How does colourblindness work?
In: Biology
The colour receptors at the back of the eye are stimulated by certain wavelengths of light which are then translated by our brains into a visual representation of the colours and locations, in colour-blindness the distinction between different colours isn’t marked enough to easily tell them apart so red and green may look very similar to someone so two objects one red and one green next to each other the person may not be able to tell where one object stops and the other starts. https://youtu.be/IhP91B3_A20
[removed]
Do you understand how normal colour vision works, with rods and cones and wavelengths? Absolutely no shame if you don’t, I just don’t want to bore you with the thing if you already do. If you don’t, I’ll start from the beginning. If you do, then I’ll save you a bunch of boring explanation and just explain how colour blindness differs from that.
Normally we have 3 receptors of light in our eyes that roughly correspond to red, green and blue light respectively. When you stimulate more than one receptor at a time, your brain takes the information and puts it together to make all the colours.
Colour blind people have at least 1 weaker color receptor, which means the possible combinations of colours they can see is reduced, and this makes some colours harder to distinguish from others.
There’s also different types of colour blindness depending on which receptor(s) is weaker.
Basically everyone has special cell structures called cones in their eye. These cones respond to a specific frequency range of light (often called long wave, medium wave, and short wave or roughly red, green, and blue light).
Color blind people have a mutation that results in one group of cones either being damaged enough to not function at all (this is fairly rare), or to respond less than it should to that wavelength of light. That means some light sources are less bright and obvious or hues of some colors can look more similar than they do to people whose cones are normal.
In my experience, having a simulated picture usually gets the point across well (there’s a ton of difference in quality of these simulations, so look for one that you can’t see any difference between the normal picture from the adjusted deficient picture).
Latest Answers