Colour blindness - facts and beautiful defects among us!

appleringo · Post time 22-4-2018 04:09 AM

Edited by appleringo at 22-4-2018 05:26 AM

What makes me attracted to somehow write and even share about this topic? I don't even suffer (should I revise ‘suffer’?!) from colour blindness. But long time ago my ex-bf used to be colour blind. He was my first bf (I considered) because I was sort of having a serious relationship in my early 20’s. After dated him for 1 year, the fact that he told me that he had difficulty in identifying colours, made me awestruck but terrified at the same time. At that time, he was majoring in Engineering and in contrast, I was in Life Sciences field. The fact that my bf had colour blind left me with a big thought. Haha. That was how I realized the real reason why my bf didn’t really fancy to talk about colours when we had lunch or dinner date. Because, I always at least made myself looked presentable and charming (in my own definition!) before we meet up. And every time I asked him, looked, what do you think about my blouse or skirts or pants I matched together for our date today? Isn’t blue and coral green a great combination? I always asked him eagerly with shining eyes. But too bad, he always responds half-heartedly about colours and so on. Only the moment when he confessed he had colour blind, then I got to know, ahhhhh! That’s the real reason behind his frustrated responds.

But I suddenly draw a bigger picture in my head. What if we got married and my kids inherited the defected genes from his/her dad (who was at that time my current bf!). Without doing further, in-depth research on colour blindness genetically, even though I was majoring in Life Sciences field at that time, (yeah, I admit, I was extremely sluggish and oblivious at that age!), I started to think of breaking up with him. Otherwise I will have to marry a colour blinded guy who will caused the whole family suffered from colour blindness. Yeah, I was that bad! Sorry! But, we ended up breaking up later not because of ‘colour blind’ issue. But more to like teenagers’ age where u realized u were not meant to be together (that was my reason that I gave him, though!).

Anyway, that ex-bf was now happily married! But I somehow tempted to share what is colour blindness to me? It triggers me to write about this when I was watching my current favourite Korean show, 미운 우리 새끼, when one of the hosts, Shin Dong Yeob told the other members, that he had colour blind and he didn’t really interested in colour. And it reminds me of my ex-bf and my lame thoughts when we were dating long time ago.

A fact that we should know about colour blind is firstly it is a common hereditary (inherited) condition, which means it is usually passed down from your parents. So It does make sense when I was worried about my future children having colour blindness defect. But more shocking fact is red/green colour blindness is passed from mother to son on the 23rd chromosome, which is known as the sex chromosome because it also determines sex.

The 23rd chromosome is made up of two parts – either two X chromosomes if you are female or an X and a Y chromosome if you are male. The faulty ‘gene’ for colour blindness is found only on the X chromosome. So, for a male to be colour blind the faulty colour blindness ‘gene’ only has to appear on his X chromosome. For a female to be colour blind it must be present on both of her X chromosomes.

The colour blind ‘gene’ is carried on one of the X chromosomes. Since men have only one X chromosome, if his X chromosome carries the colour blind‘gene’ (X) he will be colour blind (XY). A woman can have either:-
(i) two normal X chromosomes, so that she will not be colour blind or be a carrier (XX),
(ii) or, one normal X and one colour blind carrying X chromosome,in which case she will be a carrier (XX), or rarely
(iii) she will inherit a colour blind X from her father and a colour blind X from her mother and be colour blind herself (XX). She will pass on colour blindness to all of her sons if this is the case.

Don't you guys get it? Ok let me explain with some charts later..

appleringo · Post time 22-4-2018 04:11 AM

Edited by appleringo at 22-4-2018 05:15 AM

See the tables below to understand how people can become colour blind and how colour blindness is passed on to future generations.

Table 1: A colour blind man and a non-colour blind woman

Table2: A non-colour blind man and a colour blind carrier woman

Table3: A colour blind man and a colour blind carrier woman

Table4: A non-colour blind man and a colour blind woman

appleringo · Post time 22-4-2018 04:54 AM

Edited by appleringo at 22-4-2018 05:25 AM

How on earth I was thinking years ago without digging into the real scientific answer about colour blindness. Huhu. Too bad. Can you see it clearly now? Now what makes me ponder and wonder is how the colour blinded buddies around us see colourful things around us? I am really amazed with the videos and research done by BRIGHT SIDE in YouTube. Such a beautiful yet informative video. There are different types of colour blindness; where each of them had deficiency in different colour shades. 1st type is Deuteranopia (the most common form of colour blindness), with difficulties to see green and red most of the time. 2nd is Protanopia - all shades of green n read appear faded, yellow shade remains unchanged. 3rd type – Tritanopia (rare type)- they see the world in greenish pink tone. 4th type – Total colour blindness – only 0.00003% of the whole world’s population had it.

Now, let us see how people with colour blindness see colours differently than people with normal vision. This is the comparison how different types of colour blindness see colours compared to normal vision.

How about traffic light?

And take a look at how we differently see Pepsi label! Amazingly different right?

How about rainbow?

And street lights?

I realized that we are differently wonderful! We are beautiful human beings!

appleringo · Post time 22-4-2018 05:20 AM

Edited by appleringo at 22-4-2018 05:23 AM

There are also some historical facts about colour blindness that really leave an enormous impact and shock on me. I have just realized that John Dalton was the first to discover about colour blindness after he realized that he was colour blind himself. He later published his finding regarding colour blind in 1798 entitled “Extraordinary Facts Relating to the Vision of Colours with Observations”. This is what Dalton claimed his deficiency in that particular publication as Dalton saw only the blue, violet and yellow parts of the spectrum correctly.

“That part of the image which others call red, appears to me little more than a shade or defect of light; after that, the orange, yellow and green seem one colour, which descends pretty uniformly from an intense to a rare yellow, making what I should call different shades of yellow”.

All this while I only knew the fact that Mr. Dalton is the honourable chemist who proposed the modern atomic theory. Anyway, due to his immeasurable contribution into colour blindness research, the general condition of colour blindness has been named after him as ‘Daltonism’ but later ‘Daltonism’ was referred to the 1st type of colour blindness; Deuteranopia.

And another shockingly beautiful fact about people with colour blindness is how historically the famous, world-renowned Facebook got its official colour as ‘blue’. It’s none other than Facebook Co-founder; Mark Zuckerberg himself had red-green color blindness. "Blue is the richest color for me. I can see all of blue," he said and later concluded why Facebook is particularly blue in colour.

Well, amongst famous people around the globe who had colour blindness are Prince William, Bill Clinton, Christopher Nolan and Keanu Reeves. This totally overpower the fact that colour blindness is a defect but a breathtakingly wonderful fact!