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Comment by bendykstra | Hacker News Reader

I learned the importance of trichromacy when a friend and I came across a patch of wild strawberries. I'm partially red-green colorblind and for every strawberry I found, my friend found ten. They were almost invisible to me. It's neat to see that the fourth cone's response curve peaks right between the red and green cones' curves in tetrachromats. I bet they are amazing at finding berries.

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This probably has nothing to do with chromacy, but is related to finding berries and other odd things. My sister is gifted with finding four leaf clovers. She walks in a field and seems to just see them. Every time she picks one, it's a four leaf. Her record find is a 7 leaf clover.

I always wondered how that's possible.

Is it possible she has synesthesia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia)?

What does it mean to be partially red-green colobrlind? Isn't it the case that you either have the red-green cone or you don't?

It's conceivable that a mutation in the gene for the red or green light-sensing protein gets a mutation that just shifts its sensitive wavelength closer to the other. So "partial" r/g colorblindness could occur if there was still some separation between those wavelengths, but not as much as is typical.

> Deuteranomaly ... The medium-wavelength pigment is shifted towards the red end of the spectrum resulting in a reduction in sensitivity to the green area of the spectrum. [0]

The closer the spectrum perceived by the M (green) cone is to L (red) cone, the harder is is to differentiate red from green.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness#cite_ref-KallC...

I don't know how it works, but I have it - I can see red and green and pink in big blobs, but when there's lots of small red and green (or pink) details mixed - they seem the same to me (if their darkness is similar).

Also I have problems with big uniform colour areas it there's small amount of green mixed with pink or red and vice-versa. I was making a sunset skybox for a game, and friends were wondering why the sky is slightly green - for me it was pinkish-red-yellow, but I put there some green by mistake.

That sounds like standard red-green colorblindness.

Good to know, I thought standard red-green color blindness is when you don't recognize these colors at all.

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