TRANSCRIPT
All right. How you guys all doing, I don’t know any of you. All right, so I have not been here before so I don’t really know what the vibe is. So I’m going to try and make up my own vibe. I am going to talk about dyschromatopsia, which if you know what that is, just keep it in your pants for the next 4 slides and then you can let it out. I’ve intentionally picked this long and unwieldy word because that’s what is going to make the beginning of this work. So bear with me. Does anyone know what this is? [answer]
Hey, good start. Good start. Yeah. It’s not a painters palette. It is in the shape of a wheel made out of colors. Yeah. We’re going. Well, how about this? Anyone know what this is? Closer closer. It is definitely not 3 dimensional twister. How about this an idea? It’s not a pencil sharpener. There’s a little clue down there. Yeah, there’s a clue. Definitely not going to help you because it has nothing to do with the Green Lantern, but I think, OK, this next one you’re probably going to get. What is this? [answer] It is a color blindness test. Yes, this and all of the others were in fact color blindness tests. This is by far the most well known. This is called the Ishihara plate. Those are the names of all the others, but even though they are better tests than the Ishihara plate, no one really uses them.
Does everyone see the number in here? Does anyone not see the number in here? Are you colorblind? Yeah. OK. But you already knew you were colorblind before this. Yeah. All right. Good. It’s always tough to break the news to people, live in the audience. So for the rest of you to see what myself and. Sorry, what was your name? Sodos? To see what we are seeing, this is a simulation of red, green color blindness simulation to show you that we are in fact seeing nothing that is in here. Sodos, it is an 18, just so you’re on the same page as the rest of us, but that is what we see. No one sees a number in there, right? Perfect.
So you guys might know a little bit how color vision works. You’ve probably heard of the rods and the cones. Can someone tell me what the difference in rods and cones is? Anyone wanna take a stab at it? [answer] Right. So that’s what almost everyone believes. The cones have color and you can tell by the fact that there are three colors, but it’s more so a difference between night vision and day vision. So the cones are less sensitive. So they are active during the day. The rods are much more sensitive. They’re active during the night. There’s only one class of rods and that’s why at night, and I mean at night when it’s really dim and it’s starlit, you don’t see color yet at day as long as you have all three cones [in your retina], you see color. This is a mosaic model of the back of your retina. That’s where these cone cells are. And you can see that there is a mixture of the red, the green and the blue cells. And you can pretend that the rods are the black interstitium between all of these cells.
Now, for all of you besides the two of us, that’s going to be what your retina looks like. For the two of us, it’s going to be more something like this. I’m a Protanope, which means I’m lacking the red cells. Do you know what kind of color blindness you are? Sorry. [answer] OK, he’s a Deuteranope, which means he has red cells but no green cells. But otherwise it’s pretty much the same thing. We’re still Bros. So this is what my retina looks like. There’s one less type of cell there, and as you can guess, I see a lot less color because we see a lot less color because of that. These are the three cells in normal trichromacy. If you plot their spectral sensitivity against the wavelength. Here we have 4-700nm. You might know that that is the visible range. And we have the blue, the green and the red cones and the light that they are most sensitive to, or as most scientists who study color vision call them, S-, the M- and the L- for the short- and the medium- and the long- wavelength cones.
With normal trichromacy you have those 3 cones that gives you 3 different dimensions of information. Your brain will take that, they will transform that in a way, and you will get your familiar color terms and color experience coming out of that. The most obvious is hue. That is going to be like the rainbow of your colors around the perimeter. You have the value that is the intensity and the saturation along the radius goes from white or gray in the middle (being non-chromatic) to the outside, which is fully saturated color.
For us color blind people, most of them will have this going on where the spectral sensitivity of those two cones gets pushed closer to each other and that means the signal that they’re sending is going to start to be very similar between the two cones, which means that when you’re comparing those to try and determine what the color is from those signals, you’re going to have a lot lower dynamic range essentially.
