In Iran they have the white room, a room where everything is white and no other colors. In saddam husseins Iraq there was a red room, even the light had a red bulb. Both rooms made everything you see one color. Walls, door, light, blanket, food trays, etc.
Is this a form of sensory deprivation or what exactly? Would everything being one color make solitary more traumatic?
Does it have black curtains? Is it near a station?
Do you have any cite for the existence of these rooms?
I do not think “color deprivation” amounts to a form of torture. Color blind people get by pretty well. It is true that completely color blind people, people with only rod-vision, do not do so well, but that is because many aspects of their eyesight are very deficient. They do not suffer tortures from the absence of color as such. (There are probably also people with only one functioning cone type. They would not see color either, but I think their vision would otherwise be a lot better than those with no functional cones at all.)
Coincidentally, food science taste testers do their taste testing in red rooms (just from the light, I suspect. There’s no reason to paint the walls if they look red anyway.). This is to prevent the look of the food from subliminally affecting the taste experience.
Of course, if they’re trying to quantify that subliminal effect, they’ll do both (red light and normal light) and compare. They’re also not above putting the same whiskey or vodka into a series of different bottles, to see if booze from a fancier bottle is experiences differently from booze in a plainer one. (Yes, it is.)
There has been no report of food scientists going strange because of red room exposure. We assume that means they were like that to start with.
I think that those rooms would look pretty damm nice… but the torture would come mostly from the always-lit lights rather than the monochromatic decoration.
http://www.editinternational.com/read.php?id=47ddcef722fca
http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/10/29/amir.fakhravar.iran.torture/
The point is does this matter? Does it add to the psychological damage of sensory deprivation?
I know of people who have spent long periods of time in rooms like this with no ill effect. Color constancy adjusts. If it is intended to torture, I imagine it’s just one aspect of many to make the environment seem unnatural.
Heh.
Why? Because you might not be confused by some illusions and such? Sure. But overall why would it improve? BTW, people with only blue cones see B&W and have awful vision, because these cones are only about 8% in the eye and have coarser resolution. These people are legally blind or damn close to it I think.
I’m not sure, but people with the other types of monocromacy should just have all the reds changed to green or vice versa. Blue cones are on a different mechanical and evolutionary track.
You can permanently damage someone’s vision (at least it works in cats) by depriving them of certain stimuli, but it needs to be done when they are developing. Not torture, but not humane. For example, being raised in an environment of only vertical lines can make horizontal lines permanently hard to see.
Rods only work in low light, and are at ceiling response and so quite useless in normal daylight (or electric light) conditions. What is more, there are no rods at all in the fovea of the eye, where, in a normal human eye, the cones are packed densely together (unlike the periphery, where rods and especially cones are distributed much more sparsely) , thus enabling high acuity vision. Most of the work of normal daylight vision gets done in, or close to, the fovea. People with rod vision only are indeed very nearly blind, and are very sensitive to normal “daylight” lighting levels. I haven’t actually seen any descriptions of people with one type of cone only, but I think it is safe to infer that they would be considerably better off than the rod-only people.
You may well be right that people with only blue cones would likely be considerably worse off than people with only one of the other cone types.* Blue cones are sparsely distributed throughout the retina, and are not particularly abundant even in the fovea (with none at all near its very center), so it may be true that they would not help with foveal vision and acuity all that much. At least they would function in daylight, though. On the other hand, both red and green cones are densely packed in the fovea, so even if you had only one or other of these cone types functioning, it would probably provide you with foveal vision of reasonable acuity (although still no ability to distinguish colors). I believe that people with just two functional cone types suffer relatively little visual handicap apart from their inability to distinguish certain colors.
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*Although as the genes making the red and green cones possible are on the same chromosome (the X) and the gene for the blue cones is on a different one, it is probably very rare to have only red, or only green, cones functioning, with blue incapacitated. It should be possible, though.
For easy reading on rod monochromacy - see Oliver Sacks, Island of the Colorblind.
I am not aware of any humans with just one type of cones and zero rods. Theoretically it is possible, but rods seem to be more “embedded” in our genes.
I have briefly met two individuals with S-cone (blue) monochromacy. Both had very poor vision. One had a sort of telescopic lens attachment for glasses. As I understand it, they do have a sort of tunnel vision as a result of the cone matrix. I don’t know how it compares to retinitis pigmentosa besides lack of color and no progressive virulence.
Dichromats with 2 cones are relatively common. They may make many mistakes but it isn’t a big handicap, at least in our world. Many more people have 3 cones but one is shifted, so their vision is almost perfect. Blue deficits are rarer as it is on the 7th chromosome.
You are probably right - genetic mutations or double inheritance of no R+G is like much more common than no B+R or B+G as that requires two rare events to line up.
I’ve often thought exactly about the lack of color within the Space Station, which by no means torture, is yet another of the extremely harsh conditions for astronauts.