What is it with these color combinations (red-green and blue-yellow) that a person with a certain type of color blindness make them hard to distinguish and differentiate?
In: Biology
Visible light exists on a spectrum from around 380 to 700 nanometers of wavelength. Your eyes have three types of color receptors, each centered on different points on that spectrum.
However, these color receptors don’t just detect light precisely at their designated wavelength. They merely detect light most brightly at that wavelength. At wavelengths close to their point, they detect the light but more dimly.
So if you’ve got incoming light that is midway between your red and green color receptor, the information received by the eye is “a bit dim” on both receptors – and your brain can guess that the light is midway between those two colors (because the blue color receptor is registering ‘very dim’).
What happens with most colorblindness is that these central points for the color receptors are too close together. For example, your ‘red’ receptors might not actually be ‘red’ but more ‘orange’. Having these receptors too close together makes it more difficult to determine colors in that range.
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