If people are born with colour blindness , why can’t the brain adapt what we see to what they should be?

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If we are born with colour blindness , why can’t the brain adapt to the eye? If the baby is told by the parent this is blue and the child sees something else they will learn it as blue right?

In: Biology

7 Answers

Anonymous 0 Comments

If a person is red-green color blind, they have trouble distinguishing between red and green wavelengths of light. And, oversimplifying a bit, if we tell them this is green and this is red, then yes they can tell the two are different. But it’s more like telling the difference between two shades of gray.

Expanding a bit, every color you think you see is actually made up wavelengths of either Red, Blue or Green. Color “blindness” occurs when a person sees one or more of these three colors less distinctly than normal. This can lead to trouble distinguishing between colors.

Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s different types of colorblindness, but there is a loss of information. When you’re colorblind, parts of your eye are missing and your brain doesn’t receive the same information. Imagine there’s three buckets filled with balls. Different colors have different amounts of balls in each buckets. This is kinda like how we see color (it’s an oversimplification). Bucket 1 sees blue, bucket 2 sees green and bucket 3 sees red. Seeing purple is having (1,0,1) in the buckets. Some types of coloblindness happen because a bucket is missing. So when you look at purple you get (1,0,-).

So if we have something blue (1,0,0), the parent sees (1,0,0) and tells the kid this is blue. In this case the kid also sees (1,0,-) and learns this as blue. But if we have something purple (1,0,1) it’s a bit different. The parent sees (1,0,1) and tells the kid the kid this is purple. But the kid still sees (1,0,-), the same thing as blue. So now the kid has two labels for what is percieved as one color. All learning and adaptation done by the brain is done at higher levels (I believe this actually takes place in the eye, not the brain). If the brain is a computer, this is a broken USB port, not a software butg.

Of course this is a simplification. You don’t pick up on colors quite this directly and you also pick up on the overall brightness (in this example, the purple would look brighter).

My friend has red green colorblindness and can’t make out the difference between red and green. His parents can’t show him a green thing and say this is green and show him a red thing and say this is red. His brain perceives them as the same colors and he can’t see a difference

Anonymous 0 Comments

There is less color information to work with… I am partially color blind and have no issue with pure colors, but have issues detecting where tone is similar but with added color. No problem with blue, but can only tell it’s purple if in context of comparing to blue to notice variation. Similar for things like dark greens vs. browns. Or sometimes something like a light orange vs. bright green… I’m thinking specifically like those odd concept car colors you see on futuristic cars at auto shows. I can tell it’s a bright color and has a yellow component along with other colors but sometimes can’t sus out whether it’s red or blue in addition.

Anonymous 0 Comments

they don’t see different colors. they see two colors as the same and it becomes impossible to distinguish.

>If the baby is told by the parent this is blue and the child sees something else they will learn it as blue right?

this light might look exactly the same as green to the child. so how can they tell blue vs green?

Anonymous 0 Comments

If you ever get the chance to use those glasses that allow color blind people to see the full spectrum, I highly recommend it.

Anonymous 0 Comments

Yes, they almost always have relative color sight and many people with mild color blindness don’t know they’re color blind until they’re adults and get tested. Just makes it harder to distinguish certain colors as they view them as being nearly the same

Anonymous 0 Comments

There are different types of color blindness.

And of course children can learn relationally, attributing what they see to the tones and the name taught to them.