This is not a new phenomenon, and the reason I’m posting it here is because in a home video, he was able to correctly identify colors even though he had never properly seen them before.
I’ve known a few men who had red/green colorblindness, and to them, the colors they couldn’t properly see looked gray, or somehow blended into the background. People who are mostly or totally blind from birth and later have their sight restored also have difficulty distinguishing colors.
Did he maybe have slight color vision, or his brain was young and plastic enough to figure it out?
There’s not much information in that article, but I note this sentence
(my emphasis)
This makes me think the glasses allow him to distinguish different colors, not necessarily perceive something he’s never seen before. Perhaps red and green now look like different shades of gray, while previously they looked like the same shade of gray.
Yeah, short of genetic therapy (there are some studies doing some ground work on this using retroviruses that have had success in primates), the boy isn’t going to be able to see colors he has never seen before. The best you can do, as mentioned, is to highlight differences between colors or shades of colors that he would normally perceive as being identical.
Imagine you couldn’t perceive white and were shown a checkerboard. Let’s say you perceive it to be made up of a single color, so that you wouldn’t see the pattern. Now, someone comes in and paints the white squares blue. Now you see the pattern, but you’re not perceiving white.
Going back to the preliminary studies I mentioned. What OP asks about is exactly what is being seen. After the genetic treatments the primates are able to pass color distinguishing tests. They appear to indeed be able to perceive the new colors. The treatments use retroviruses to encode the photosensitive cells with the missing genes? order to create the missing or deficient photo receptors.
Most colorblind people don’t see in shades of gray. It’s more like blue and yellowish for the common red/green colorblindness.
The M and L color receptors (cone cells, and roughly corresponding to green and red) have a lot of overlap in their wavelength sensitivity even in normal people. A pure green or pure red object will still stimulate the other receptor.
In red-green colorblind people, the overlap is even closer, but not perfect. The EnChroma glasses filter out the parts of maximum overlap to enhance the brain’s ability to separate the colors. It changes the response curves to be a little more like a non-colorblind person.
Suppose, for instance, that a given color stimulates one receptor by 100% and the other by 70%. The brain notes the difference and considers this to be a reasonably pure color. A R-G colorblind person might instead have 90% and 85% stimulation–close enough that the color looks like it’s in the middle of the range (a muddy yellow). With the the EnChroma lenses, the stimulation might be more like 50%/35%–less total light, but with a separation more like normal eyesight.
Incidentally, the glasses can also give people with normal eyesight a kind of “supercolor” vision. I haven’t tried it myself but I’m told it’s pretty cool.
I don’t see where this is such a big deal, to invest any significant amount of effort in it. Sometimes I watch a whole movie without realizing it is black and white. If color vision were critical to life, OK, but this is just a toy that enabled researchers to dazzle a child with an additional layer of glitz on his life.
Not everything has to be critical for life to have value. Color vision is amazing and you’re really missing out if you don’t have it.
There are a number of videos on YouTube (search “EnChroma reactions”) for a bunch of people (children and adults) tearing up in amazement at how fantastic the world looks with the glasses.
An additional level of glitz? It’s not like he got special headphones that auto-tuned everything because he liked the way it sounded. He had a disability and this somewhat lessens it. He didn’t get something more than everyone else, he was just brought a little bit closer to normal.
I’m not sure if you wear glasses or not (and I’m not comparing nearsightedness to colorblindness), but I remember the first time I put on someone elses glasses. That ‘holy shit’ moment when I realized that I couldn’t see, I didn’t know what I was missing, the entire world snapped into crystal clear focus.
But, hey, just another level of glitz, right.
As for your movie example, I’m not following that at all. You watched a movie that was designed to be viewed in black and white, that everyone else has seen in black and white. What difference does it make if you didn’t realize it was in color? On the other hand, color blind people see things differently than nearly everyone else all the time. Put on a black and white movie and ask everyone in the room which person is wearing a red shirt and no one knows. Put on a movie with full color and only people that aren’t color blind will be able to tell you.
But, hey, shit on the dad for trying to help his kid or the researchers that are making steps towards improving people’s lives.
The filters may not be much help, or I hope they are like multifocal lenses and let the user nod their head to get to a clearer view ?
I think they would actually have to make these filters so that they did not filter the frequencies that the red and orange LED’s in traffic lights emit. Because the LED’s emit frequences in a narrow range ? Maybe the traffic light people ensure the LED’s emit a range of freqeuncies to make each colour.
Your sentence is not precise enough.
When you say “colors”, its probably not true for every item /instance of that colour (that colour according to most people).
You could show them two items that are the indistinguishable to you, eg the same green to you (and all the normal sighted people).
But you have carefully chosen two different paints or pigments which produce that colour in different ways - it uses different frequencies (different spectrum, ala Newton’s colours of the rainbow…thats a spectrum ) to produce the same colour.
The colour blind person may be able to see one of the items correctly as the same as green, and see the other item differently. Or they see the two items as different colours, and indistinguishable from a third and fourth colour respectively (different shades of grey,for example.)
