You know, I don’t FEEL color blind, and I can SEE the red dots and the green dots on that shirt. And if I look hard I could trace out where the letters should be. But I can’t take a glance at the shirt and read what it says.
The only time I feel color blind is when I’m doing those dot tests.
My ex was colour-blind, and for a while did the colour-blind version of The Question to non-colour-blind people. He’d never seen the dot tests until I pulled them up on the internet and printed them out, and for a while it was like he thought there was a grand conspiracy amongst his friends and family to convince him that empty circles contained numbers (I think he could read two out of the six). He’d drag guests into the computer room and make them read the numbers, and then he’d shake his head in amazement.
I -hope- I’m not guilty of annoying people with The Question, but it’s so fascinating. I mean, I know other people probably don’t perceive things in exactly the same way as me, but this is one of the few things where it can be demonstrated that they really don’t. Red and green look so dramatically different to me, yet there’s a point where they cross over to other people’s eyes and become indistinguishable… that’s just incredible! And fascinating! And then the Monkey Brain takes over and wants to keep poking at it.
I usually answer the question, after rolling my eyes to lets the questioner know that yes…everyone asks. Sometime I get mock-aggrieved and rant about how political correctness doesn’t apply to the color blind. I try to be a good sport about ‘the question.’
ianzin kind of makes a good point, but asking a tone-deaf person to describe musical tones is still kind of rude. If it were a clinical thing like a physical maybe…but in polite conversation? I’m a pretty good sport, but I can see how it would get annoying.
I’ve used the “That’s like asking a blind man how many fingers I’m holding up” line, but I’ll admit it’s not quite the same. Maybe it’s like asking a dyslexic to write stuff for you. It’s not really polite.
By the way…I’ve got this T-shirt.
One time, in middle school:
Me: “Can you pass me the pink marker?”
My friend hands me a blue marker. I look down at it, set it down and pick up the pink one myself, figuring he was too intent on his own work to see what he had handed me.
Five minutes later.
Me: “Can you hand me a green?”
Friend hands me a yellow.
Me: “What’s wrong with you?! Are you colorblind or something?”
He was.
:smack:
How many fingers am I holding up?
[QUOTE=Monty]
Seriously. Why are so many people compelled to ask me The Question (“What color is this?”) when they discover I’m colorblind? I’ve asked some friends who also happen to be colorblind if they get the same reaction from other people. Waddyaknow, they do! It’s seems to be a universal reaction, based on this rather small sample. It’s almost like a variant of the Borg has taken over all thought processes for the person and they cannot resist the urge.
What I don’t understand is the compulsion to ask “What color is this? This? And that over there?” Let me help you out if you’re so compelled: Yesterday, we couldn’t tell what color the things are, today we can’t tell, and barring some miracle tomorrow won’t make any change in the type of vision and we still won’t be able to tell. It’s a simple physical fact. People, we’re colorblind! That means that we can’t tell what color something is! It’s like asking a deaf person what tone you’re playing on a musical instrument.
So, I have a question each for the following two groups of the TM:
[ol][li]If you’re colorblind, how do you deal with people asking The Question?[/li][li]If you’re not colorblind, do you succumb to the compulsion to ask The Question?[/ol][/li][/QUOTE]
I’m partially colorblind, which means I have some trouble distinguishing some shades of green from tan, and many subtleties are lost on me. I can, however, see most single colors quite plainly. I still get the stupid questions. ‘What color is this?’ Red. ‘What color is that?’ Green. “Hey, I thought you were colorblind!” Yes, and you, apparently, are deaf as a fucking post!
I used to have a lot of green slacks.
I’m red-green colorblind and have played the what color is this? game my entire life, but it’s almost never annoying. I think the reason it seems universal is because it’s inevitable if people want to communicate with us clearly. If they don’t attain some idea of how our eyes work they are going to misinterpret our behavior.
Many years ago when I addressed an envelope in red ink, my boss told me to “fix that.” When I asked why, she said because the letter isn’t urgent, we wouldn’t want to alarm the recipient. Not only do I not have an emotional response to the color red, I didn’t even realize the ink was red until I held it to the light. My boss (I suspect) assumed that I lacked attention to detail.