So imagine it like this, you guys might have a better idea of depth perception and that we have two eyes, not so that we can do this, but one aspect of one advantage of having two eyes forward facing is that we have depth perception. The further part, did you talk about this in a previous? Yes, it’s very nice to have depth perception. I can see that I’m not going to trip over you. OK, So the further away the eyes are apart, you’re going to have different information and therefore you’re going to have better depth perception in a sense. And so imagine like an Anya Taylor Joy, eyes very far apart, has super good depth perception. She’s basically a rangefinder, but with this anomalous trichromacy, this type of color blindness, just like those spectral sensitivities move together and don’t have very different information. It’s kind of like Sarah Jessica Parker. The eyes are closer together. They’re giving a lot of the same information, doesn’t have very good depth perception. I haven’t validated that. Maybe she has great depth perception, but she’s just an example. And then if they move really close together. You get Lila from Futurama… Cyclops… no depth perception. And that’s basically what I have, which is where they have moved so close together that they’re overlapping and essentially just one has disappeared at that point. And this is called dichromacy. So I’m completely missing one of the cones.
This is not going to tell you how I see the world. It’s not going to tell you how I see color. So I’m going to try and do that now and explain to you how color blind people see color. Sodos, Are you severe? Mild? [Not really sure, but it’s not a major problem for me] Yeah. So maybe you’re mild, you’re an anomalous trichromat. You still have both of those cones. They’re just a little bit too close to each other, but not all the way overlapping. This is a color wheel. You guys have probably seen this, see this sort of thing in Photoshop or paint.net for those of us that have no money. It basically shows, as I showed before, you have white or gray on the inside. You increase saturation as you move to the outside and all the hues on the outside. There are three types of color blindness.
There’s Protan, Deutan and Tritan (we don’t care about Tritan). Anyway, the Protan and the Deutan – I’m protan, he’s deutan – What happens when those cones start to move together is you basically decrease the dynamic range in the direction that the arrows are pointing. So we see that the circle basically turns into an ellipse. So we still have a large dynamic range in this way, but in this way not so much. For me as a dichromat where those cones are all the way together. I just have a line basically. So my chromaticity is a line. It’s still dichromatic 2 dimensions because I have this. One dimension plus the intensity dimension, but I’m not showing the intensity dimension. And it’s basically for me, blue to white to yellow. And I know I did this to my wife and she says that’s not blue, that’s not yellow. For me, it doesn’t matter because I don’t see blue and yellow like you do. I see blue and purple shoved into a single color that I call blurple. And likewise green and yellow shoved into a single color that I call grellow. I could guess and say, oh, that’s probably yellow or that’s probably blue. But it’s it takes away the uncertainty when I just say that’s blurple or that’s grellow. And you know, I do call the middle white and sometimes it’s cyan. But for the purpose of this, we’ll just call it grinkyan, which is gray, pink and cyan kind of all pushed into that neutral, neutral color.
So this also not really telling you what I see, so we’re going to check out some real examples. And so I’m going to show an original image on the left and then an image on the right that is simulated color blindness and how how I would see it so. Here we have a winter landscape. On the right is how I see it, very drab, almost no color, just white. On the left is how you guys all see it, which I really wish I got to see this super vibrant winter Wonderland with colors throughout the snow, a real rainbow. I’m really jealous of all that. Yes, I know the snow is white. We know what color things are, but so I’ll pick something more colorful. And here you’ll see that we have a parrot, and that’s how I see it. As you can see, I still see color, just a lot less color than what you see here and you might be a little confused now, and that is because yes, I did specifically search for an image that lost the least amount of color as I simulated color blindness into it. So I hope these look about the same to you guys. That’s quite rare though, most of it’s more like this. So these are the fall colors, the autumn colors, where you have green, yellow or whatever the fuck it is on here. And then over here is how I see it, which is pretty bland, not much of a spectrum anymore. But you know what? So I get to miss out on the decay of chloroplasts from deciduous foliage. Who really cares, right? So how about this? What you see what I see… A little bit depressing, not so festive, a little bit of a snotty soup at Christmas. But you know, that’s OK. It’s just why I stopped believing in Santa at five years old.
