This blog started a couple years ago with the story of how I regained color vision. Here’s the link if you missed it the first time. http://robheinsoo.livejournal.com/775.html

 Over PAX weekend I confirmed something I'd half-suspect--my color sense fades if I don't use it 'properly.'

 We had Eric Lang as a houseguest most of PAX weekend. We played a lot of games, including my first-ever game of Puerto Rico. I’d never wanted to teach Lisa since the ‘little brown settlers’ that drive the plantation economy push my buttons, and if they push my game-reject button, I figured they’d push Lisa’s. With Eric as guide, we pushed past the brown settler tokens and had a good three-player game, with Lisa winning what I’d thought was a duel between me and Eric.

 Midgame, the color red joined brown as the game’s notable color. Eric said something about “Look at the red number on the counter,” and I said, “That number is red?”

 I picked the counters up. Looked at them closely. I could only see that the numbers were dark. Not red. Uh-oh. I’d been thinking that colors, in general, seemed muted, maybe, but I’d been setting the thought aside.

 The next day at work I turned on the Windows Media Player ‘alchemy’ visualizer while I was working. It had been a long time since I’d had it on. It started off muted and I thought, “Oh. Yeah. This is like it was before. I’m not really seeing color well, am I?”

 I typed on an MS Word file on the left side of my screen with the Windows Media Player program running on the right side. Thirty minutes later the visualizer POPPED, all of a sudden everything got bright. Wow! It was a mini-recreation of my original color-vision event. Instead of two or three muted colors (blues, yellows, some greens, reddish maybe) I had the full spectrum roaring at me.

 When I got home I dug into the Puerto Rico box for the counters I hadn’t been able to perceive properly. Sure enough, now the red numbers were obvious. No way to see them as anything other than red.

 So now I know that the condition is somehow ongoing. I’d suspected something like this might be happening because of an event in Hawaii a couple years ago when I’d been unable to see red flowers on the trail. I’d responded by turning on my laptop computer that night to watch the visualizer program for awhile, eventually saying “See? No problem, I can see all the colors.”

   But now I have to admit that I seem to require ongoing color therapy from the visualizer’s mix of rapidly flashing and intermingling colors.

 Which means my condition is possibly a lot more interesting for a brain scientist than I’d thought. I’m going to mention the condition to a neuroscientist or two.

   In the meantime, I'm using the visualizer as much as I can. The world remains entirely colorful, and I'm grateful.