I was rubbing my closed eyes, noting the random colors that it induced. I wondered if a color blind person might see the colors they are otherwise blind to when doing this.
Is the pressure of rubbing the eyes triggering the rods and cones? Or stimulating some other thing that might bypass the color blindness and send a color signal to the brain?
I have also noted an odd thing when trying to go to sleep. A repetitive pattern of swirls. Random at the ragged edges. But repetitive in the main shape and movement. Can be colored or not.
I tried a different wording in Google and got the information of the pressure triggering ganglions. But not sure if they relate specifically to color. Also phosphenes. Are they tied to color sensing?
DON’T RUB YOUR EYES, DAMMIT! That’s it. That’s the TLDR summary.
If you want to know more, here it is:
I speak as someone who paradoxically was born with genetically terrible eyes who sees beautifully today without needing much in the way of corrective lenses (if driving at night I use eyeglasses, but that’s it).
My genes bestowed upon me retinal degeneration (and “pathological myopia,” a term US doctors don’t seem to use but which describes my eyes very well), a posterior sub capsular cataract, and premature nuclear cataracts. When I was a young child, eye doctors told my parents, “she will be blind by the time she is 40.”
Yet here I am, with damn good eyesight at age 66 that I am thankful for every day. There are many reasons for this, including good luck and a great eye surgeon in Singapore who treated me for about 15 years. And back in the 1990s, a highly regarded ophthalmologist, a professor at Harvard med school, whose research considered, “What happens when people rub their eyes a lot?”
When I was his patient, I was still in my 30s, and he was in the middle of researching the topic. He told me, “everything we’re discovering shows that it’s much better for eye heath if you don’t rub your eyes. Just don’t.”
My WAG is that if you, say, lack red cones, your brain will never have learned the experience of seeing red and you will not see it in your dreams, nor, pace @CairoCarol, from rubbing your eyes.
That is what I am wondering. You can imagine a lot of things. But a color? Things that I try to conjure purely from imagination, still have the building blocks of what I know.
But on the technical level of my question. Do they experience the color through some other means? Such as rubbing there eyes, odd brain function triggers. If it happens on a somewhat regular basis, do they perceive a color?
This was my thought. AIUI, colour blindness is a failure to develop and grow the set of cones responsible for seeing each of specific colours - red, green, blue. If you’re missing the entire infrastructure to see blue, for example, your brain is unlikely to make it up; after all, we don’t make up ultraviolet that nobody sees. Certainly rubbing your eyes will not trigger impulses on nerves that never developed.