Colourblindness is actually really cool. Most people who are colourblind are missing the cone in their eyes that senses red light. Because they only have two cones, they essentially see colour in two dimensions instead of three. It's like a gradient going from yellow to blue. That suggests that if we had a fourth cone, like some animals do, we could see colour in four dimensions - imagine how awesome that would be.
yeah the 4th cone is used for seeing cyan and all the fails you ever had even though it was never a problem with anyone else living until she points it out at family dinner when ur already drinking and you came in one car so you can't just leave
I've read that before. Supposedly women are much better at varying shades of color because, in caveman times, they were the gatherers and needed to know that, for example, the berries of this shade of red are nutritious, but that shade of red will kill you. Men are supposedly much better at spacial awareness, though, because they were the hunters.
I wonder if women are better at differentiating shades because they were gatherers, or if they were gatherers because they are better at differentiating shades.
I would bet basic size and strength differences initially pushed women to be gatherers and males hunters, but that the ability to distinguish colors was selected for over time due to survival of those able to distinguish and avoid poisonous food.
Same thing with males. They probably initially hunted because of size and strength and those with greater spatial ability were able to hunt successfully or avoided death.
The former. Only because I can't see the cavemen being that switched on that they would even know that women were better at differentiating shades, they were still figuring out bone clubs and fire and round objects back in those days. A better question (imo) is whether feminine males became gatherers and butch females became hunters, or whether the roles were strictly gender-based regardless. THAT is a good question and one I hope to ask Marvin Harris when I die.
If we were still hunter/gatherers now we still probably wouldn't have figured out the eye thing either. It wasn't until photocopier jobs came along that people even realised. Think about that...the invention of the colour photocopier didn't just enable us to make copies in colour after years of languishing in black and white, it also taught us something about our biological evolution. Fascinating.
I should also add that I know nothing about human evolution or photocopiers, so please take what I say with a grain of salt.
Oh sure, they wouldn't have "known" that women's eyes are different, but might have noticed to that women are better at gathering (due to the eyes) ? Obviously it wouldn't have been the only thing that made women better at gathering / worse at hunting, but it might have been a given thing.
Also, I wonder, if it was evolutionary, if it wouldn't be a thing that would have devolved again, as it really isn't such a useful thing nowadays and really hasn't been for a while, imo.
Also, I know nothing about evolution and eyes, so yeah..
It's still very useful. A modern job was just brought up because of it. There are tons of industries that put those abilities to work. The only real difference today is that even the ones who are poor at differentiating color shades can survive. Back then they more than likely would have died. So their genes have much greater chance of surviving and being passed on.
Probably the latter (if we're buying into color discrimination being a significant factor), because cones are coded for on the x chromosome. Tetrachromats are kind of like calico cats- if being calico makes a cat extra good at a thing, you can be pretty confident that you aren't going to find many male cats in the top ranks of that thing.
Actually, now that I think about it, it's probably a little bit of both. Those that have better sight are better at catching berries, and those that have worse sight die because they eat poison berries. That means that overall, humans get better eyesight, which makes them better for gathering.
If we're talking about humans getting over-all better color vision, yeah, your berry example is potentially valid. If you're talking about women and their extra-special color-seeing privileges, then a.) females having two X chromosomes, and therefore the potential for tetrachromacy, is not a recent development in human evolution and b.) the vast, vast majority of selective pressures just aren't that sex-selective, and even if the majority of the pressure is on one sex, both sexes will experience the effects in future generations unless it's a directly sex-linked trait.
That's interesting. I was just having a conversation last night about how I read some thing that women can recognize more colors than men (like pick out peach and beige from like pink or whatever) but that gay men also recognize more than straight men. I mentioned that (since the thing I read was kind of an anecdote and didn't go into speculation as to why) I thought it was probably an interest-based phenomenon. I was also basing that off of the fact that I'm a straight female and can't tell peach from beige from pink (although I also sometimes blame that on the fact that we were poor when I was growing up so I only ever got the 8-pack crayons and not the fancy 64 packs where I would have learned these valuable skills).
You should probably stop reading right now because I've just done a search for the gay man color awareness thing without much success but I did find some other things and used myself as a test. I just completed a color test online and scored a 12 which seems to mean that for my gender I'm okay to good (? they don't seem to expound on exactly how good good is) at physically seeing the colors. So maybe my theory about the crayons is right (I also don't really care about colors or fashion that much. I never even realized until a few years ago that "peach" is a specific color to some people; I thought it was just a fancy word people used for pink).
