Perception Is a Rumor

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Look at a rainbow. ROYGBIV—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. Now look closer.

None of those colors exist the way you think.

Your eye has three kinds of color receptors: one tuned to red, one to green, one to blue. Your brain is mixing signals from those three sensors, like primary colors, and assigning a name to the result.

All color is an interpretation.

Most of the time, the interpretation lines up with a real wavelength of light. Your interpretation has a name, and an associated Crayola crayon, so you assume your eyes are interpreting reality.

You probably think of violet and purple as the same thing. Lilac, plum, eggplant—different words for the same color.

They’re not. Violet is a real wavelength of light. Purple isn’t.

Picture the visible spectrum laid out on a line. Red at one end. Blue at the other. Green in the middle.

It’s a gradient. One color blending into its neighbor, into the adjacent receptor. The wavelength for each one falls somewhere on the line.

But purple does something different.

Purple is created by your brain when red and blue fire together—when the two ends of the visible spectrum need to meet. But they can’t. They’re not next to each other any more than 12 touches 1 on a ruler.

So your brain does something that brains are great at. It makes shit up. It improvises. It bends the ruler into a clock. Loops the line until the ends meet. And the seam where they touch—the spot that didn’t exist a moments ago—is what you call purple.

How the hell do we do that?

Biologists call it your umwelt—the specific slice of reality your senses let you into. A bat’s umwelt is sonar. A dog’s is mostly smell—they smell fear, they smell drugs, they smell poo.

Bees navigate by ultraviolet light.

A mantis shrimp has sixteen color receptors. It sees polarized and ultraviolet light. Bands of color humans can’t.

Our human umwelt takes in 11 million bits of information every second and we are consciously aware of just forty.

Forty. That’s not much.

Something is opening and closing the aperture. Most of the time, it isn’t you.

In English, orange is both a color and a fruit, and that’s not a coincidence. Before traders brought the fruit to Europe, the color didn’t have its own name. Chaucer, writing in the 1390s, described a fox as the color “betwixe yelow and reed” because he had no other way to say it.

The fruit arrived and the word came with it.

I suppose we like naming colors after things we can hold.

Anyone else remember those scented markers as a kid? Red was strawberry. Yellow was lemon. Brown was—what, root beer? Even as kids we knew the color and the object came as a pair.

Now look outside. What do you see? Hopefully, a few trees. I’m looking at a Douglas fir right now. We named the color orange after the fruit. We could have done the same with trees. Called the color tree.

But we didn’t. And because we didn’t, it changes the way we walk in the woods.

Twenty words for types of trees and ten for shades of green.

The attention went to the species. Now you walk into a forest, and you see three Douglas firs, a cedar, two hemlocks—close your eyes and you see them in your mind.

If you describe the New World as “the grandest green you ever seen, surrounded by various other greens. Yes, this land has some of the finest greens in all the world.”

Well, I don’t know that the queen funds any future trips west.

And green is a damn fine color.

Language shapes perception. Naming trees as more than green allows us to see more. It allows us to categorize and translate and communicate. It allows us to notice.

Without these words we’d still see the forest, but we wouldn’t perceive it the same way.

The rainbow in your head is exactly that. In your head.

Ask a group of kids from different cultures to describe a landscape. Plants, animals, colors. They’ll have different answers. Same brains, seeing different things. A country kid sees a game trail where a city dweller just sees wilderness.

In Icelandic they have a hundred ways of saying wind.

You might not need this level of nuance to fly a kite, but what if you are sailing the open seas? Searching out new lands? Then, perhaps, could a few more varieties of “wind” be helpful?

I Saw Purple

In 1990, Todd Marinovich was USC’s “Test-Tube QB”—the biologically engineered quarterback who’d never eaten a Big Mac. The Trojans were ranked fifth in the country, riding a twenty-game conference winning streak. They came to Husky Stadium favored, and Washington beat them 31-0.

