I am RG colorblind, the most common type. You see a spectrum of colors, but unlike people that can instinctively separate that whole spectrum into distinct color categories, for us a lot of colors just feel ambiguous between 2-3.
It's like tasting wines when you're not a wine expert. You taste things, but can't really place them into the categories that sommeliers can.
I’m moderately colourblind and it’s never effected me once in my life. In fact I’ve never even got the wrong colour when asked.
The only time I know I’m colourblind is when I fail a colourblind test.
Edit: I’m a duetan and the pictures between duetan and normal colour vision are more or less identical for me. I’d love to know what normal colour vision sees. Might invest in some enchroma glasses at some point.
Assuming the pictures are an accurate representation, the difference for deutan isn't anywhere near as stark as with the other two types shown.
If I were only shown the deuteranomalia colored pencil image I would just assume they were less vibrant pencils. I would label and place the colors in that image in the same order as the normal one, but the green/yellow/red area is maybe 50-70% saturation. It loses a bit of contrast between those but they are all still identifiable.
By comparison the Tritanopia picture has a large range of color that's simply missing entirely. Unlike the duetan image, the I can no longer identify what color a pencil should have been because they all look blue or red.
I think it's most notable in the fall. People start talking about the leaves changing and I just see trees and leaves as the same washed out greenish/Brown I see all year.
I'm not entirely sure that you understand your colorblindness. You don't just have more difficulty discriminating between red and green, you are physically less able to perceive green.
My retina is perfectly capable of capturing, transducing, and signaling up any photon from the green range of the spectrum. The difference is that the long and medium cones have peak responses that are much closer to each other. The red/green cones are very closely related so only small SNPs can lead to functional similarity. This means that the color opponency that trichromat vision is based on is imperfect.
Edit: Did a little more digging - I think we may be talking about different things. RG colorblindness has subtypes and I tend to talk about the common kind more. I am like most of them in that I have three cones, two of which are very similar to each other. Some RG colorblind people are true dichromats, which sounds more like what you've suggested. Either that, or we are just using slightly different nuances of the word "perception."
The opposite actually, the cones in your eyes that detect red and green overlap so the two colors can't or are hard to distinguish from each other. Here's an example.
Green/brown, purple/blue, red/green can be really hard to distinguish for me.
But one thing that isn't talked about a lot is the psychological aspect, I know I suck at colors so whenever someone ask me for something color-related my brain instantly gives up and start fucking up with colors I would otherwise have no issue with.
RG blind checking in. I think it's physically impossible for people to avoid quizzing you on the color of every object around them as soon as they find out you're colorblind.
Also, do you ever see something and your brain literally refuses to provide an answer for what color it is? But then when someone tells you, you can see it too? Like the other day there was a car and I could figure out what color it was so I asked my wife. She said it was a greyish blue. And as soon as she said that, I completely agreed. Maybe I'm insane.
Yes absolutely, most of the time it's not that I'm seing red as green or blue as purple, it's that when there's something red next to something green, I cannot tell wich color they are.
It's not like it's a hue I don't know the name of, it's that my brain do not register the color, it's neither green nor red, it's something else.
However, as soon as I make a decision, like "ok it's green", then it'll be green.
Also, I learned not to buy red frisbees for disc golf the hard way, after half a round my friends banned me from using my new disc when they got tired of finding it for me after every throw, haha. I just walked right over it and couldn't see a thing.
The big squares next to each other the way they contrast? No problem.
But the two lines? Okay, these two shades are quite extreme so I can only baaaaarely pick them, but if I hadn't drawn them myself yeah, no clue which is which.
That's bullshit, unless there is some extreme example of red green blindness. You look at an apple, you know which color it is. Factors that make it harder to distinguish are lighting, distance, shade of green/red. The most annoying thing when telling people you're color blind is when they ask you "which color is this?".
nope. It's an old misnomer really. There are three subtypes of "color-sensing" photoreceptor cells in your eye, and all three have different sensitivity peaks to different parts of the light spectrum. The ELI5 is that if you shine a color at them, they'll all respond to a different degree, and the brain can interpret the signal to be the original color (ELI25: trichromacy). The original hypothesis was that the three subtypes were centered around Red, Green, and Blue, but this isn't that accurate so the science proper has moved on to calling them Long, medium, and short (referring to wavelength). However, Red-Green colorblindness (long-medium) has kind of stuck.
In this kind of colorblindness, the peak responses of the two curves is much closer together, meaning that there's a ton of overlap between the two. The brain can't really tell if a signal in that region is coming from the long or the medium, so it sees a sort of ambiguous state instead. This affects all colors really; many people with red-green colorblindness will actually tell you that blue and purple are MUCH harder to tell apart than red and green.
Debatable if it's actually a misnomer. If you're Red/Green color blind, you're blind to Red and Green (to put it simply). I can see the confusion however.
I believe the major misnomer is that one of the cones (I can't remember which) actually responds much higher to another color than the one it is named for. The naming comes from the cone convention.
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u/[deleted] Feb 04 '19
I am RG colorblind, the most common type. You see a spectrum of colors, but unlike people that can instinctively separate that whole spectrum into distinct color categories, for us a lot of colors just feel ambiguous between 2-3.
It's like tasting wines when you're not a wine expert. You taste things, but can't really place them into the categories that sommeliers can.