What Toothbrushes Taught Me About Ways of Seeing

Since our boys were brand new, we have organized things by color in order to keep straight what belongs to which kid. The phrase "Blue is for Beckett," has been a mantra in our house for the last two and a half years. When they were newborns, we would dress Beckett in blue so that others knew which kid was which. Though we have pretty much dropped color coding their clothing (Beckett, as it turns out, likes much brighter colors), we still use this to organize items that they should not share.

Beckett's milk cup is still blue because Aodan needs lactose free milk, so the coloring helps us keep the two types of milk separate. We also keep their toothbrushes separated by color. Blue is for Beckett. But we recently learned that even this simple system is not fool-proof. Even something as seemingly straight forward as color scheme is, as it turns out, subject to interpretation.

I learned this when we were both in the bathroom at the same time while I was brushing the boys' teeth. Charissa said something like, "oh, you switched their tooth brushes. I guess it doesn't matter." Of course, I hadn't. I was using the blue toothbrush to brush Beckett's teeth, so I replied, "blue is for Beckett." I then learned that she thought the other toothbrush was the blue one. We had been using opposite toothbrushes the entire time we've had this set. She is not, by the way, color blind. Nor am I. But we saw these two toothbrushes very differently, obviously.

Every geeky kid with an existential streak will remember the moment when he began to wonder whether or not people really do see colors the same way. What if what I see as blue, you see as red? We would never know that what we saw was different because we would both always call what we were seeing blue. This is the kind of question that is interesting from a theoretical perspective but that really doesn't matter much. As long as we consistently call that color blue, it doesn't really matter what it looks like to us, we can still communicate about the color consistently. But what was happening here was something different.

When I asked Charissa what she saw when she looked at these toothbrushes, she said that the one on the left was a green toothbrush with blue trim, and the one on the right was a blue toothbrush with purple trim. This is because the bases and the very tops of these toothbrushes are green and blue, respectively.

But I see these completely differently. I see the long necks on these toothbrushes and the fats parts on the handles, so I see them as blue (on the left) and purple (on the right). So, though we both see the same colors, we define which color is predominant, and thus definitive, in different ways.

This hints at a fundamental difference in the way my wife and I see things. What I see as trim, or background noise, she sees as defining characteristics. From my perspective, it seems like she sees a negative image of the same world I see. What's unimportant to me, is definitive to her.

Of course, to what extent our way of seeing toothbrushes is analogous to our ways of seeing the rest of the world is not settled. But the lesson here is still an interesting one. My wife and I, despite sharing our lives together, and despite the fact that we agree on most things and have an extraordinary number of things in common, see the world through different eyes, and may perceive it completely differently.

And ultimately, we name things according to how we see them. We see things according to how we define their characteristics. So, which characteristics we see as important--as definitive--has everything to do with how we name the world.