Asked afterward what he saw out there, Marinovich said: “I just saw purple. That’s all. No numbers, no faces, just purple.”

He meant it figuratively. He wasn’t reporting a hallucination—he was reaching for a metaphor. What the game felt like from the inside.

When our brain takes in too much, too fast, too loud, it triages. Pilots describe tunnel vision. Soldiers describe the world flattening. The loudest signal becomes the signal.

For Marinovich, the defense was everywhere. Suffocating.

But was it?

If he reviewed the All-22, he’d probably find a few openings. Gaps in the coverage. Receivers running free. The opportunities were there but his brain couldn’t resolve them in real time. The details collapsed into a single overwhelming impression.

Purple.

But not every brain in the room triages the same way.

In 2003, Dean Potter stepped to the edge of the Cave of Swallows—a twelve-hundred-foot open-air sinkhole in Mexico—and jumped. He was less than a year into BASE jumping. His parachute had gotten wet overnight. When it opened, the lines twisted and the canopy collapsed on top of him. He was falling into the darkness.

Two hundred feet from the cave floor, he saw a rope.

Just a thin line hanging in space, in the middle of a dark vertical drop. Most people would’ve spent their last seconds in a panic. They’d see darkness approaching. They’d “see the light.” Potter saw the rope, grabbed it, and held on while it burned through his palms. Eventually he hit the floor, but had slowed enough to survive.

If he’s panicing, his brain doesn’t see the rope. A panicked brain only sees the fall. It collapses everything into a single overwhelming input, the way Marinovich’s collapsed into purple. Potter’s brain did something different, and infinitly more awesome. It expanded. Time stretched. Detail sharpened. A piece of rope thirty feet to his right, in the middle of a free fall, registered as a possibility.

Michael Jordan might call it the zone. Steven Kotler has a better word: flow. Triggered when the stakes are high enough, the challenge is hard enough, and you are totally in the moment.

Potter had all that and more.

Marinovich had stakes and challenge, but was missing something. He didn’t want to be there.

He later said, “Even in college, it felt like the shit you had to put up with in order to play wasn’t worth it.”

The aperture opens when you’re all the way in. It narrows when part of you is somewhere else.

Marinovich and football were an arranged marriage. He never had the space to fall in love.

Seventeen years after Marinovich, another quarterback stood in the same building, looking at the same purple. He saw something else.

Alex Brink played four years at Washington State. He went 3-1 against the Huskies. He’s the only Coug quarterback who ever won three Apple Cups.

His last college game, 2007, came down to a fourth-quarter drive at Husky Stadium. Score tied. Final seconds.

Where Marinovich saw only purple, Brink saw Brandon Gibson breaking open downfield. Out of a sea of purple jerseys, he picked a crimson one. He threw the ball, and got hit as he released it.

From his vantage point on the turf, Brink couldn’t tell whether the pass connected. For a moment all went silent. Then he heard the roar—a roar that filled the stadium, at least, that’s what he perceived. It was emanating from just one corner of Husky Stadium. The corner where the Cougar fans sat.

Touchdown.

Both quarterbacks filtered. They had to. Defenders, stadium noise, the brain can’t process all of it. It doesn’t have to.

Marinovich’s filter selected the noise. The crowd. The color. The pressure. Everything collapsed into a single signal.

Real or imagined, he saw purple.

Brink’s filter selected defenders approaching and Gibson breaking open downfield. Then, on the turf, unable to see the result, his brain found a new signal. The Cougar faithful.

Filtering is automatic, but you can train that filter. You can set the parameters.

And even when you see the world clearly, you still have to communicate what you saw. And that’s where things get tricky.

The Problem Is Translation

Every sense speaks a different language. And the languages don’t always translate.

Ryan Holiday asked Rick Rubin what still astonishes him at this point in his life. Rubin said: “what works.” An artist describes an idea, and it sounds bad. Then they play it for him, and it’s great.

