What about those wierd 3-D (or whatever they’re called)pictures that you are supposed to look at and somehow see hidden picture? I have never been able to see the picture, just the funy pattern. Other people say they can see the hidden picture with no problem. 
Yeah I beleive they are called stereograms. My boyfriend made one, he is a computer programmer. I think they are neat, the only thing is sometime I can see them other times I can’t.
Not everyone calls the center light “yellow.” In Japan, they call it the “blue light.”
The reality is that everyone sees the spectrum of colours differently. By “differently,” I mean “separated into colours differently than the next human being.” Since no two human eyes are identical, no two humans see the same thing the same way. In general, however, most folks see the ROYGBIV pretty much the same. Those of us who suffer from severe colour vision deficiency see those seven colours separated differently, some of us even see fewer than seven colours.
Correct to a point. However, the distribution of rods and cones is not a “small difference” in the physiology of the eye. This is especially true for those of us who have more than one and fewer of the other than most folks. Therefore, some of “colour-vision challenged” folks are in high demand for night guard duty at times as we see shapes better than colours (for obvious reasons).
quote:
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I’m color blind, and the story of the dolphin color is not how it works.
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My friend is color blind. I just called him. His direct quote: “Dolphins and things you tell me are bright pink look exactly the same to me.” Perhaps he has a different type of color blindness.
“The dawn of a new era is felt and not measured.” Walter Lord
voltaire, my wife told me to thank you for pointing that out, since she insists that school busses are orange also… you should see some of the bitch-fests between us on the subject… 
I don’t suffer from insanity…
I enjoy every minute of it!
This topic is being discussed on some other threads right now, but this is a better discussion, so I’m boosting it.
Related threads:
** http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=45763 How many colors can the human eye see?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=38714 How do we know what colors animals see? Are any creatures able to see more colors?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=33318 Colorblind animals?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=28171 Are horses color blind?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=15793 Cats colorblind or not?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?threadid=12622 Do we see in different colors???
What may be happening isn’t that your friend sees pink dolphins, but rather that he sees blue-grey bubble-gum and valentines. So you might want to save your jealousy for a better occasion. 
Hey brittainy… I tried explaining that same thing to one of my friends and I couldn’t get them to understand it. I always thought that was the reason for people’s different preferences. Like maybe everyone thinks the same color is their favorite (the way they see it), but they all have different names for that color because they actually see them differently. You know what I mean.
Being red-green color blind, I’ve wondered this all my life. Thanks for asking Brittany, I know I’m not alone.
If we could trade eyes, we would know for sure. My “Yellow” could be your “blue.”
(Caveat: this is obviously not science, but rather philosophy.)
Someone earlier wondered if age was a contributary factor, and i can say yes it is. the older one gets, the less of the blue enfd of the spectrum is picked up and we begin to see more in the red end of the spectrum. an example of this would be the paintings of monet, as he got older, and i hasten to add that this was excacerbated by cataracts, the redder/browner his paintings tended to become, that is until said cateracts were removed late in his life. However it is a general trend that you will tend to pick up more red as you age.
Someone earlier wondered if age was a contributary factor, and i can say yes it is. the older one gets, the less of the blue enfd of the spectrum is picked up and we begin to see more in the red end of the spectrum. an example of this would be the paintings of monet, as he got older, and i hasten to add that this was excacerbated by cataracts, the redder/browner his paintings tended to become, that is until said cateracts were removed late in his life. However it is a general trend that you will tend to pick up more red as you age. This clearly then effects how we percieve colour.
Perhaps THIS explains why my Grandmother always has the colors on her TV all messed up. I’ve wondered about that for years. Every time I go and correct it, making the colors as close to realistic as I may discern, BAM! There sho goes, making everything all purplish.
I can say for sure that people do not percieve the universe in the same way.
Here is why.
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The smell of a idling deisel engine is green (to me).
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The taste and smell of Kent Goldings hops is also green, but is an elongated triangular shape with a rounded short end, pointing towards about the 1 O’Clock angle. (for me)
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I’m doing a painting of Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Chile in acrylic, and I’m only painting the audio.
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I mentioned #2 to my family on my birthday once and I got the entire car to be dead silent for a bit- it was rather uncomfortable. I never knew that other people did not experience the world the same way I do.
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The visual component of smells/tastes and sounds is visualized in my “mind’s eye” the same place pretty much where you “see” a story unfolding when hearing it on the radio, or reading it in a book.
I like wearing tinted glasses of odd colors for a while, then taking them off. My eyes have adjusted to the tint, and everything looks off for several minutes afterwards.
I’ll have what you’re having.
As I stated in another thread,I used to service TVs. Adjusting color was always the last thing I did before leaving someones home. The older sets had a service switch that would collapse the vertical and produce a horizontal line across the screen. With the red,blue and green gun controls you would adjust for a white line. That gives you the correct “amount of color”.
Then with the hue control on the front of the set you would adjust for facial tones. Everyone seems to see facial tones different. I would adjust the set for myself and then ask for their opinion. It was never the same.
If husband and wife were there the husband would always say that he didn’t watch tv much so I should adjust for his wife. But…Guess who fiddles with the set constantly?
I’m not taking anything… I just percieve the universe differently than you.
Consider you have two people, both with good color vision. They are both presented the same color…but percieve it differently.
Consider you have one person with normal vision and the other color blind. They are both presented the same color…but process it differently.
Generally speaking if you have 2 people with good color vision there will be a slight variation in the end-product/interpretation of the color they see. This is due to variations, in the rods and cones and, in the visual perceptions of the two people.
There’s also a cultural aspect to perceiving colors. I’m surprised no one has brought it up here.
Most modern Westerners percieve about 10 different color “families” (the basic “ROY G BIV” spectrum, plus black, white, and pink), but many people from other cultures see colors differently, some with as few as 3 families, others with many more.
One rather famous case was a girl named Jeannie, who is the best-known example of a “wild child,” discovered at around age 13 locked in a room with food, a bed, a toilet, and little else. She was quickly adopted by a team of anthropologists. In one test, Jeannie was shown a palette of paint colors at a hardware store. She immediately started asking what each color was, and quickly grew frustrated when her caretakers could only respond with answers like “light blue, lighter blue, even lighter blue”.
Granted, this doesn’t really touch upon the idea that what’s red to be might be blue to you, but it does bring up an interesting idea that what’s red to you and me might be a completely different color to someone else.
I’m another one who sees different colors with each eye. I didn’t discover this until I was working in a darkroom in college. I was looking at some Ilford B&W negatives, which usually come out greyish purple. I noticed that with my left eye the film looked blue, while with my right eye it was magenta. Since I can’t even see the same colors with my own eyes, it wouldn’t surprise me if different individuals don’t see the same thing, either. Different cone/rod densities, perhaps?
btw, Monty, in Japan, the “blue” traffic light is the “green” one in the US.
–sublight.