But I don’t want you to feel bad for me because really, in a way, it’s you guys who are alone. So if we look at humans, humans are trichromats. They have the three cones. They’re all you 8 billion humans. By the way, color blindness is 8% of men, half a percent of women. So there’s quite a few of us. But there’re more of you and here I am. Here’s me at 12 years old. I’m playing Antipholus of Ephesus for Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. I have a very anachronistic costume here, but it’s very color blind friendly. The yellow and blue, lots of contrast. And that is me as a dichromat. But I’m not alone over here because I also have pretty much every single other mammal… are dichromats. All mammals are dichromats, almost. You guys have some help too. You guys have some friends. You guys have the other great apes. You guys have got gorillas. Chimpanzees. You have a mouse like marsupial called the fat-tailed dunnart. That’s pretty cool. But for the most part, all mammals: dichromats. Now you might see there’s some room over there, and that’s for the animals that have 4 cones. Anyone know what they’re called? [answer[ We’re going to stick to vertebrates here. Insects are a little fucked up. Anyone want to give a stab at it? [answer] What’s the name of it? Tetrachromacy. Exactly. I was really hoping someone would say quad-chromacy and I could be a patent about it, but it’s tetrachromacy. And over here we have birds. Who said birds? You said birds. Yeah, fish, reptiles, amphibians, pretty much everything else. So we got the mammals over here, pretty cool. But pretty much everything else, it has tetrachromatic, has an additional dimension of color vision and has way better color vision than not only myself, but of you as well. So next time you want to be looking at a color blind person, be like your color vision sucks. Remember yourself in the full scheme of things.
Just to go on a tangent, do you guys know what a legless lizard is? Have you heard of a legless lizard? [answer] Right. You think snake, but it’s completely different. So this is a legless lizard. It kind of looks like a snake, but like the head is too small. It’s like the it’s just weird. The nose is weird, it’s all tapered. It’s like this uncanny valley of of snakes. And yet this thing which kind of looks like the tail of a fat-tailed dunnart has superior color vision to the rest of you.
So how did we go from pretty much everything being tetrachromatic, including dinosaurs, including birds… to mammals, which actually here don’t know if they’re dichromatic yet, but mammals were alive at the same time as the dinosaurs. I don’t know if that’s common knowledge. I didn’t know that when I was 12, so whatever. But they live the same time as dinosaurs. But to be in their own ecological niche, they had to be burrowing animals, nocturnal, evade the dinosaurs. You thought they wouldn’t get eaten, blah blah blah. But that meant that they are not using their cones, they’re using their rods, because they’re underground, coming out at night. And when you don’t use it (in genetics), you lose it. And so when you spend 50 million years not using it, that is how we went through the nocturnal bottleneck of mammals eventually becoming dichromats.
But then something happened and you guys got that extra third dimension back. You didn’t go all the way to tetrachromacy, we went to trichromacy. Why was that? This is the main theory, this is the one that makes the most sense to people, is that here you see strawberries in a plant. Here, same thing, but simulated to dichromacy. How I see it, I don’t really see the strawberries. They’re the same color. Here you guys see the strawberries, they’re a different color. And so if you want to eat strawberries, you evolve a third cone. The thing is, to me, that never made sense. Because a lot of things eat strawberries and most of those things do not have that third cone, at least from the mammals. And so I got really turned on to another theory that another guy had more recently that was the skin tone theory. So what you see here again, original and simulation, is a sunburn and a lady blushing. I don’t see those. I don’t see sunburn, I don’t see blushing, which means that I cannot use skin tone to assess the health of things. And that’s why a lot of color blind people have trouble as doctors. I don’t see sunburn; I don’t see rash; I don’t see pallor (people being pale) and likewise when skin tone is used to communicate things (which is blushing) and in other great apes is a lot more things such as sexual receptivity, where a chimps vulva will turn red when she’s in heat, for example… I can’t see that. And yet as social creatures where you need to communicate not only through speech, which we didn’t have 30 million years ago, but through these other indicators, that can be a very important reason that we need to evolve to be more social with each other. So skin tone theory is how I like it.
