our yearly Gift of color and beauty

Beebe Lake, near Cornell University,
New York State USA (University Photography)

If I were to tell you from whom Vleeptron just received the following e-mail ... well ... all I'll tell you is that the guy teaches this kind of stuff at a joint that you couldn't possibly afford to attend. But a lot of Vleeptron's readers are smart as whips, so you could take this guy's courses on your Full Academic Scholarships.

But anyway, he's just around the corner from me, and like me, has been bombarded and mesmerized by New England's annual explosion of color in the remarkable old growth mountainous forests.

I would like to extrapolate from his thoughts and quotations that a small bit of what I wrote about the Autumn leaves hereabouts was scientifically reasonably accurate. But that might be too much of a stretch. So here's The Hard Stuff. This is The Real McCoy:

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Here are some thoughts about consciousness and its unknown origins:

An excerpt from John Jerome’s STONE WORK:

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The foliage colors raise some interesting questions, sending me to the library. It’s all chemicals, says the biochemistry text. Chlorophyll keeps the leaves green while they are green, carotenoids -- as in butter, corn, canary feathers -- turn them yellow when the Chlorophyll goes. Tannin ads the browns, the bronzes; something called anthocyanin turns leaves red if the sap of the plant is acidic, blue or purple if it is alkaline. Color is a substance, says the chemist. Funny how when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

The physicist on the other hand says it all has to do with light. The leaves that look red are only reflecting that portion of the white light of the sun that is composed of waves on the order of thirty-two millionths of on inch long. Violet leaves reflect waves that are sixteen millionths of one inch long. All the other colors that autumn leaves can be, all the several million shades that the human eye can discern, are strung out along the sixteen millionths of an inch difference; the total span of the visual portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. Yellow is smack in the middle, eight millionths of an inch away from red in one direction, from indigo in the other. I wouldn’t have thought that I could discern eight millionths of an inch, but the physicists say it is as clear as the difference between, well, blue and yellow. Color is a distinction.

Then there’s physiology, the uncanny capacity of the rods and cones of the eye to take these substances and distinctions and somehow transform them into the maelstrom of sensation that staggers me when I step out of door. Actually, the rods have nothing to do with it; only the cones deal with color. Nobody quite knows how. The most popular theory posits three types of cones, one of which responds better to red, one to green, the third to violet. The various hues are perceived by combinations of response; when all three types are equally stimulated, the color white is perceived. By the eye, or by the brain. Or the consciousness that operates the eye and brain. Or the consciousness that is operated by the eye and brain.

Color then isn’t a substance or a distinction but a pattern of nerve impulses -- at least until it gets to consciousness. 'The eye is a device by which the energy of a light pattern is converted into the energy of a nerve impulse that is conducted by the optic nerve to the visual cortex of the brain for interpretation as a visual image' says Sigmund Grollman in The Human Body. That’s all fine and good, except for the interpretation part; electromagnetic vibrations into nerve impulses, yes, but how do we turn nerve signals into whatever it is that makes this glory explode in our heads when we step outdoors into a hardwood forest in the fall? Funny how science inevitably comes bumping to a stop against a wall like that: how muscle works, the smallest particle, the origin of anything. Why color is pleasurable; what pleasure is --

October in the woods is like a forced march into the sensory life; I am
armed with, let’s see, the capacity to discern shapes, motions, and colors, to perceive smells, hear sounds. I can also touch things, feel their textures, taste them if I dare. But that’s about it, in the way of experiencing the woods. Except that is for proprioception, self-sensing, without which I couldn’t get into the woods to enjoy them. Proprioception is the sense that makes the first five work, that fetches pleasure (and pain and everything else) and brings it home to us. It is seldom mentioned except among physiologists, an almost secret capacity that explains a huge part of how we experience the world." The proprioceptors are nerve endings embedded throughout the muscle, tendons, and joints of the body that read and report on relative position of body parts, on movement, loading, acceleration and deceleration. They make the musculoskeletal system that largest sense organ of the body, a receptor as well as an effector ... They tell us where we are and what we are doing as we are doing it; they are our connection to the present tense of physical action."

Wading through the fallen leaves, I make one more small obeisance to proprioception, to the entire sensory universe that gives me a self to take out for walks like this. My head tells me this is true -- that the senses are where the self comes from -- but it is a touch too psychological, and therefore fuzzy, to my tastes. I’m more comfortable with the harder edges of physiology and physics. Ah, that’s it; proprioception is where physiology and physics come together. That must be why it fascinates me so. It’s the tool that helps you get the physics right, the means by which you get pleasure out of physics. It is the internal rigging that locates the body in time and space, the three-dimensional internal map of the body that redraws itself, realigns itself, with every move you make." I keep failing to get its wonders adequately set down, the impossible riches brought to us in those mysterious moments when information turns into experience. My frustration reminds of a Lewis Thomas essay on embryology in The Medusa and the Snail. He is speaking of the process that at some point switches on a single cell and allows it to grow into the brain. "No one has a ghost of an idea how this works," he says, "and nothing else in life can ever be this puzzling."