We begin this project with a public workshop on January 9th in Philadelphia, and also this journal of all things visual: When do our visual impediments impede us? What are our weird work-arounds to surmount shortsightedness? And how do we see depictions of blindness in the world around us?

Our aim is to document things as they come up, to notice things that normally go unnoticed, and to deeper this dialogue that has thus far been a more casual conversation. If you're here, stick around. And stay tuned for updates on Rods & Cones as it develops.