25 Sept 2012

Seeing and believing

According to Google the human eye can differentiate over 2 million different colours. 2 MILLION. That’s a lot of colours. I’m pretty happy with that (and the contact lenses that stop my world from blurring together into mid-grey tumble dryer fluff). How many colours ARE there exactly though- and what would dulux call them all?

Also, just because I can’t see something doesn’t mean it’s not there, right? So how many actual colours are there in total? Is there a finite amount? How much colour creating did God do before he got bored and moved onto sound waves? And why did he choose to limit the human eye to 2 million shades of everything when bees and jumping spiders see ultraviolet and snakes and TV doofers have infra red?

And sound. I’m not the best person to comment on the technicalities of noise (I know this as I married a sound engineer). My qualifications begin and end with having 2 ears. But does anyone else feel slightly paranoid that bats and dolphins can chatter away to each other without us ever being able to hear them? That’s just rude.

Even the sounds that humans are programmed to hear are dwindling a bit - I'm deaf to the mosquito alarm outside our Spar which causes the kids to walk by it with their hands over their ears. For similar frequency-related reasons I also heard absolutely nothing from the little black plastic contraption in our ex-neighbours front garden, which the kids convinced me was a motion activated anti-cat device. Apparently it emitted a high buzzing when you walked too close to it. I wouldn’t know. I couldn’t hear it. There were never any cats in the garden though.

Thinking about sounds I can't hear makes me think of what God CAN hear. What does the song of our hearts really sound like? You know, pure worship. Lost in his presence. My only reality is you and I'll sing my heart out without thinking about the person sat next to me. That type of thing. Or for those of us who don't often manage that, even just collectively singing out to our creator while half thinking about what to have for lunch / Has baby puked down my back / Are kids singing or messing around - are our teeny human ears even capable of hearing what’s really going on? Probably not. If science can demonstrate that there are stimuli in the natural world that our 5 senses can’t process, there’s bound to be stuff beyond the fringes of the jumping spider and TV doofer that God can hear just fine. And that’s without the Angels joining in.

I need different contact lenses. And some sort of amplification. And probably a little less care about the person sitting next to me.