How would you describe color to a blind person?

All right, this question is admittedly out there, but I think that it can really provoke some serious thought. How can you explain an utterly abstract experience to someone who has never (and possibly will never) experience it?

Maybe red is hot, and blue is cold. Green is like a tree, orange is like the beating sun. What about mixtures? Is there a way?

Now, think about how you could relate something like, I don't know, a computer game to someone who lived during the 16th century. Or maybe internal combustion to pre-Agricultural revolutionary man.

Abstract, yes. Impossible to answer, I'm not so sure.

I really am unable to answer, but you may want to check out this thread:
Eşref Armağan - Do you know this guy?
about a blind man who paints in color!

[edit on September 30th 2009 by greeneyedleo]

Tones of sound, or temperature and texture.
Other than that, donate your eyes. Color is light, our brains decode it. color is different for every species. So that blind person ain't missing out on to much, although i do no how it would feel to not be able to use a sense everyone else has.

[edit on 30-9-2009 by gandhi]

I would find a person with Synesthesia.

I would then have them describe to the blind person what certain colours sound, taste and smell like.

I wouldn't even try to describe what a colour looks like to blind man.

This is definitely one of the most intriguing questions I have seen in some time. I used to wonder how you really begin to explain almost anything to a blind person. Even their other senses have no reference point so it is still pretty abstract but color - wow, that takes the cake. I would not even know where to begin to think about starting to begin with that.

Describing color would be a challenge:
I would attempt to do this by explaining what color is. ie. starting from the beginning I would tell them that for a person who has sight to see there must be light reflecting off of the surface of the object one is looking at. Then I would telling them that our Sun that provides the natural light for our world appears to be a warm light that when viewed through a piece of glass we call a prisim the light is split off into to many light frequencies, some of the the frequencies have different frequencies that we can see called colors. Some of the light cannot be seen by the human eye but we know it is there because we have instruments that measure it. The visible frequencies of light are called red, blue, green with other colors in between like orange, purple,brown.
On a scale that started low and went high, the red would be near the bottom with other colors of red we cannot see such as Infrared being below the red color. Climbing to the top of the chart you have Infrared, red, orange,yellow,green,blue,purple. We use Red to indicate when something is hot to the touch, we use blue to indicate when something is cold or cool. Now at one end of our chart let's say the red end, there are frequencies below red that are Radio waves for transmitting sound and music to people all over the world. You cannot see radio waves so to the human eye they do not have color. At the other end of the frequency above the purple are frequencies in the X-Ray and Gamma ray categories
they do not have a visible color visible to the human eye.Some people refer to these color frequencies as spectrum's. Modern day science is more likely to call the visible light, the red through purple a spectrum instead of frequencies. The frequencies are used for the non-visible light waves like x-ray and radio waves. When all of the red through purple light spectrum's are combine together, we call this white light. During day light hours when the sun is shinning we say the sky is blue in color . It is blue because we see more blue light than any other color. This is because when the light travelling from the sun to the earth hits the surface of our outter atmosphere, the blue light has the most trouble penetrating the atmosphere and is therefore somewhat left behind so to speak, making it visible to the human eye..SO to sum this up, Red is hot-Orange is warm,yellow is a mellow or serine feeling,Green is the grass and color of the trees, blue is cool or cold with purple being very cold or super frozen. KMG


[edit on 1-10-2009 by kissmygrits]

As I know almost nothing about music; I would get a musician to help me translate each musical note into primary colors, and color hues translated into sharps and flats and so on. I can "almost" hear colors myself.

If the blind person used to be sighted or could detect color but not images, I think there is no point. They already know.

If they never had vision, it's a pointless undertaking. Unless they have the experience themselves, they will never understand. Sure, they can build all sorts of fantastical thinking around your rather colorful description but cannot grok the experience itself. If you get frustrated, you might accuse them of being a color athiest or they could accuse you of being deluded into seeing something that they have no objective evidence for (but really all evidence is gained by color gnosis, not objectivity).

Wait, I almost forgot about the ones that say they know what color is like because they go to see a chromatologist on Sundays but have never seen for themsevles.

An aural analogue: A person with absolute pitch cannot talk someone into acquiring the ability. If one may, they must learn to seek and discriminate their own internal representations.

[edit on 10/1/2009 by EnlightenUp]

[edit on 10/1/2009 by EnlightenUp]

Eh I wouldn't bother with describing to them colors either, rather i would tell them how to astral project and that you will be able to see the colors for themselves, that alone should motivate a blind person to try it.

Easy. I'd describe it as e=mc^2, and then explain wavelength, frequency, and the visible light spectrum.

Science...the religion of all religions.

reply to post by American_Soviets


Not for nothing, but I can see and you'd confuse me with that stuff.

reply to post by ineverknew



Watch mask. That's how I would do it. And no, not 'The Mask' but 'Mask'. Great movie.

reply to post by ineverknew


I would pout hot lava on a blind person and tell them "red". Or just get a rose and have them smell. Olfactory awareness is the most powerful sense we have, other than our 6th sense.