The eye doctors can tell you that there are various ways a person can be colorblind, and it is very rare for a person to see only in black and white.
The laser eye surgeon of Excel Laser Vision Institute, Doctor Moosa, explains to us that complete color blindness is known as monochromacy, and it is so rare that only one in 33,000 gets it. For a lot of people with color blindness, it only affects specific colors, and a few factors influence which ones and the reasons for it. Let us closely examine the different types of color blindness.
What Are The Basics Of Color Vision?
When it comes to color blindness, it is critical to understand the principles of color vision. The first step in the vision process is light hitting the photoreceptors in our eyes, which appear in two types: rods and cones. Rods are good for differentiating between the quantity of light the person is seeing, which is important for things such as night vision, while cones recognize differences in color.
A person with normal vision has three types of cones that absorb light from various parts of the visible spectrum. Some process short (blue) wavelengths, some process medium (green) ones, and some process long (red) ones. It is very similar to the way tiny red, green, and blue phosphors on old TVs could come together to create millions of colors.
Do Genetics Play A Role In Color Vision?
A lot of the time, color blindness happens because of a mutation on the X chromosome. Since it’s a recessive gene, women, who usually have two X chromosomes, have two possibilities to have the gene for normal color vision. On the other hand, men only have one. A woman, who has sons, and a copy of the color blindness gene but isn’t colorblind herself could have a 50% chance of having a son that is colorblind. For this reason, about a dozen men are colorblind but only one in every 200 women is!
What Are The Types Of Color Blindness?
Although the only way for color vision to be correct is known as trichromacy, there are a few ways for it to go wrong. A person with anomalous trichromacy has all the types of cones but some of them fail, and the outcome is limited color vision almost to a point of someone with dichromacy, which means they are completely missing one type of cone.
The most common color blindness is red-green since it’s probably because the red cones (protanomaly/protanopia) or the green cones (deuteranomaly/deuteranopia) fail or they are absent. No matter what, the person sees the world as a landscape of dull brownish-yellows, and this type of color blindness affects more men than women.
Blue-yellow color blindness is the least common with only 5% of cases. Eye doctors realize that it’s this type of color blindness if tritanopia cones are missing or tritanomaly are failing. This doesn’t originate from X chromosomes and so it’s split evenly between the sexes. As a result of this type of color blindness, the person sees a palette of pinks, teals, and browns.