But how does this all affect me personally? You might have asked, like… “color blindness, I dunno, is it a disability? Do you have trouble in life? Does it affect you?” Well, it doesn’t really affect anyone too much. Cooking meat, it’s a little bit hard.
These colors are all grinkyan (gray-pink-cyan). I can’t see what they are, but it’s not too big of a problem because I have a meat thermometer. Selecting bananas. Here you can see the original versus the simulation. I can’t select bananas by color, but it doesn’t really matter because you just kind of squeeze the end. It’s soft, it’s ready, whatever. It doesn’t really affect much. Matching clothes. I did not design that outfit, so thank you to my teacher who did. But for the most part not a problem. I just wear Plaid. Doesn’t matter, never really affects me. It looks good in my eyes so it doesn’t really matter what it looks like in your eyes. I guess that’s the confidence in me talking and knowing if hotties are DTF, you know, would be nice, blushing, whatever, but it’s not really a problem for me because… they’re not (DTF).
But there are some actual real problems, and it’s not because we are somehow at a disadvantage, but because people view us as having a disadvantage. So. In India, I could not have been an engineer, not allowed to go to engineering school. In China, I couldn’t get a driver’s license. In the UK I could not donate sperm. Very sad. And in the USA, 63% of jobs exclude the color blind or are not accessible to the color blind, and most of that is unnecessary exclusion just because people don’t really understand what kind of color we see.
So what can you do to be nice to colorblind people? Well, I assume you guys, a lot of you play board games. So just let us choose our color first. Just a small nice thing that you can do you know. Also, if you are designing something, try and make sure that color is not the only thing you use to encode a piece of information. Try using a color blindness simulator on your design to see if you can tell what all the pertinent colors apart if you are in policy, which don’t expect anyone here to be. Don’t default just to excluding the color blind from your club because you’re like “Aaargh, color, they can’t see it! Scary!” And finally, if you are DTF, just like send them an e-mail, you know, it’s much better communication. And yeah, thank you. So here’s my e-mail and thanks for paying attention.
Is there Q&A? you want a Q and A? Yeah, sure. Yeah.
Q&A
So I have two questions actually. So for the the simulation of the color lines, are these images like exactly the same for you? So with all the colors that you have over here, pretty much everything that’s compressed to a line and the line is like somehow here that is the line. That’s what I see. As a dichromat, if you can press everything to that line, then it will be the same as what I see. The two images for me look identical. For an anonymous trichromat where this isn’t completely compressed, you’re decreasing the dynamic range one step and then in their eyes you decrease another step. And so it’s not quite the same to anonymous trichromat, which is 3 out of four color blind people. And then for me dichromat (which is the strongest before you jump over to complete monochromacy) that’s one quarter of the red-green colorblind population. And for me they’re they’re exactly the same. But if you’re trying to design something, just design to the strongest one, and then that’s fine. The simulations are quite accurate.
So how would the simulation look like if we want to see how the tetrachromatic, people or animals see it? So to be a tetrachromat, if you want to have a display, for example, that displays tetrachromacy, you need to add another pixel to the display. These are all RGB displays. Which are for trichromats. There is nothing that we can do with an RGB display that can show realistic images to a tetrachromat. Likewise, a colorblind person we can simulate down from your trichromacy to my dichromacy. We cannot go backwards. We cannot show me what trichomacy feels like. There are certain hacks where you can give me a little bit more information, like using the opponency between the eyes in the same way that you do depth perception, but now you’re doing different in color, so by putting like a red lens over one eye, I can give you a bit more information and it takes your mind a really long time to get used to. But just like I can never see a simulated trichromacy, you can never see a simulated tetrachromacy.
