How does colour blindness work? Why are there only a few specific types (red-green / blue-yellow / total)?
In: Biology
Our eyes have cells called cone cells that are activated when exposed to light. There are three types, red, blue, and green. Every color you can see (including white) is made up of combination of these. As an example, orange and yellow are red+green. In color blindness, these three types of cells are either don’t work properly or don’t work at all (possibly even missing altogether). In red green colorblindness, the green sensitive cells are the issue. In blue yellow, it’s the blue cells. For total color blindness, either all three are missing, or there is only one (meaning there are different types).
The first step in our brains for color vision is to turn the red green blue into three spectrums. These are white/black (r+g+b), red/green (r-g) and blue/yellow (b+g-r).
There are these cells in your eyes called cones. They act a lot like prisms, when you hold a prism up to a light it scatters the colors in the light making a rainbow. Our cones do the same thing, when they are misshapen they scatter less colors.
The light that we see is made up of waves, even though green and red look like different colors to a fully sighted person green waves and red waves are very similar and are easy to get mixed up with one another making this the most common form of color blindness.
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