How do you explain colors to a person born blind?

I would try to explain by touch.Is it warm or cold? and probably sound.Is is dull or bright/sharp.I am not sure what they would see in their mind’s eye.My mother was legally blind ,but of course was able to see some things and could also rely on her memory.

Textures and sensation. White clouds are fluffy like cotton balls, greens are cool like cold water, reds are warm, like a cup of coffee. Let your mind go, close your eyes and explore.

You should watch the film Mask not The Mask with Jim Carey. There is a lovely scene where the main character “explains” colours to his blind friend.

Annie Dillard’s chapter “Seeing” from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek touches on the seeming impossibility of describing the visual world: “I couldn’t unpeach the peaches” is a fitting line.

I think @lucillelucillelucille and @Adirondackwannabe have the closest possible subversion to this difficult problem: synesthesia. The only issue is that not everyone is going to look at a particular shade of blue and feel the same thing. Our abstracts of emotions, textures, sounds, and scents are our best bet at being able to capture the essence of colours.

A friend of mine suggested once that orange was the taste and scent of a ripe tangerine.

Thank you for your answer, leannd1986! Now you’ve given me a reason to watch Mask again- I don’t remember that part, but I’m going to watch it to see the way it happens!

I saw Cruiser starting an answer and that made me think of music as another avenue to explore colors. A light waltz, a driving rock beat, the blackness of a death waltz or the delicate notes of a flute. Think of the options.

Put on a Keith Jarret album and talk about how light has texture just like music, It just happens to be in a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum and picked up by different sensory organs that are sensitive to those frequencies.

A combination of the colors of things, their taste and smell, and the emotional connotations of colors—blue, sky, serene, heavenly; green plants, [money US—greenback] growth, salad, asparagus, broccoli, healthy, [except when a face is green]; red, lips, blood, valentine hearts, passion, rubies, love, cinnamon candy, yellow, sunshine [even if it isn’t], buttercups, butter, corn, happy, black, dark, death, ebony, coal, little black dress, chic; brown, coffee, chocolate, tree trunks, dirt, shit, business suits [for some—others wont wear brown]; grey, cloudy, sad, business suits, industrial things, mouse, self-effacing; white, pure, nothingness, snow, vanilla ice cream

as @janbb said dpworkin’s comments here http://www.fluther.com/62758/how-do-describe-a-color-to-a-completely-blind-person/

Check out some of the previous questions on this topic for @dpworkin’s answers to this. He has a blind girlfriend and has written some very good descriptions of her sense of color.

Just a random theory of mine but to me it seems possible that we all see colors differently.

Why would that be necessary? It’s a bit like trying to explain what walking is like to a fish.

@noelleptc . . . If I was truly a fish or a person blind from birth, I would have no frame of reference for which to even try and imagine the description.

I have a couple of buddies who were friends, in high school, with another student who was blind. They told me they were all sitting around getting stoned one day and one of them asked the blind fella what it was like being high when you are blind.

He answered that it was the same as it was for the rest of them except he couldn’t fucking see.

I saw a movie once where this girl wanted to help her blind friend learn the color green, so she had her eat a bunch of green food, like lettuce and peppers and asparagus etc. just a thought (:

How about explaining what happens in the brain when you process colour? I guess you’d have start with a discussion on what light is and how it reflects off various things to give us our perception of colour. It’s a tough one, but I don’t think it’s impossible.