Neurologist Gabrielle Jordan from the University of Newcastle announced that she had found a woman who is a tetrachomat, that is, a person who can distinguish more colors than any other inhabitant of the Earth.
According to Digital Journal, the average person can perceive millions of different shades of colors. This opportunity is given to our eyes by special cells - cones. There are three types of cones in the eye of the average person; these people are called trichromats. Color blind people have only two types, respectively, they are called dichromats. Almost all animals, including dogs and monkeys, are dichromats.
That being said, scientists have long believed that there are people with four cones who can see a wider range of colors than most of us. These people are called tetrachromats and see hundreds of millions of colors. Those shades that distinguish these unique ones do not even have names, since the bulk of people do not imagine that they exist, and the world was not puzzled by this question.
Dr. Jordan and her colleagues have searched for people with super color vision for 20 years. According to her, two years ago, a neurologist tracked down such a woman in Northern England. She turned out to be the only true tetrachromat among several other people whose eyes have four cones. Gabrielle Jordan said she was very excited about her discovery. But she immediately wondered why the other 25 participants in the study, although they have a special eye structure, do not show the ability to distinguish shades invisible to others.
Researcher Jay Neitz from the University of Washington, commenting on the discovery of Dr. Jordan, noted that all women with four cones have the potential to develop super color vision, it just needs to be done. The expert also suggested that the natural environment, most likely, is still tuned to trichromats, from which tetrachromats cannot fully reveal their unique abilities.
The intriguing question of how they actually see the world around us remains unanswered, because tetrachromats simply cannot describe it. “It's like a trichromat tries to describe how he sees the world for a color blind person. He simply will not understand him. Likewise, in this case, we cannot even imagine it,”experts say.