Stuart Anstis sat in his living room in the dark, wearing a pink visor that held up a hood made of thick black paper with eye holes cut out. He couldn’t see anything but the flickering images on the TV set, which he had rigged to play everything in negative. He’d been watching a movie for some time--There was this fellow dancing and miming and flirting, he recalls--when a friend, who happened to know the film, stopped by. Oh, Bob Hope, the friend said. And I said, ‘Bob Hope! Good Lord!’ I’d been looking at him all that time and didn’t know who it was.
Vision researchers like Anstis--along with photographers--have known for decades that faces are nearly impossible to identify when light and dark are reversed. But why that’s so is not well understood.
Curious about the difficulty of interpreting negative images, Anstis, a perceptual psychologist at the University of California at San Diego, decided last year to plunge into a negative world. He connected a set of goggles to a video camera that reversed black and white and converted colors to their complements--green to purple, yellow to blue, and so on--then put them over his eyes. For three days Anstis saw nothing in positive. He removed the goggles only at night, and then he slept blindfolded; he showered in the dark. The experiment was a variation on earlier studies by researchers who had worn glasses designed to turn the world upside down or shift it sideways. They had found that a surprising degree of adaptation occurred; somehow the visual system compensated, put things right, and allowed a person to function. Anstis wanted to find out if the same thing would happen when he traded black for white.
Through the goggles, faces of his friends and colleagues took on a black-toothed, menacing quality. Their pupils became white; the light glinting off their eyes appeared black. I went on falsely seeing the highlight as the pupil, Anstis says, so I constantly misread people’s eye movements. He could never be quite sure when they were looking at him. Their blinking became a peculiar flicker that he found depersonalizing. Emotional expressions were hard to read, he says. Pictures of celebrities were unrecognizable. By daylight--when the sky was a very dark yellow, almost black--a woman’s sharply etched shadow, now rendered in white, looked like a paper cutout or even another person. Fuzzier shadows--cast by a hand held over a table, for instance--translated into a vague, eerie glow.
Objects were no easier to deal with than people. Meals in complementary colors--blue scrambled eggs, for instance--became so unappetizing that Anstis puckishly recommends negative goggles to dieters. Outdoors, sunlight converted to shadow made a flight of stairs a frightening experience. The risers became confused with the treads. I lost my sense of reality, as if I’d been up too late, he recalls. At the curb, cars whizzing by didn’t look real. They looked like toys coasting along on white platforms, which were actually their shadows. I would have been quite happy to walk in front of them if it hadn’t been for the roaring sound of the traffic. He felt as if his other senses were taking over his consciousness, to compensate for the lack of meaningful visual input. The scent of a laundry room, for instance, became remarkably intense.
