Color Blindness

Really random things happen once in a while, and guess this is one of them. Right now, I'm writing a term paper for AP Psych on color blindness and all things associated with it. At the same time, in Drawing, we're doing a unit on color and its values. So randomly coincidental...

So this would be the point that I mention that I'm colorblind. BEFORE you start asking, "what color is this? what about the sky? How about this red shirt I'm wearing??" Seriously, just because I'm color blind doesn't mean I'm stupid. Don't ask me what color the sky is, don't ask me what colors are on the American flag, and don't ask me what are the colors in the rainbow. And another thing: I don't have achromatopsia, which is seeing things in only shades of grey. Instead I'm protonopic, which means I'm missing my red-receptor cones. That just means that I see colors wrong, specifically to do with red and it's many shades.


The colors I have difficulty telling apart:

•  purple and blue
• cyan and white
• light, bright green (think highlighter) and yellow
• red and brown
• certain greens, oranges, and browns
• dark pink and purple (which means dark blue too)
• red and black (if there isn't a large space of red)

So maybe you can see why this art unit might be a little difficult for me.  Already I've had to ask the girl who sits beside me which pastel was the purple and which was the dark blue. If I leave them in the container, I know which is which because I know the order that the colors go in the rainbow. However, once I take them out, they look the exact same. To you, they'd be incredibly different, but to me they're the same. At least until I try to use one in my drawing and it's the wrong one. -____-   That's always incredibly annoying.

So, some random facts about red-green color deficiency now. Apparently nature made up to us color blind folks by giving us the ability to see through camouflage; it has no affect for us according to one article. It's also incredibly dangerous for us to be working as doctors or medical technicians. Another article from the US National Library of Medicine described a problem with color blind people misinterpreting charts and slides, not being able to recognize things like jaundice (where your whole body turns yellow) and not seeing titration end points (titrations are mixing acids and bases until the solution is neutral, shown by an indicator in the solution) or being able to tell tissue samples apart. Basically that means that someone like me, working as a doctor, could interpret your results wrong, and me as a technician would mix your meds wrong. Yeah, guess there's another good reason I shouldn't be doctor. (Besides the fact that I would throw-up all over the patient...)

And, for good measure, if you're wondering if you're color blind, here are a few tests that you can take:

 

• http://www.colblindor.com/color-arrangement-test/(by the way, the line is supposed to go from 1-15)
• http://www.biyee.net/color-science/color-vision-test/protanopia_test.aspx (for protonopia- I got 14 right, 24 wrong, for a percentage of 34% correct)

•  what you do is click the choice that most closely matches the larger pattern

• http://colorvisiontesting.com/ishihara.htm#plate%20with%2010%20answer (I didn't see anything in any of the circles)