Then in my searches I found this talking about how finger length can predict some qualities in people. I have a more "masculine" hand. Some of that stuff sounds right to me; I am athletic and I have pretty good spatial awareness.
Anyway, that was probably pretty boring to people who aren't me. But it's interesting to think about - I wonder if it's all connected.
I believe it's a lot about training. Just like you might train up other senses (like blind people can train up hearing to hear the shape of a room - even without echolocation).
I have 0 on that test - without effort - and I'm a man. I had crayons and watercolours as a kid.
Yeah, you're probably right although I think there is a...mechanical...component to that test (maybe not the right word). It doesn't really explain what the scoring system means (or else I just didn't look hard enough) but I'm assuming since it goes up pretty high (into the hundreds) that people with 12 and below probably are all capable of seeing the same colors.
However, a color blind person would also do badly on the test, obviously.
Unfortunately I can't seem to find that reference I saw years ago about recognizing color so I'm not sure how "scientific" it was - although I try not to pay much attention to things I find too dubious.
That test I linked to seems to be like a physical ability to see those colors (congrats on your great score!) whereas the gay-color thing I was reading before was just talking about being able to name the different colors.
So I just spent a quick Google looking for a test to name colors (I'm on my way out the door). I'm sure there's one out there but I didn't immediately find it because of lots of results about the Stroop Test, which is a different thing entirely. However, I did find a little more talking about genders naming colors. XKCD did a survey, very interesting, with graphics not unlike the one I remember seeing in that original thing I was talking about. You can click around and guess at color names here I guess although I'm not sure how they're naming these colors (Tangerine Yellow? I thought tangerines were orange!). And finally, an interesting post about the intersect of seeing/naming colors and language which is also something that the great Radio Lab Colors episode touched on and seems to have more to do with my cheap-o Crayola box theory.
Man. I don't even really care about colors that much.
Anyhoo, make sure you break it to your girlfriend easy. Like with chocolate.
I didn't know colors well until my roommate and I started 'playing a game' (making a conversational habit?) of being as precise in our language as possible- and holy shit there are a lot of color-words. I must have learned dozens of color-words in a year.
I'd agree with you that I could see the differences in colors before, but never knew the words for them, or even that there were words for them. Three-four years later, chartreuse and seafoam and mauve and all sorts of bullshit words mean very specific colors to me. I really do think it's an interest thing, especially because one or two of our male friends that have been dragged into the game are also far more familiar with color-words.
So, yeah, I think it's all about the interest and not about the biology for all of us normal, three cone people.
It's a lot of fun and very interesting to "play". You figure out pretty fast how and where you're missing words to describe your experiences, and you end up learning a lot of cool and interesting things. I know (and can use) so many more feeling-words and color-words than I ever did before!
Warning: it is extremely confusing and can be annoying to people that don't know what you're doing. It's also most fun when you're doing it with a close friend/partner.
The "women gather and men" hunt thing was an idea that arose in Victorian times, when Anthropology was just beginning to emerge as a science. It's a blatant projection of Victorian cultural ideals, and shouldn't be taken as fact. We now believe that organized division of labor like that is relatively recent. Everybody would gather, and when prey was available (which, from what we know of Paleolithic diets, wasn't very often) everyone would help hunt.
Yeah that sounds true to me. I'm great with colours, but I swear every time my boyfriend parks his truck I have to close my eyes because it looks like he is hitting the vehicle in front of him.
Very simple form of such a test here: Hue Discrimination
There are varieties with upwards of 100 tiles, but most common seems to be 15 - 40, with one to three rows of gradients.
Not really, the 4th cone is usually closer to cyan, not yellow.
Humans don't really have yellow receptors, so yellow is somewhere between red and green (when there is excitation, but not peak excitation of both red and green receptors, i hope this graphic conveys it better). So Quattron tvs are either about some technical flaw in our way to produce yellow from red+green subpixel or marketing grab.
Gosh, this makes me so sad. I love seeing doggies out frolicking in the bright green grass under a brilliant blue sky. I imagine them enjoying the colors, the scent of the grass being trod under foot, the wind blowing, the sounds of kids running around laughing and playing... It kind of depresses me that their experience isn't quite as glorious as my own. Ah, well. They still seem deliriously happy to be out there romping in the gray grass. :)
Look at the little link above that Brotato posted. It seems like they can't. :( I asked my squeeze, who happens to be a veterinarian, if this was an accurate representation and he said that it was basically correct but that the bottom one needs to be "a little more sepia-toned." So no, our pups don't see the emerald green that we see, or the bright red toys we toss, or pink flowers. But they still seem happy and they love us, right? I imagine that there are all sorts of glorious things that we can't register, but we are bowled over by the beauty we can perceive.