One of my current jobs is proof-reading and text editing. I make my changes in what I think is dark blue ink. My boss prefers edits in red “because that stands out,” but let me use dark blue once I explained my situation. All my school-life I wondered why teachers’ written comments were in red when everyone knows (I assumed) that red is a pale, weak color, easily overlooked.
Driving, for me, is extremely arduous, especially at night in city traffic. It’s not that I can’t figure out the traffic light. I usually can. It’s the galaxy of other lights all around that disorients me. When the car ahead puts on brake lights, it takes me a second or two to process. Because color is involved, I have to think about it first.
On the train a loudspeaker announced “Push the green button to exit.” I looked around, saw a big, colored button on the door, but was that the green one? It looked like it was probably green, but I had to look around to make sure there weren’t other buttons. The people behind me grew restless.
Bright, direct light strains my eyes, which is another thing that characterizes some color-blind people. For this reason I don’t use a lamp at my desk at the office. Aren’t the ceiling lights sufficient? For years I didn’t know why EVERYBODY would say to me, “How you can work like that? You need some light in there.”
I think there are psychological components to color-blindness as well. I see hues but I don’t always assign them names because I don’t have names for the colors I see. I just have the names that the normal-visioned use. Blue and purple can sometimes be one color to me. Same with dark green, brown, beige, tan. Some yellows and greens. Pale pink and gray.
I think that I often regard color as an idea (something I have to think about) rather than sensory data. Don’t wonder why I ask if the newborn is a girl or boy. “Can’t you see she’s dressed in pink?” Once you tell me she’s wearing pink, I can usually discern it. But until the uncertain color is confirmed, it often exists for me in limbo as something unnamed, identified, uncategorized.
Lastly, I find that color-blindness provides a useful metaphor to remind folks not to presume we all see the world in the same way.
OOOO! That’s EVIL! I can’t read it at all!
Um… for the benefit of those of us in the this thread having some problem with colors… what does that say? From the jpg title something like “I love color”…?
See, I can read that one just fine. It says “I [heart] color”.
I love this topic.
My first (late) husband was colourblind. The whole spectrum from green through brown through burgundy and red were the problem. However, he had no trouble with traffic lights, the red and the green used did look different to him.
At first when we were married, he refused to acknowledge his special way of seeing things. I remember one evening window-shopping where he got angry at me because he pointed out a nice red tie in a display. I kept saying “What red tie?”. he kept calling me stupid because I couldn’t see what he meant. When I said “Oh, you mean the green one!”, he was livid. He kept insisting that his way of seeing colours was the right one. He was right, I guess, in a way, but a number of us didn’t see eye to eye.
When I was upset at him once, I deliberately mismatched socks in pairs in his dresser. Passive-aggressive act, I know.
I think a lot of people are aware that partial colorblindness is a lot more common than complete colorblindness. If someone told me they were colorblind, I would probably ask other questions first, but once I determined they were only partially color blind, I might ask about how they experience colors. I find it odd when people get upset by questions to which the answer is obvious to them only because they already know it. There’s no need to be snarky, just say “I actually have complete color blindness, so I only see in shades of black, white and gray - but some colors such as red do tend to show up darker and some colors such as yellow tend to show up lighter, but I can’t usually identify colors based solely on darkness.” Or you can always say “I prefer not to talk about it, thanks.”
According to most medical texts I am (and many other dopers apparently are) red green color deficient. Mines a bit worse than most I have trouble with blue and purple as well. As I child I wondered why there were two blue crayons in the box and nobody used one of them.
I didn’t get that I was color blind until I took the test with the dots…for my Army flight physical and failed. Then I failed the FALANT test which completely ruled me out from flying.
My grandfather was color blind. He saw the world in black white and grey. He never understood why people paid all that extra money for color TV sets. “they look just the same”.
Hey do the rest of you with color deficiency find you have very very good night vision? I was once told that color deficiency and color blindness arise from our eyes having far more rods than cones and since rods work in low light and cones don’t people with bad color vision have excellent night vision.
I only know one person that is color blind. It would never have occurred to me to ask him what color something was.
My dad’s colourblind, and when he and my mom were first dating, he took great care in dressing well. He was particularly proud of his blue suit that looked so good. One day my mom asked him why he never wore this lovely blue suit and instead always wore the - wait for it now- PURPLE suit.
