I recently saw an example of red-green blindness and I cannot wrap my head around how they’re able to see both yellow and blue vividly. If they can see yellow and blue individually, why can they not see green?
I did a bit of searching and learned how the red, green, and blue cones in your eyes work, so I was temporarily satisfied that it was the same as TVs and monitors that don’t actually produce the colour yellow but only give the illusion… Until I remembered that the illusion is achieved by combining red and green light, so wtf.
Help my brain. Make it simple.
In: Biology
The colors that a monitor is able to represent are found on a visualization of the visible spectrum. Example: [https://www.thoughtco.com/the-visible-light-spectrum-2699036](https://www.thoughtco.com/the-visible-light-spectrum-2699036)
Note that it starts at red on the low wavelength side and slowly morphs to purple/violet on the other.
The way normal vision works, the wavelengths are all relatively easily distinguished. “This here is red, this is green, this is blue”
For those of us that are color blind, there are certain wavelengths that are easily confused. “This is red, this could be either red/green, this is *certainly* green, this is blue.
Getting back to the analogy of rods/cones in our eyes and the monitor. Simplifying things, let’s say we have red cones, green cones, and blue cones in our eyes. Some of our cones are defective and react to the wrong color of light.
Taking this a step further, this is how the color blindness glasses work. They don’t do anything but cut out the frequencies of light that are the most commonly confused. Now what you’re left with is light that is definitively green or definitively red.
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