The artist wasn’t wrong, they know music, so does Rick, but the translation was off.

Now consider a different type of translation.

“When I was a kid, I knew I was different. And people would say, ‘Oh, that’s an odd child,’ and that crushed my spirit. But I loved music. It was mesmerizing to me. I would see beautiful hues of light, cascading. I just thought that’s what all black kids did, stared into the speaker, like, woh. Music was just coming out of me.”

—Pharrell (Piece by Piece, 2024)

Pharrell has chromesthesia. Music doesn’t just sound like something to him—it looks like something. Sound translates to color in real time, without effort. Other synesthetes taste sounds, or see days of the week as having shapes. Their wiring translates natively. Picks up a signal the rest of us can’t.

Rubin’s story is an example of the language failing. The description was unable to carry the music, so he needed to hear it directly.

Pharrell is doing something different. Translation, but not into words. In his head, sound becomes color, automatically, without any effort. It’s a translation no one else can use, but it gives him a second copy of the music. He gets two versions running in parallel.

The right translation can multiply what you perceive.

The Writer’s Sense

Steven Pressfield was a Marine before he became a novelist. He’s written historical fiction about Spartans and Greeks, and perhaps the most famous book ever written about creative resistance, The War of Art. Not someone you’d expect to invoke a goddess before breakfast.

And yet every morning, before he writes, he recites the first twelve lines of Homer’s Odyssey. The opening invocation of The Muse. Three thousand years old. He treats her like a goddess.

Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O Muse.

Then he goes to work.

Pressfield believes in a higher dimension of reality. He says the muse assigns him something—that he’s on the lookout, waiting for the cosmic radio station to send a message, watching for the next trolley coming down the track. When he sees it, when he becomes aware of it, his only job is to step aboard and see where it takes him.

Most people aren’t looking. Heads down, working their assignment. They miss it.

Nobody else can write the same book, the same essay, because the work doesn’t simply come from you. It comes through you. Through your experiences, your attention, your questions, your particular way of seeing.

You might read it back a year later and think: That’s not me.

And it’s not.

The work is a snapshot. Not of reality, but of perception. What you could see from where you stood at a particular place, in a particular time.

Real or imagined.

Maybe it doesn’t matter whether the muse is real. What matters is, if you show up, do the work, and call to her every day, you get rewarded as though she is. You’ve tuned yourself to be receptive. To be open. And so you see the world with new awareness and shape the words that best describe what you see.

The muse, decoded, is an aperture. How much you let in, and how much you let through.

Pressfield isn’t receiving in some woo-woo mystical sense—he’s tuned into a frequency. He’s showed up at the same desk, with the same invocation, for so long that the next idea seems to just fall in his lap. The next trolley.

Maybe that’s what the Muse is. A way of bending the ruler into a clock. Creating a bridge between things that don’t obviously touch. An idea arrives. An image surfaces. A sentence appears. The connection becomes real the moment it changes what you notice.

The artist is trying to translate from one language into another. Sometimes the translation survives the trip. Sometimes it doesn’t.

A song can make you cry, can make you sing, or it can make you dance, but those same lyrics, printed on a page, look trivial.

The final hook of “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” is literally “ma ma se, ma ma sa, ma ma coo sa.” Anyone else says that, they’re going to a mental institution. Michael said it, and everyone sang along.

Those words weren’t carrying the song. So what was?

The arrangement, the rhythm, the voice. Thousands of tiny signals. most of them never surviving translation. That’s where the emotion hides.

The artist hears it clearly, and does their best to translate.

The writer is doing the same thing. Chasing an experience that’s separate from language. Reaching for words that are strong enough to carry a feeling without breaking it.

Maybe Homer’s invocation isn’t a request. Maybe it’s a calibration. A way of telling the nervous system pay attention. We’re listening now. You sit down. You say the words. The channel opens—because you’ve trained it to.