Dad: Purple? Seriously? :eek: :smack:
For the last 20 years he’s bought his clothes only in the earth tone spectrum, so it’s pretty hard to mess that up.
It’s never occurred to me to ask him “what colour is this?”.
I just wanted to add quickly that Mrs. WeHaveCookies does indeed ask me “What color is this?” just as often as I pester her about her perceptive uniqueness.
Nava:
When I was about seven and living in Tennessee, our neighbor had a peach or pear tree (I forget which now). My mother told me not to take any of the fruit off the tree. I was–and still am, I guess–practically addicted to both fruits. So, I climbed the tree and followed my Mother’s admonition: I did not pick any of the fruits. I just took a bite out of each one. Since none was ripe, I went through all of the fruits on the tree and got very sick!
Really Not All That Bright and SmartAleq:
I used that in a stand-up routine for my ward talent night a few years ago. “I’m extremely colorblind so I have a great way to determine if a woman I’m dating could be the future Mrs. Monty. I’ll ask her to go clothes shopping with me. If she’s, well, cruel, she’ll outfit me like I’m dressed now. Yep, I’m not dating anyone so I put this ensemble together on my own. On the other hand, if she sets me up in style, then I just might be on the right track.”
ChefGuy:
A buddy of mine asked me what I wear when I’m teaching at my public middle school here in Korea. He knows I’m colorblind. I told him, “White shirt with dark slacks.” His response was, “Oh, you wear your Mormon uniform.” On the plus side, I got to use his line in a wonderful talk in church a few months ago.
Kevala:
When I was very young, I thought everyone in the world was in on a big conspiracy to confuse me.
jackdavinci:
You’re a saint among the People. Too bad most folks persist in asking even when given those responses. And often enough, it’s in a situation where I can’t just walk off the premises.
Jimson Jim:
My mother’s father also had colorblindness as severe as your grandfather’s! Also, when I was in the Army (before I got smart and went into the Navy for the rest of my military career), I was assigned to a combat unit in West Germany. Not only did I have better night vision than other members of my section, but the camouflage didn’t really disguise anything for me.
ianzin:
Yeah, I guess that’s a better way of putting it. Here’s something else odd: I’m the only member of my immediate family who is not tone deaf. Yet everyone else used to insist that I was also. They got over that after (a) I got selected for a couple of choirs (not famous by any means, but I still had to audition) and (b) I learned a tonal language (Vietnamese, both North and South; they’re distinguished partly by their different tones).
Priceguy:
I don’t even want to know why you have the flail!
nofloyd and WhyNot:
When I took a Geology class in college, the prof was great. I let him know at the beginning of the semester that I am severely colorblind. For tests where the color of something was important, he would let me know what color the item is.
Mosier:
here as opposed to [url=]Trichromacy (or “normal color vision”).
Like they say, just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean people still aren’t out to get you!
Until I was diagnosed at 12, I well on my way to formulating a conspiracy theory. I assumed everybody verified the color of crayons by reading the label. Otherwise how could anyone really be sure they were using the right crayon? I wondered how others knew I had been in the sun too long. When I ate a rare hamburger, why did someone insist it was pink inside when anyone could see it was a kind a grayish brown? Why did everyone adjust the color on the TV set after I did? Orange faces? No way! Why was I always last to notice the fall foliage? What was so special about fireworks? What did people mean by “color-coordinating” their clothes? Why do we color pumpkins orange when they’re really brown? How else can we be sure a banana is unripe without biting into it?
Growing up color-blind can be like having dyslexia. I didn’t know why I kept making mistakes or why others saw things that I didn’t. I believed that I failed to pay attention to the world around me because I was a day-dreamer and maybe not as intelligent as some people gave me credit for.
This is a fascinating idea. I am not colorblind (I can always see all of those little dots), but my friends all tell me my idea of what is “blue” or “green” is… not always correct. I always assumed it was just a matter of labelling rather than actual perception. I don’t think there’s such a thing as “color partially sighted.” I have excellent night vision, though, and I’m somewhat sensitive to light. Intriguing.
My mom and I argued once over a shirt one of us called more blue and the other called more green. Neither of us had color blindness problems.
2 possibilities: Even among the regular color-sighted population there is more phenotypic variation than we realize. Or, where we ‘break’ up colors is more culturally/environmentally driven than we realize.