It reminds me very much of the Flat Land story if you know the story? No. Maybe you should read it once. It’s a story about how people that live in 2 dimensions then get visited from people that live in three dimensions. It’s a very nice simple thing. I know Carl Sagan talks about this in some of his talks, but it’s not like it’s not a fictional story, it’s like a mathematical model or mathematical story, right? I mean string theory has 11 dimensions. So like we as 3 dimensional beings cannot experience the 4th dimension in the spatial sense. Same with color vision.
Are the [sensitivity] Spectra really coming closer together or was 1 weaker in comparison to the other? So do you really see at all what we don’t see… which would be higher perception closer to green? Yeah. So a lot of color perception is not so much the range of wavelengths that you can see it is the this is the opponency between the different channels that we took everything here and we shoved it down between 400 and 550mm you would see the same number of colors, for example, but it would be mapped onto a smaller range of the electromagnetic spectrum. So for me as a protanope, the red cone is gone, and so the 30 nanometers on the end that only the red cone is sensitive to, I can’t see it. So my visible range in this model, a very simple model 400-700nm (though is generally larger than that in lab settings), but mine would be 400-670nm, for example. But that is not what makes me see fewer colors. It is the absence of that cone that makes me see fewer colors. So actually like your spectrum should go down more color blind. So you’re asking about this? or the shift together? Yeah. So for anomalous trichromacy, it is a shift, it is not a decrease in the sensitivity (in general for red-green color blindness, which is almost everything). For acquired blue-yellow color blindness, then the sensitivity of the blue cone can decrease, your number of blue cones can decrease, etc. but that’s kind of different beast. It’s within the same model, but it’s usually much milder. It’s not congenital. It happens in old age, you can get a cataract and have yellowing of the lens, for example. That also decreases your sensitivity of the blue part of the spectrum.
That decreases the dynamic range in the blue yellow range. That is a tritan defect, but we generally don’t talk about that. But the sensitivity of the green and the red, they don’t go down. They shift and you’re… So it’s not right. Your peak is not at the same wavelength. The peak is not the same wavelength here. Yeah. So here we 530/560nm. But do you have two piece one at 530nm and one at 540nm for example? I do not. I just have the 530. Sodos probably does because he’s a milder version. But again, if you’re saying I don’t see red, it’s not because you have a shift because color is not defined by wavelength. Like 500 or 670 nanometers is not red. Color is the intersection of a real physical phenomenon, the reflectivity of the surface object and the cones in our eyes. And red to me doesn’t exist. It’s not that I can’t see it, it just doesn’t exist in the framework of my eye.
How did you find out? Oh, I knew this when I was like 6 years old. Because for me, when I’m like drawing with crayons and draw the sky purple and the grass, orange, your teachers are like “you’re obviously not stupid, You’re just colorblind.” That’s how I found out. A lot of people find out when they apply for a job, especially if they don’t have dichromacy, because then it’s really obvious that you’re not seeing the same thing as everyone else. But even with trichromacy even if it’s like moderate, you apply for a job, they test you and say, sorry, you can’t be a pilot. Sorry, you can’t be a police officer, you can’t be a firefighter, you can’t be an airport [security] screener, because they all think that color is such a basic human necessity and that we have none of it, and so we’re not able to [work at all]. And that’s how I think most people find out is when they get denied a job opportunity. And they only do that at the end of the recruitment process. So they hire you and then say go have a medical. And so you’re hired, you have a job offer contingent on the medical. And then they say, oh, sorry, no, you are colorblind.
So one question, there is probability component to this. Is there any other other thing that goes together with color blindness? Yes, I think you want to move along and talk to you about the genetics at the break.
Host: Yes. So I think this is absolutely fascinating. I learned a ton of things and thank you very, very much.
Leave a Reply