Imagine a world, where a white Sun shines from the blue sky on the orange landscape and wind is blowing from the red sea.
There is such a planet, in our galaxy. That’s my home.
As I was four years old I came to my mother telling how I had found a green ball from our lawn. I had been taught that grass is green, and the ball had similar color. In fact the ball was red. Then, for the first time, my mother thought that there’s something terribly wrong with the boy...
It came out that I was redblind. Humans have three types of cone cells in their eyes - red, green and blue sensitive - and those cells form our colour vision. I lack the reds. It doesn’t mean that I could not see red, though. For me grass and leaves are orange-colored, coniferous forest is brown and stormy sea is red. I observe red and brown mainly with cones meant to receive green and that’s why I mix the colors. But why do I now recognize grass as orangecolored if I was told in my childhood it to be green? Maybe it went wrong with orangefruit - for me it has exactly the same color as grass.
So, red/green colorblindness does not mean that I think red is green and vice versa, it does not mean that I could not see red or green, but it does not mean that I don’t have problem with other colors. As a matter of fact, in certain situations colorblind can have difficulties with any color. For example: in Nordic countries there are no native bright red flowers, because Nordic pollinators include only insects, which mostly rely on ultraviolet - so the native "red" flowers are purple or something between red and blue. Because my eyes lack red receptors, that wavelength is caught by my blue cones and voila: I see red flowers as blue. For me pink is a form of grey. Some colors are different in electric light and sunlight.
But I can learn to identify colors. I have learned that a certain tone of grey might be pink, and usually I can name artificial (man-made) colors, like those on watercolor palette. After all, everybody of us learns the colors from parents or at school: so this learning process is complicated if some of the common cones are lacking. For me the traffic lights still are: red & yellow = yellow, green = white, and there’s nowhere that watercolor green in the nature! Only time I have seen green in nature, was a river in Montenegro (which I visited 1989).
At primary school it happened that I painted a watercolor picture of a forest. My teacher sent it to pupils’ art contest titled "Fall colors" and I won the first prize. In the mid-1990’s I started to make "falsecolor" pictures to a column in finnish national bird magazine Linnut. The author was a blind birdlistener and I was a colorblind birdwatcher. When people hear that I’m a birder, they usually wonder how can I tell apart different species? It is easy: they have same colors in guidebooks as they do in the realworld! Yet there is nothing wrong in pictures below:
How does protanopia make my life more complicated?
Well, it is though true, that there are birds that I can’t visually tell apart like normals – those which differ each others by eg. greenish/brownish plumages or yellow/green legs. Usually I tell them apart by voices, or then wife tells me what bird is it. Actually I do most of my birding by ear, and I’m especially specialized on nocturnal birding.
During my army service I worked eg. as a coastal guard, in which position (watching the sea) proper color vision was presumed. I did not have difficulties doing birdwatching there...
In the 1990’s I worked as a field assistant of forest bioindication for SYKE environmental research centre (Pori, Finland) - there I was not allowed to valuate the needles (which all are brown to me), but instead I specialized in lichenoindication.
I have several times passed traffic lights without noticing them, because I mistook them with streetlights. Never had an accident or ticket from that, though. Navigating on boat channels is somewhat impossible to me: the green and red used to outline the route are somewhat equal to me, and very difficult to point out from the water.
When choosing clothes or water colors in a shop, I must ask my wife or shop assistant for the colors – because if I made the choice, the results may not satisfy the normals. So, the colors are not my problem, but the normals’!
I have also found colorblindness to be a nice excuse in skipping over unpleasant duties...
As I was a highschool geo/bio-teacher, I also taught human genetics. At that point I made an appointment with my hometown ophthalmologist. It appeared, that he had written a doctoral thesis about colorblindness! So, with whole bunch of more facts over my "disease" I returned to the school. My students certainly learned what’s colorblindness, how it works and is inherited. One of them had dyed her hair green. Some colleagues found that disturbing, but I did not first even notice the anarchistic message. One day I just noticed a grayish tone of her hair and guessed this tone of gray must be green. To me human lips are grey. If You are used to see them as red, this may sound repulsive? To me, red lipstick lips makes a person look like a clown, because that’s not the color of lips!
Red/green colorblindness (or daltonism, after the first explorer of this issue, physicist John Dalton, who himself was red/green colorblind) is rather common in Nordic countries - about ten percents of the population have some kind of color deficiencies. Usually they are male, because color vision genes are located in X-chromosome and the colorblindness gene is recessive. So in order to be colorblind, female must have two colorblind X’s, when males can manage it with single recessive X. Most of them lack only partially red or green cones. A real colorblind person lacks usually the green or red cones, very seldom the blue ones. This is because the genes coding the green and red receptors are located next to each other in a chromosome, the blue code being far away.
For us eg. red does not work as a signal, though we can see it, because we mix it with other colors. People preparing colorful diagrams, Powerpoint presentations or using laser pointer should remember that every tenth person of the audience misses the point: red, blue and yellow colors are informative, others tend to be confusing. Laser pointer is something we very seldom can follow.
In web design it is advised to use black text on white instead of colors, in order to reach maximal audience (including daltons). Every dalton – as every normal – see the colours more or less differently, because colorblind or not – I guess not many people on Earth have exactly the same number of cone cells: there are millions of them in every eye. Personally I find black on white a bit confused. On these B5 pages You can see color combinations that are comfortable to me. I’ve surfed several webpages with colors like red on black, green on red and yellow on white, and noticed that they’re not for me – its painstaking to read them.
Also led lights are a mission: impossible. I see there is this tiny light on, but cannot tell is it red, green, orange, yellow or white, because in this case all those are same to me. Blue would make a difference.
I like to watch horror movies. The blood does not make me feel uncomfortable – because it’s hard for me to identify it. But I’m not coldblooded: when I studied biology in the university, I once participated an autopsy. There was no blood there, but seeing a real thing being cut really made me feel sick.
I have met plenty of dalton gang. Most of them (of course) have the red/green confusion. Only once I met a blueblind man, and I've met only two colorblind women. I’ve never seen a totally colorblind achromatopic person. But that's perhaps because I am colorblind...
Some US experts (often non-daltons) like to use title "CVC" for colorblindness. I (and many other daltons) don’t mind. I think it just further mixes what’s the point. The folks in the U.S.A. love abbreviations, and in the end no-one knows what the other is saying… "Let’s take ATV with us to the NWR. Did You see that GBH? They’re common here in LA..".
Pingelap is a 2 km