Lets take your computer screen right in front of your face.
Its primary colours , its corners of its colour triangle, are RGB. Red green and blue… and yet it can show orange and indigo and cyan and violet …
Meanwhile those colours CAN be produced by a single frequency.
So there are at least two ways to make your eyes think an object is orange.
make it send orange frequency at your eyes
make it send a mix of frequencies (probably a whole spectrum … a continuous curve ) that your receptors detect and hence brain perceives as orange.
What is happening is that the colour blinds colour receptor are not working to be a good set of three colour receptors to produce unambiguous responses to the frequencies of the rainbow. Some of the frequencies produce ambiguous responses… the signal from the receptors is the same and so can’t be told apart.
But the addition of the filter can help make the response unambiguous, at the cost of being injurious to monochromatic light. (single frequency light as from laser or LED.)
If you were color-blind, would you wear special glasses just to see true color?
I’m going to bet that a year from now, that kid won’t even know where those glasses are. Color blindness is not a disabling impairment. The novelty will wear off, he will go back to being perfectly content with the level of everyday vision that he has without them. In fact, in many circumstances, they will actually impair his vision, such as in low light, and maybe even in nearly all indoor environments. Notice, they took him outdoors to try them. Most color-blind people don’t even know it, until somebody tests them for it and tells them…
It’s comparable to 3-D movies – sure they are nice for gee-whiz, but would you wear special glasses all the time, just to see the 3-D effect? I’m completely blind in one eye, so I haven’t seen anythng in 3-D in decades. It’s not a disabling handicap. Not only is it not worth the technological effort to develop and perfect it, it’s not even worth the bother of putting on the special glasses.
Given that I’ve needed some form of vision correction for my entire life–yeah, probably. In fact I’m tempted to get them even with normal color vision.
The light loss is a mild downside, but the most interesting colors are outdoors anyway, and if I’m outside I’m probably wearing sunglasses. So really these would just be a replacement for glasses I’m already wearing, and the light loss is a feature, not a bug.
Lots of people with ordinary vision problems don’t know it until they’re tested. They just have a harder time with reading or driving or whatever. Doesn’t mean it has no impact on their lives. It may manifest in subtle ways, like a lack of interest in books. Or in this case, possibly a decreased interest in art. Could be some great artist gave up as a kid because they couldn’t choose colors properly.
When I’m choosing a chocolate, I’d like to be able to tell the Dairy Toffee apart from the Orange Crisp or the Cornish Fudge.
When we’re decorating the house, I’d like to be able to say something other than, “Oh, you’ll have to choose the paint”.
When the instructions say “unit is fully charged when red LED turns green” I’d like that to mean something to me.
When I read that potatoes that have turned green can be poisonous, I’d like to be more confident that I wasn’t going to die.
When the emergency operator asks if my wife’s lips have turned blue, I’d like to be able to give prompt and helpful information that might save her life.
Sometimes it matters more than others, but it’s never not a handicap.
I knew you were going to double down on this instead of just leaving it alone. Again, I’ll say, who cares. Why does this bother you so much? And don’t say it doesn’t. Like threads about tattoos or bathroom laws, I find it suspect when people say both ‘no, it doesn’t bother me…’ but at the same time seem to be pushing back against it, almost as if, like it this case, jtur doesn’t want this kid to have these glasses.
I’m not color blind, so I can’t say, but and I know lots of disabled (adult) people do say that they would give up their disability, but why would you ask a question like that? Why would you say suggest to someone that we have the ability to correct something that’s not working with your body, we just assumed you wouldn’t want it, so we didn’t bother making it. Better luck next time.
You really seem to have a problem with this don’t you?
Therefore he shouldn’t be allowed to have them?
I’m not saying you’re wrong, but are you right? Do you know that or are you making it up?
To quote myself from upthread:
So what you’re saying is that since I was never told…since I figured…no, since the kid probably didn’t figure out on his own that he was col
Wait, what are you saying?
I can tell you that if color blindness is anything like nearsightedness, in that you might not know you see things differently than the others, but can you explain how that’s an argument against being allowed to be able to see them the same as everyone else?
What I’m getting from this is that you have an optical disability that doesn’t bother you and you feel like no one else should make any attempt to make their own disabilities better either.
Well, you need to let that go, whatever grudge you have, you need to stop projecting it on to others.
Also, you keep saying that it’s not a disabling handicap. Well, lots of things aren’t disabling handicaps, but people are still allowed to do things to make life easier on a day to day basis. Whether it’s putting on glasses or using sign language or whatever else gets them through the day.
I assume everything you do is necessary for sustaining your life, right?
I don’t know whether it’s just a dazzling though nonessential layer of glitz – but, for the sake of argument, let’s go with that for a bit. I take it you know that some folks put cream in their coffee, and salt in their stew, right? And you could maybe go on and on about just how big a business the spice trade was, back when cinnamon was a rare commodity? And you can relay whether an ice-cream parlor in your community stays in business because people (a) not only cheerfully pay for stuff they want but don’t need, sure as they (b) go in to specifically request a particular flavor?
