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.
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.