How to buy potatoes if you are color blind

I have long selected pictures for today's post and faced a rather amusing problem. Half of the illustrations on the theme of color blindness was completely meaningless to me. Like the picture above. The wife claims that something is wrong with her on the right. Sometimes because of this, I look at others like fly-flyers, which they see in the ultraviolet.

In short, today I will try to tell you what color anomalies are, how much it interferes in life, and I will answer the most sacramental question, “What color do you really see?”.

Color blindness and color anomalies

There was such a wonderful physicist, chemist and generally intelligent and curious person - John Dalton. Most likely, few people will immediately recall his outstanding achievements in the physics of gases and other discoveries. But almost everyone will have a visual impairment association named after him. He became both the discoverer and the first patient described. He had deuteranopia. He did not suffer much from this, and, like most of the anomaly, he noticed this quite accidentally when he was an adult. He completely lacked sensitivity in the green part of the spectrum. John himself described it this way:

That part of the picture, which others call red, seems to me as if a shadow or just poorly lit. Orange, green and yellow appear to be shades of the same color, from intense to pale yellow.

Normalized plots of sensitivity of human cone cells of various types (K, C, D) and rod cells (P) to different parts of the spectrum. The wavelength axis on this graph is logarithmic.

Violations of color perception are very similar in nature to a defective sensor of a camera with a downed calibration. Only instead of the RGB-sensor we have cones and rods. Each type has its own sensitivity zone associated with the structural features of opsin proteins. Imagine that in the released specimen, the matrix / retina completely lacks sensitivity to colors. Only beautiful and stylish shades of gray. This is a complete achromatopsia . Slightly more frequent variants with completely (-anopsia) or partially (-anomaliya) insensitive cones of one type can also occur:

• Protanopia / protanomaly - red cones,
• Deuteranopsia / deuteranomaria - green cones,
• Tritanopia / tritanomalia - blue cones.

All this beauty is inherited quite interesting. The gene responsible for coding the opsin color sensitive proteins is on the X chromosome. Therefore, a mother who has one such defective chromosome in her set (XX ') with a probability of 50% will pass it on to her son, whose spare X chromosome has not flown from his father, otherwise the son would have been a daughter.

Possible options:
XX '(healthy mother-carrier) + XY (healthy father) -> X'Y (color-blind son) + XY (healthy son) + X'X (healthy carrier daughter) + XX (healthy daughter)

A daughter could simply be hidden carrier as a mother. So it is necessary for male color blind men to live with their set of X'Y. In my case, the story of my defective X chromosome will end on me, since my sons got quite a decent, healthy Y from me. Although, there is a chance that my wife will still persuade me also to a girl.

Inside view

Just want to clarify one important point. All the colorblind descriptions you read are pretty pointless. All these beautiful pictures with red sky, green dogs and other joys will not tell you exactly nothing. We do not see the world like this. To be precise, no one can know what is actually happening in the person’s head next to it when you ask him to describe the color of the object. Still, try to describe what it looks like from the inside. I have deuteranomaly. Almost like John Dalton, but the green cones are not so broken and some signal is still transmitted. But they clearly did not report the desired pigment. Most often I have a problem with green and brown, which, in fact, is a dark, unsaturated shade of orange.



What exactly do I see? Rather, it is worth describing in words - what I do not see . In the example above, for me it is the same color. Yes, I see in the editor that these are colors with a completely different Hue, that one is derived from green and the other from orange. But this does not negate the fact that the colors are just the same. This is best described as a reduction in the resolution of vision in certain parts of the spectrum. I begin to confuse shades where the difference is obvious to others. Since I do not have full color blindness in the green part of the spectrum, I see the difference between bright and saturated shades of green.

What to do if you were sent for potatoes

Potatoes are a pretty poisonous plant. Berries, leaves and sometimes even tubers. If it is not properly stored, then she decides that her finest hour has come and it’s time to get ready to germinate. At the same time, it turns green and solanine begins to accumulate rapidly in it. Do not eat this. This is a neurotoxic glycoside that can seriously poison you.
Ordinary people just go and buy normal potatoes. But, as it turned out, in the case of my deuterium, everything is much more fun. My wife laughed for a very long time when I brought home a kilo of five selected, from the heart of green potatoes. I had to throw it away. Now I try to additionally check with the camera of a mobile phone, which distinguishes some colors better than me. Special thanks to hambrayuzer gmikhail94 for its application Color Picker . It really helps me out.


Yellowish brown is approx. You can take.

Otherwise, my problem does not bother me much. I can draw a maximum of a tree with brown leaves. I distinguish well the colors of the traffic light, which is good news.

Diagnostics

Color anomalies very rarely notice their problem. Most often, people never find out that the grass of some kind is not that color. However, for some professions, it is critical to have good color vision. For driving, by the way, from 2014 it is enough to distinguish at least some colors and have at least one eye.

The ophthalmologist can diagnose color perception using special Rabkin tables. This is a set of extremely high quality printing with color standards. The patient must answer what exactly he sees in the picture. There is an interesting point here - some of the images are structured in such a way that the patient with violations will see some figure or figure, but there is no normal trichromate. A few examples:



Normal trichromats distinguish two figures in the upper part of the table: a circle on the left and a triangle on the right. The protanopes distinguish two triangles in the upper part of the table and a square in the lower part. Deuteranopes see a triangle at the top left, and a square at the bottom.



Normal trichromats distinguish figures 9 and 5 in the table. Protanopes and deuteranopes distinguish only figure 5.

Request to designers

Dear interface developers and creators of wonderful, harmonious color palettes for websites!

Do not forget that as many as 8% of your users have certain kinds of color anomalies. Don't forget to test your creations in imitations of color blindness. In Android developer tools, this is a full-time feature. We will thank you for the best readability of the palette.

UPD

You can try the online test here: xritephoto.com/cool-tools
Consider that it is possible to make a diagnosis only by calibrated printing tests by an ophthalmologist.

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