Your Eyeballs and the Case Against Color

A typical human possesses something like 120 million light-registering rod cells in their eyeballs. Jammed along the surface of the retina, the relatively simple cells detect incoming light and pass a mountain of data to the brain for interpretation. These workaday cells are the foundation of eyesight. You like seeing in low-light situations? You appreciate peripheral vision? Thank your rods.

This story originally appeared in Volume 24 of Road & Track.

I’m not saying that the cone cells, which detect color, are prima donnas, but they are much less numerous, dramatically less sensitive, and more prone to becoming tired quickly. It’s likely that your distant ancestors escaped fatal bear/­leopard/saber-toothed-tiger attacks because of their rods, not their cones.

While rods can only give you grayscale vision, color is a slippery bastard. Blue light can fire into our eyes at roughly 640 terahertz, but is the blue my mind interprets the same as yours? And speaking of blue, studies of populations that lack a word for the color (a characteristic of a weirdly large number of languages across time) have shown that they sometimes don’t differentiate between what we might consider distinct shades of blue and green. Anyway, humans have but three measly varieties of cones, one each for red, blue, and green. That is, unless you’re colorblind, in which case you might have only two. Also, a small percentage of women have four, but that’s another matter. The point is, we see little of the “color” around us. Birds and butterflies have several cones and so see more colors. But I don’t want to swap lives with them. And mantis shrimp are the animal world’s kings of color, with 16 different cones. That doesn’t seem to make them especially happy, as they often hide in coral nooks and emerge to punch crabs and octopuses.

What is the point of this? I mean, apart from revealing myself as a nerd. The entire idea of our newest print issue, Vol. 24: Black & White, is to ignore all the cone food in the world (at least from the photography). This isn’t taking color photographs and stripping the hue out of them. We created this vintage-focused issue to celebrate the artistry registered by rods.

I hope you enjoy it.

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