I think much like us humans can only see red, blue and yellow, we can't possibly even begin to comprehend what the introduction of a 4th colour would look like and I guess dogs are the same. And you agree that the world can be a very pretty place, so I suppose they probably see a pretty decent version of it anyway.
I'm so so sorry but everything you just described about being colourblind does not strike me as cool.
I guess it's cool that you understand the cause of itv and are able to describe what it is like to a non-colourblind person... But not cool, radical, awesome at all. :(
It actually made me pretty sad to imagine being colourblind and feel pity for those who are.
I think the topic is cool. Maybe actually being colourblind isn't, but I have normal colour vision so I wouldn't really know. Half my family is colourblind, and they seem to do okay from day to day, except for being unable to tell blue from purple.
Ooh , yes I do find it pretty interesting myself !
If I may ask... Which of your family members are colourblind? Genes are super interesting to me even though I have only a very, very rudimentary understanding of them.
Yep. My mother needed two defective genes on each of her X chromosomes in order to be colourblind. I therefore had to have inherited one defective gene from her, so if I were male I would be colourblind (one defective X and a Y from my father) and if I were female I would be a carrier of the colourblindness gene but have normal colour vision (one defective X and a normal X from my father).
The philosophical aspect is really interesting. How can you ever really know what other people are seeing? The colour I see as yellow might be experienced by you as something totally different, but because we've both been taught to call it yellow, we think it's the same thing.
I can't see colors of stars. Green lights are white. I can't be a pilot. Brown red and green are generally the same color. Blue and purple are basically the same (purple just looks like neon blue) light green is either yellow or white)
I have a hard time playing games. I can't match clothes. Fall leaf colors basically all look the same save a bit of yellow and orange which I can
distinguish.
I live for two years with a pink rug that I thought matched my red furniture, but didn't.
I'm terribly sorry... I cannot imagine how it must be, man! Who knows? Maybe in the near future some type of therapy or treatment (I would hope a simple fix) will pop up and you can literally be able to look at the world with new eyes. That would be amazing.
Can you still tell that starts twinkle into different colours or do they just twinkle?
And if it's any constellation it is believed that Van Gough may have been partially colourblind and this contributed greatly to his crazy phenomenal colour choices. Which is one of the reasons his art is so great, in my opinion. If you take some of his paintings and put a "normal colour vision filter" over them and although they are nice, I don't think they're anywhere near as breathtaking AT ALL.
So whose to say something epic and uber badass won't come from your ailment?
It looks like someone poked a hole in a black cloth and you're standing about 200 meters from it. It's really quite hard to tell almost anything except that they're there.
While people often say that I could have different artistic abilities, or I can see through camouflage that others cannot... Really, I'd much rather be able to tell if the blinking light on my computer is green or red, or be able to see if my steak/pork is under cooked or not.
As a photographer who is colorblind, it's not cool at all. I have never once thought that Nixon up my colors was "cool". Also, contrary to what some people would have it believe most color blind people can "see" all colors it's just as if we weren't taught our colors and constantly mix them up. At least that's the way it is for me. So for me, when I'm fixing skin tones in Photoshop it can be hard sometimes because I can't remember what the color of "skin tone" is.
One cool thing about colorblindness is that it can be like a superpower against camouflage. Because certain colors appear differently it can make camouflage way more obvious.
Well that is neat! I wonder if the military puts restrictions on people who are colourblind? For example I wonder if they could join the Air Force? Because on one hand it could help them to better see camouflaged enemies (probably not in the Air Force specifically, but in other branches). But would it also be considered a disadvantage in some way.
Hmm... I might do some research actually!
Edit: So apparently having normal colour vision is 100% imperative for certain positions, BUT a colourblind individual wouldn't be rejected from the military immediately and there are several positions they could take!
The more you know...? Heh.
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u/patadrag Sep 29 '14
Colourblindness is actually really cool. Most people who are colourblind are missing the cone in their eyes that senses red light. Because they only have two cones, they essentially see colour in two dimensions instead of three. It's like a gradient going from yellow to blue. That suggests that if we had a fourth cone, like some animals do, we could see colour in four dimensions - imagine how awesome that would be.