We See Colors Differently | Hacker News Reader

We See Colors Differently

davidmathlogic.com

30 pointsibobev7 comments

When I was a kid I noticed that if I laid on my side for a bit, the colors in one eye would be significantly red shifted.

I also noticed that closing your eyes for a while on a perfectly clear day, you could notice the blue tint on everything outside.

You also lose color vision when oxygen deprived (hypoxia). As oxygen returns, it returns beginning in the center of your fovia and expands outward like a jagged, slightly asymmetric ripple, color returning with it.

Everyone is colorblind. We have only three cones (one of them a weird mutant out of two earlier nocturnal mammal ones) instead of the full regularly-spaced complement of four that non-mammal vertebrates have.

Far better, if you want to experience colour blindness, and have an Android phone, is to turn on Simulate Colour Space option in the Developer Settings and then open the camera. You can then look around and get an approximation of what a colour blind person would see.

(Have a Google on how to reveal the hidden Developer Settings.)

Some neural networks can fill in color in black and white pics. I wonder if color blind people have brains that hallucinate colors. Qualia is hard metaphysics.

I'm red-green colorblind. I've recently learned some people have four types of cones in the retina. They have tetrachromatic vision, seeing over a hundred times more colors than I do. I'm fascinated by what kind of a bright vibrant world they see!

It is my understanding that it isn't a brighter view, just more differentiation. So things that might look smooth and all one colour to some may have shades of colour to a tertrachromat. Eg. Make-up may look splotchy, paint looks streaky, etc. I'm not a tetrachromat, so I don't really know.

Can any tetrachromats weigh in on this?

HN title should change to the page title "Coloring for Colorblindness" not the ambiguous subtitle.

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