I realized tonight, as I stared at a mound of pretend plastic peas on a red plastic plate, that I really don't understand what the experience of red/green colorblindness can be like. (I was studiously staring at this arrangement of toys rather than at Violet, whom I was trying to lull back to sleep. Mommy eye-beams can be fatal to such an effort.) I mean, OK, red and green things form a single indifferentiated category of redgreen. But what happens as I add progressively more yellow to blue? Does it form a series of colors identical to that produced by subtracting yellow from orange? Surely not. I assume that such a person can see the pop of orange against blue, opposites on the color wheel. Can he see the "warmth" of orange vs. the "coolness" of blue? Does he see blue as receding and orange as approaching? Assuming the non redgreen color experience is the same, what happens as the distinguishable colors move into the redgreen? I have learned from the internet that I am very far from alone in having thought up the color problem as a young kid. I really used to worry about how I couldn't be certain other people saw the same colors that I did. Thank goodness years of studying philosophy cleared up all those worries.
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March 22, 2007
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It's not entirely true that red and green things are all redgreen. Indeed, I can assign a specific color label to basically any shade--I'm just wrong sometimes, especially with vaguely artificial things (e.g., I know grass is green, so I see it that way).
More specifically, he four classes of mistakes that I think I'm most likely to make are:
* Confusing orange with bright green
* Confusing brown with dark green
* Confusing blue with purple
* Confusing lavender with pink
Hope this helps!
Posted by: micah | March 22, 2007 at 01:50 AM
Apparently I'm slightly color blind, though not too much or for all colors, thank god. Just one of the disks you're supposed to look at at the eye doctor has no number in it when I look at it. Mostly there are some things that look like faded black to me that other people (quit oddly, to my mind) swear are dark green, and some things that look like a faded red to me I'm told are orange to others. Only the orange case causes emberresment, really. But I see both orange (that is clearly distinct from red) and dark green (that is clearly distinct from black) so I don't really know what's going on myself.
Posted by: Matt | March 22, 2007 at 04:47 AM
Mommy eye-beams can be fatal to such an effort
What an interesting observation that is, also!
Posted by: Saheli | March 22, 2007 at 05:36 AM
Wiki is your friend. More info than you want to know. From there, you can get to tests and pages which show simulated views of how colorblind people see things.
I.e., this page. Pretty balloons! I think the best test is this one.
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