According to some reports, every tenth inhabitant of the planet is color blind. Studies show that color blindness depends on a number of factors: heredity, gender, age, place of residence. Moreover, such an anomaly may have been the norm for our distant ancestors.
Color anomaly
Color blindness is a fairly common visual impairment that is characterized by a hereditary inability of the eye to perceive one or more primary colors and is caused by a defect in the X chromosome. But, as the doctors have established, color perception can be impaired as a result of eye or nervous diseases, or after a traumatic brain injury, severe flu, stroke or heart attack.
Sometimes the aging process can be the cause of color blindness. For example, the artist Ilya Repin at an advanced age tried to remake his painting "Ivan the Terrible and his son Ivan."
However, colleagues found that due to a violation of color perception, the painter significantly distorted the color palette of the painting and the work had to be interrupted.
Seeing the world around us in all colors is hampered by the improper functioning of special light-sensitive receptors - cones located on the retina of the eye. The various pigments contained in the cones can capture three color spectra: red with a wavelength of 552-557 nanometers, green with a length of 530 nanometers, and blue with a length of 426 nanometers.
It is noteworthy that men suffer from color blindness 20 times more often than women, but at the same time it is the latter who predominantly betray the disease by inheritance.
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Scientists argue that genes are to blame for everything. Statistics say about 8% of men and 0.4% of women have a similar visual defect.
Selective vision
There is a misconception that color blind people do not distinguish colors at all. But statistics show that only 0.1% of people see the world in black and white. Typically, color-blind people may not be able to distinguish one color. John Dalton, after whom the disease is named, did not perceive the color red.
Moreover, most often in people suffering from color blindness, there is not a loss of any color from the visible spectrum, but its weakened perception.
Science distinguishes three color anomalies:
1. Protanopia - impairment of perception of red color. People suffering from this pathology may confuse red with brown, dark gray, black, and sometimes green.
2. Deuteranopia - difficulty with the perception of green. There is a mixture of green with a light orange tint, and light green with red.
3. Tritanopia - problems with the perception of purple and blue colors. In this case, all shades of blue appear red or green.
Complete green or red color blindness is much less common.
Benefits
Since 1940, it has been widely discussed in military and scientific circles that color-blind soldiers are better at identifying camouflage among foliage than their healthy colleagues.
For a long time this issue was not seriously dealt with. And now, relatively recently, British researchers have confirmed that people who have difficulty distinguishing between red and green have developed a compensation mechanism, thanks to which they are able to distinguish many other shades that are inaccessible to the perception of other people.
In the course of research, British scientists conducted an experiment in which a grid of vertically arranged rectangles and a small target were displayed on the monitor, where the rectangles were located horizontally. Participants in the experiment, some of whom were with normal color vision, and the other with dichromic (inability to distinguish between red and green), were asked to press one of four buttons to indicate in which sector of the grating the target appears.
In the first part of the experiment, the rectangles were of the same color and the participants had almost no difficulty in finding the target. But when the rectangles were randomly colored red and green in the next part of the experiment, the subjects with normal vision performed extremely poorly, while the dichromes still had no problems with target detection. According to scientists, the excellent result of color blind people was due to the fact that the color, unlike other participants in the experiment, did not distract their attention.
Paints are an illusion
Based on modern ideas about color perception, color blindness, perhaps, is not a deviation and, moreover, a disease. Thus, physicists argue that there are no colors in the world around us.
Color is just an illusion created by the brain, which does not exist in physical reality.
Erwin Schroeder, Nobel laureate in physics, writes: “If you ask a physicist what he understands to be yellow, he will tell you that these are transverse electromagnetic waves, the length of which is about 590 nanometers, and when the wave oscillations hit the retina of a healthy eye a person has a feeling of yellow color”.
Color blindness as a factor in evolution
Canadian psychiatrist Richard Boeck, who spent many years studying ancient texts, suggests that our distant ancestors saw the world around us in black and white.
In the process of evolution, according to Boeck, the sensation of light bifurcated into yellow and blue, and after a while yellow split into red and green.
Most primates are dichromatic these days. Only a few species, including humans, are trichromic. A number of researchers claim that this quality has been acquired and associate it with the need to look for food during the daytime. It was color vision that helped prehistoric people find bright fruits.
Limitations
Sometimes you can come across the opinion that people with color blindness are not allowed to drive vehicles. This is not entirely true. Driving licenses of categories A and B are issued to color blind people, but they will be marked "Without the right to work for hire."
However, there are professions where color perception is of fundamental importance - pilots, sailors, chemists, some medical specialties. The way there is closed for color blind.
Due to color blindness, the famous singer George Michael, who since childhood dreamed of becoming a pilot, was "rejected".
Oddly enough, color blindness is not an obstacle in the work of a painter, where, at first glance, one cannot do without full color perception. But Charles Merion and Vrubel were able to adapt to the color anomaly of vision and to realize their artistic talent in their own way.
Color blindness and geography
Modern research shows that people with color blindness are unevenly distributed across the planet. A large percentage of color blind people live in the Czech Republic and Slovenia, while on the Fiji Islands this disease is completely absent. Science still finds it difficult to name the reason for the geographical selectivity of color blindness.
However, British scientists were able to trace an interesting pattern. Color blindness has been found to be more common in the urbanized southeastern part of the UK, which has been repeatedly attacked from outside.
In the north and west of the country with a predominantly rural way of life, where the population came from the British primitive tribes, there are much fewer color blind people. However, it is premature to argue that color blindness develops as a reaction to danger.