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Seeing Red... and blue... and green

Do we see the same blue?

When I was around ten I asked my teacher if we saw the same colours when we look at a picture. She asked me to elaborate so I suggested that maybe my green is her red, but we think it's the same colour. The conversation died quickly but that question has always lingered.

When the blue/gold dress debate strategy in 2015 I was excited: my grade 5 question was going to be answered 20 years later. So we do see colour differently, but not to such an extreme as the example I gave Ms. Breeze. How we perceive colour, or the range of colours available to all humans, is through the photoreceptors in our eyes, which have cones and rods. The rods capture low levels of light but do not capture colour.

The cones on the other hand absorb bright light as light energy through photopigments. There are three different cones, and each one perceives the light spectrum slightly differently, which is what enables us to see many colours and their variants.

The three cones have something called opsin, which are photosensitive to pigment in three colours: red, green, and blue. Based on the wavelength of light, a colour will be produced and the opsin that is most sensitive to that level of wavelength will perceive the colour, such as the colour blue which is produced at the shortest wavelength of the three colours. Each of the cones have red, green, and blue opsin, but in different amounts, which allows each cone to be more sensitive to one of the colours. The cones are often referred to by the colour they are most sensitive to.

So why do we see different colour? Some people - around 8% of men and less than 1% of women - are missing one of the cones and have trouble seeing a range of one of the colours, often misinterpreting colours all together. For instance, if you are missing the green cone, you may misinterpret the colour green for more reddish hues. The reason you can still sense gree is because the green-sensitive opsin on the other two cones is still present, but is not dominant.

On the other spectrum of colour perception, there are people called tetrachromats who are highly sensitive to the light spectrum and able to pick up the tiniest of differences between two colours that a normal-visioned person could not pick up. Watch this amazing video about San Diego woman, Concetto Antico, who has this super-vision.

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