Color Blindness

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Color Blindness

Many people refer to problems with one’s ability to see color as color blindness, however, unless a person can’t see any color at all, color vision problems should be called by another term. Common terms are abnormal color vision, color deficiency and color vision confusion. Females maybe be effected by color blindness, but usually they are just carriers. Males are more often affected. About 8% of males and 0.5% of females are effected by color blindness.

Although color blindness may be a result of another eye disorder, the majority of color blind cases are hereditary and present at birth.

The retina, is a complex nerve system which converts light energy into electrical energy that is then transmitted to the brain. This conversion is accomplished by two types of receptor cells in the retina called rods and cones do to their shape. The cones are responsible for converting the color. Each cone contains visual pigments that are sensitive to one of three wavelengths of light: red, green and blue. Normally, all colors of the spectrum are able to be matched by mixtures of only three color sensitivities. Therefore, the huge variety of colors we see are a response to different compositions of wavelengths

of light. The rods are responsible for encoding white and black.

Color blindness results when one or more of the cone cells fail to function properly. One of the visual pigments may be functioning abnormally, or be absent altogether.

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