Last night I bought some “blue” rugs for the bathroom. At least I thought they were blue. I don’t even see a hint of green in them. They are blue blue blue. Then my girlfriend comes over, uses the bathroom, and comes out talking about the nice new “green” rugs. I though she was kidding around with me since we’ve gotten into the blue/green discussion on various objects before.
But she would not relent. She kept insisting they were green. So I brought one of the rugs to work today. Every co-worker sees the rugs as green. Every-single-one.
So why do I see them as blue? I don’t see the slightest trace of green. The rugs look exactly the same color to me as a flower on the wallpaper in the bathroom. The flower that we both identify as blue.
Like I said, this has happened before. I don’t think it has anything to do with being color blind. However, throughout my life there have been many times that I see blue and everyone around me sees green.
I should mention that I can tell the difference between blue and green. It’s just that certain shades of green look blue to me. If there was no one else around I would have no reason to even doubt that they were blue.
I get the same thing, I’m constantly seeing one color where my wife insists it’s a different color, and I especially notice it in the difference between incandescent, flourescent and natural lighting. I suppose it’s got something to do with the difference in color temperature (in degrees Kelvin) + some aspect of the difference between my wife’s and my color receptors.
My wild guess is that you may indeed have a subtle version of color blindness, in which you see some greens as blue, sometimes called blue-yellow color blindness. Check out the 4-panel color diagram just below that description; the lower-right quarter may fit your particular situation.
I have the opposite condition. I see green when everyone else sees blue. And blue by itself doesn’t show up that well for me. This could be for me some form of tritanopia, but it’s never been much of a problem, so I haven’t sought out an ophthalmologist for accurate testing. I’ve only see one of the test images for tritanopia online, and with the variation in monitors it may not be an accurate representation, but I couldn’t pick out the number.
I don’t know much about this subject, but apparently there are forms of color blindness that only have these small effects. Yours sounds like it leans toward the blue side, while mine leans toward green.
I have a similar, but perhaps opposite, problem – gotten into many arguments about this. I tend to see things in a somewhat shifted manner. A lot of things people call “blue” are just plain “green” to me, and a lot of “purples” are plain “blue”.
I had a color deficiency test done, and even though I fail the Ishihara test, I passed the hue sorting test and was declared not color deficient by my eye doctor.
One other possibility: is your girlfriend a native Spanish speaker, by any chance? The Spanish language places the blue/green boundary in a different location on the spectrum than the English language does. For example, the turquoise blue waters off the Riviera Maya are, in Spanish, a shade of “verde” (green).
Hmm. How accurate are the Ishihara tests? Apparently, I may have some colorblindness, but there’s no way I’ve made it this far in life without realizing that.
However JKellyMap has a point, that different countries and cultures divide the spectrum differently, and their languages reflect that. For example, Russian distinguishes light blue “goluboy”, and dark blue, “siniy”.
We use the Ishihara in our clinic for basic color-blindness evaluation; it’s a standard ophthalmic test. The Roth test (IIRC there are other names too) is a little more in-depth, and involves the patient placing little colored discs in order in a color wheel.
And this is kind of a Sapir-Whorf type of situation. In English, we distinguish “Red” from “Pink”. An item that is “pink” is not also “red”, while an item that is “light blue”, is also within the domain of “blue”, though one could argue that “pink” is just the common word for “light red”. Think about it- what comes into your mind when you think of “light red”? In Russian, my understanding is that something that is “goluboy” is NOT also “siniy”, and an item that is “siniy” is NOT “goluboy”.
Yes, you could very easily go through life without realizing that you are colorblind. Most colorblind people do, in fact.
Before John Dalton (who suffered from a fairly severe form of it) presented his first paper on colorblindness in 1794, the condition was unknown to medicine and science (and there does not seem to have been any real “folk” awareness of it either). Of course, there were colorblind people before 1794, but for most of the long millennia of human history and prehistory, no colorblind person ever realized that there was anything particular wrong with them (unless, as can occur with very severe cases, much worse than Dalton’s, it was accompanied by other serious vision problems). If they found themselves disagreeing with someone else about the color of something, they probably generally blew it off (as the OP was tempted to do) as just the other person being weird. Colorblindness is a subtle defect that does not affect most people’s ability to function in any very significant way.(Good color vision was probably much more important to our monkey ancestors, who needed to be able to find fruit amongst the leaves, than it is to us humans.)
Incidentally, non-colorblind people who speak languages with few color words can still distinguish all the colors that English speakers can, even if they don’t have all our words for them. The OP’s issue is most unlikely to be linguistic, and almost certainly is a form of colorblindness.
My dog has a similar problem. He’s literate and knows the alphabet. But every time I show him an ‘F’, he sees ‘K’. More curiouser, whenever I ask him about it he just snickers and tries to pin it on the soup. Beats me.
Oh, then there’s this bit of awesome.
I spent the approximately 45 minutes before lunch and discovered that I may have a very, very slight defect. Maybe. One of the few tests that quantized it put it at 93% of normal function for deuteranomaly. Whatever. Freakout over, just missed one of the few Ishihara discs on the Wikipedia article and freaked out a bit.
I was amazed by the Wiki article referred to. I pass the Ishihara test easily, but my wife and I argue continually about colors. Just this morning, we were out for a walk and she was marveling how her hat matched her raincoat. I looked at them and they were both pale blue, but the raincoat had some violet in it while, to my eyes, the hat didn’t. She insisted that the raincoat had a lot of violet in it, but so did the hat. We also argue about whether something is green, turquoise, or blue. And we both grew up as native speakers of American English (well, she grew up in Brooklyn, so maybe not).
I found it especially fascinating that some females might have 4 color vision in the same way that 2/3 of new world monkeys have 3 color vision. I know the genetics of that (and it is fascinating), but it never occurred to me you could have a similar thing among humans.
But speaking of that it seems clear from such color phrases as “red hair” and “red rust”, both of which are clearly orange, that “orange” must be a relatively recent addition to the English color spectrum. That is, what we now call orange would have been called red some centuries ago, possibly yellowish red.
I have a lot of green slacks that I thought were brown or tan. Red-green colorblindness can make you into a fashion risk very quickly. Oh, and Ishihara and anybody who insists on administering his stupid test despite my telling them that I have problems with it, and just so they can look at me in shocked amazement, can kiss my ass.
The Roth color test will probably overcome any language-based issues with assigning color names. The one we used today has 28 little discs of different colors, coded to show the actual order by numbers printed on the back. We darken the room, have the test board under a daylight-spectrum lamp, and mix up the colors. The board has a circular slot in it. We place one disc in the slot (kind of a reddish-purple hue) and ask the patient to build from that. The aim is to make a rainbow in a circle. There are no bright primary colors in the selection; they all kind of shade gradually one into the other. (I think they kind of look like little eyeshadow pots, in various pastel-ish shades.) Oh, and we have the patient cover each eye in turn with a patch and test them separately to see if there’s a difference between eyes. Being relatively normal in color vision, I can sort the board in about 2 minutes if I stop to check my work.
The most dramatic results I’ve seen were from one guy who regularly took 10 minutes per eye to sort the colors (this with asking them to wrap it up at about 9 min, and stopping at 10), and they still didn’t appear to be sorted in any order I could understand. After the second or third session, I started suspecting they were sorted on how luminous the colors appeared, perhaps.
