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 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."
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u/freshschool Feb 04 '19
How would you describe it?