Colour-blindness

[slycat]

One little known fact about me is that I'm colour-blind. I thought I'd make a post about it and how it affects me. Basically as soon as I mention to anyone that I am colour-blind, people instantly start pointing at things asking "what colour's this?" which can get rather annoying. When I say I'm colour-blind, it's not like I see in black and white or colours are all flipped around, I just get what I consider similar colours confused.

I recall when I was first told I was colour-blind that I had the red/green variety of colour-blindness after doing one of those tests with the coloured dots and patterns. This basically means that I get colours which have reds or greens in them confused. This is also why blue really stands out for me I guess. When I explain that I think one colour is similar to another, they just think I'm mad and have trouble believing me. Thankfully it's rare in day-to-day life that I find this condition a real problem. Only recently at work when customers have sent in smoke ping graphs had I really had a problem as the colour for 50% packet loss looked a lot like the colour for 1% packet loss and I had to ask a colleague for help. This in itself isn't really an issue, just slightly embarrassing.

The only other place I tend to have difficulty with colours is with colour matching puzzle games like Bejewelled. Many puzzle games which rely on matching similar coloured pieces thankfully have a colour-blind option which adds symbols onto the pieces. Hexic and Peggle thankfully have this option, however Bejewelled does not. This is likely because all the differently coloured pieces are differently shaped, but I still get the green and orange pieces easily confused and also when special tiles like bombs in Bejewelled Twist or multipliers in Bejewelled Blitz (A Facebook game which has recently been a thorn in my side!) appear in the games, it becomes rather difficult as they are all the same shape but are still need to be matched by colour. I still really enjoy these games but it's difficult being competitive when I will always be slower than others due to my condition.

Knowing that it's possible for people to see reality differently to others always leads to the possibility that what I see as blue could be completely different to what others see as blue. We all call it blue because that's what we were brought up knowing that colour to be, but what's to say that it wouldn't look different through another person's eyes? Well I expect considering everyone's eyes work in the same way, we most likely do see things the same as others... but it's still an interesting thought!

Comments

[scruff.livejournal.com]

One of the guys who was in the same lab as me, Luke Jefferson, did his PhD on automatically compensating for different types of colourblindness, I think he wrote a phone app that'd use the camera and automagically adjust the image to the best contrast difference (the same algorithms are used in printers where two colours that might have the same brightness are printed in black and white) in realtime.

Fascinating stuff!

[balloonfox.livejournal.com]

I think I have a touch of that myself...I often have a hard time telling a few colors apart.

Also, here's something I often think about, because there's no way to prove it one way or another: what if I look at something that's blue, but to you it looks like what *I* would call red. Since we both where schooled that the name for that color is blue, we'd both call it blue.

Did that make any sense at all? I mean...we'd both call it blue because that's what we learned, but if I where to look at it threw your eyes, I would have called it red!

Maybe I'm just talking out of my ass. LOL

[slycat.livejournal.com]

Well I'm no biologist so I've no idea if this is possible, but it is an interesting concept :)

[scruff.livejournal.com]

It's not possible, I'm afraid, the wavelength of a colour and the molecules in the retinal cells it excites are physical constants :)

[gaz-a.livejournal.com]

The question is that does the signal produce the same actual "colour" in the brain that we see? All the colours could be swapped randomly in every person's brain and nobody would ever know.

[scruff.livejournal.com]

Oh, it's entirely possible that they produce different signals, which're mapped back to abstract concepts of colour in the brain, but those concepts are the same, and've been part of the primate mind for tens of millions of years - current theory is that the red/green axis developed as a way of distinguishing ripe/unripe fruit, for example; red/green colourblind people are actually reverting to a far more ancient way of doing things, just because a few genes are slightly different.

How colours are labelled is quite interesting, there's evidence that your linguistic and cultural upbringing actually do, for want of a better term, colour your perception of'em.

[skunki.livejournal.com]

I'm sort of "half-colour-blind" and I'm an expert in colours and ink with a degree from the University Of Print And Media Technology. So what? I know the world is more "red" than I recognize, but I like it that way.

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

I remember the colour tests as part of one of my biology courses. Aside from the colour blob picture tests with the numbers as you mention, there was also wools. Different colours of wools that you had to group into reds, greens, blues and others (which were mostly browns). One guy did the test and the rest of us were all boggled as to why his "others" pile had so few in, and the reds were mostly browns. I think it surprised him to find out he was colour blind.

[slycat.livejournal.com]

It's not really fair to make kids do that kind of test in a group as the ones who are colour blind will be singled out. I found out at the optician I think.

[kytheraen.livejournal.com]

Well, we were all about 19/20ish, so I think he handled it alright.

[sphelx.livejournal.com]

Do you still see/find colours that you don't know the name of?
I do. Every now and then I'll see something and be completely at a loss to name it's colour.

[aragontigerseye.livejournal.com]

Color vision is a quite interesting subject at times...
Even tho some aspects might suggest otherwise (::looks at comments from others written earlier::) I like to think that colors can be quite a subjective thing...

I've seen that with my housemates... one of them is an artist. He draws, designs and things like that. The other is a programmer... I myself am a programmer, but have done some webdesign and am a bit trained at what colors are supposed to go good together... and a few of those combinations just make my eyes scream, but are seemingly quite pleasant or okay to look at for others.

At the same time similar colors have been a thing of discussion here... where I'd see a color close to blue my artist housemate would see a color close to green, no mistake there... whereas the other programmer would just state that it's a turquoise.

So things like that lead me to think what I stated above: that colors are indeed a quite subjective thing, but still influenced by physical aspects...