Colour Subjectivity

[Damhna]

I turn to you for some guidance in the my ; most likley unethical; favourite way of annoying drunks in a bar.Namely asking them when they are already blind drunk to describe a colour.

It appears to me that the only subjective way of identifying which colour an item is can only be established using spectrophotometry. This does not help much in identifying if what I think of as green is what you perceive it to be.

I've tried asking Cecel as I suspect that his might properly be the standard against which I should measure my own perceptions. Unfortunatly he has seen fit to leave me pondering.

Do the differences in retinal size , number of rods/cones , optic nerve health etc etc make a difference?

How can such differences be quantified?

Red green colour blindness, how does the world look to those afflicted?

[coming up for air]

That's around here somewhere. Just search on Color in the title line.

[Damhna]

I have tried , using both spellings , but I cant find anything.

[Chas.E]

There was a recent discovery of "mutant female tetrachromats" which is an exceptionally rare mutation, these women have 4 color receptors instead of the normal 3. This mutation only appears rarely in female carriers of colorblindness, and has long been theorized but no living example had ever been found until now:

http://www.redherring.com/mag/issue86/mag-mutant-86.html

This mutation confers superior color discrimination, one article says that in comparison to tetrachromats, it is as if all normal vision is colorblindness.