The Two-Century Quest to Quantify Our Senses
One day in the year 1840, a man opened his eyes and couldn’t see. This was it, the “final blow,” as he later wrote in his diary. It was as if the man, a renowned German medical doctor turned professor of physics, had inexplicably gone blind overnight. But his condition was not new. It was the dramatic culmination of months of unexplainable symptoms that had befallen this scientist: bursts of light in the eyes, headaches, nausea, lack of appetite, insomnia, and neurosis. Little did the scientist know, however, that his dire situation would eventually result in something remarkable—a startling revelation that would forever change our understanding of the human senses and how they would come to interact with machines.
No one quite knew why Gustav Fechner fell ill. Burnout, perhaps, brought on by too much work, like partially writing and editing a 7,000-page, eight-volume encyclopedia? Or turning himself into a human guinea pig in the name of science, damaging his eyesight? Fechner had stared too long into the sun using glasses with only colored filters as he explored the perceptual phenomena of afterimages—the images that stay on the retina long after one stops gazing at a light source. This series of experiments seemed to throw him into a searing, never-ending “light chaos” that he would constantly experience, even with closed eyes. He even painted his bedroom black to stop light from leaking in.
Emerging experimental psychology laboratories wanted to create a new kind of human being.
“Close to insanity,” Fechner nevertheless began to slowly recover from his malady. Instead of gradually adjusting his eyes to faint light, he took the brute force route: sudden and intensive short-term exposure to the brightness of the everyday, quickly closing his eyes before the light caused intense pain. He resumed eating, consuming such odd delicacies as raw ham soaked in