Do you have preferences when it comes to the taste of food and drink? Choosing one salad dressing instead of another? Requesting mustard on a hot dog? Sprinkling garlic on a slice of pizza? Maybe a bit of lime for your rum-and-coke? Anything?
I am colorblind and right now I just don’t have $300 to spend on a “problem” that isn’t a problem in my life. I’d wear the glasses just to see what the experience is like, but not constantly.
^ This.
Comparing it to being, say, nearsighted, is ridiculous. My nearsightedness is disabling without correction, my colorblindness is not.
Of course, the degree of deviation from the norm is important - I’m very nearsighted. Someone with only, say, a 1/2 dipoter of nearsightedness might not consider it a bother. I’m not even sure they’d be required to wear glasses to drive a car.
Likewise, “colorblindness” is not just one thing, there are different types of colorblindness and several of them are pretty minor (mine is one of those). Other types are, in fact, very disabling. A lot depends on which colorblindness a person has - but as noted in the article, these glasses don’t work with every variant of colorblindness. They certainly wouldn’t work with, say, achromotopsia which is the complete absence of color perception.
That I’m going to dispute. While it’s true in some cases - I didn’t know until I took the FAA color vision test - in others the person is aware from an early age they’re missing something. From what I gather from this article the kid in this situation might well have been one such person. Those who notice prior to formal testing have a more severe form of color impairment than I do, and they may be the target audience for this technology.
It’s not disabling for you - but as I have noted, there are different forms of color vision impairment. The disabling varieties are more rare than the more common slight impairment that might go unnoticed for a lifetime. I wouldn’t say developing the tech is “not worth it”, and if someone does find some benefit in these glasses more power to them.
I’d view it sort of like the polarized sunglasses I’ve been wearing for years now. They give a slightly different visual perception, and sometimes give more information than bare eyeballs. But they aren’t essential to my life.
Being colorblind didn’t get in the way of my earning a degree in art. Being colorblind didn’t get in the way of my getting a pilot’s license. If you want another example, the comic book artist John Byrne has the exact same form of colorblindness I do and that didn’t stop him from making a living as a comic book artist for Marvel and DC, working on major heroes/groups like The Fantastic Four, X-men, and Superman.
Other colorblind artists have chosen art fields that don’t require sensitive color perception. Art isn’t just about color. When Peter Milton was diagnosed with a fairly severe form of red-green colorblindness he moved to working in black and white. As have others. For someone who wants to be an artist colorblindness isn’t going to prevent that.
As usual so often happens, the most disabling aspect of a disability is not the impairment itself but the perception of others and their misunderstanding of the capabilities of the person affected.
What you’re describing is a very severe impairment of color perception and that level of impairment is pretty rare. Most “colorblind” people are actually better described as “colorweak”. I don’t see greens very well, but I do see green and don’t have a problem distinguishing traffic lights, LED’s turning from red to green, or perceiving that someone’s lips have turned blue. I have the most common form of colorblindness and while once in a great while it’s annoying it’s never been life-threatening and it’s never stopped me from doing what I want to do in life.
Other people do find it seriously disabling - if they want the glasses more power to them. But this shouldn’t be seen as something to be forced on absolutely everyone with color vision deviating from the norm.
Heh. I never knew that about Byrne – but one of the first of his issues that I’d bought was one where Superman casually manhandles a problem that’s too much for various members of the Green Lantern Corps. After all, he doesn’t give a crap whether the threat is yellow; “MY POWERS,” he announces, “AREN’T HINDERED BY COLOR!”
Okay, hijack over. But it cracks me up, in retrospect.
There is an element out there that, upon finding someone isn’t meeting some norm or other, will insist that forcing the person to conform to that norm is the proper course of action regardless of what the affected person might think about it.
It’s the same attitude that used to force left-handed children to write with their right hands or otherwise attempt to change the fundamental wiring of the kid to conform to societal norms. Being left-handed isn’t a disability unless society makes it a disability.
I’ve heard of these glasses for several years, and I’ve encountered people who not only think I should wear them, but seem puzzled that I really have no interest and will spend time trying to convince me I should try them because don’t I want to see what everyone else sees? Um… you know, this just hasn’t been a problem in my life. And frankly, after a half century of perceiving the world as I do, I might not like normal color vision. I mean, would everyone look greenish to me compared to how I see them right now? Is food going to look funny-colored and “off”? Sure, the winter coat I have that looks brown to me will, apparently, suddenly look green but it’s just… not that important to me.
So, while this hasn’t come up in this thread it has come up in real life from time to time.
My father was red-green colorblind. Mostly it wasn’t a handicap. But we went to Atlantic City for a week every summer. There, the traffic lights on the streets that ran the long way (NE to SW) had the red on top, green on the bottom, but the short streets had it upside down. This caused him serious difficulty. They did it that way in order to use only three bulbs inside the signal instead of twelve. I think he died before there were any significant number of horizontal signals, but I wonder about them.