Hey there again tiktakers!
Today we'll be exploring more curious facts about the human body.
More specifically, well be talking about a condition related to how our eyes detect colors,
and how our brains perceive them – a condition known as color blindness.
Are you familiar with it?
Color blindness is the inability to see colors in a normal way.
Most people who suffer from this condition struggle differentiating reds and greens,
and frequently also blues.
Because of this, this condition is also known as color vision deficiency.
This is a genetic disorder, and men are much more likely to suffer from it than women.
It is believed that about 1 in 10 men suffer from some kind of color blindness.
Interesting, right?
And now you might be wondering why is it that some eyes don't perceive colors correctly.
Well, we'll try to explain it in a simple way: The retina, which is located in our eyes,
has two kinds of cells which detect light: The cones, and the rods.
The rods detect light and darkness, while the cones detect colors.
In a very summarized and simplified way, there are three types of cones: The ones that detect
reds, the ones that detect greens, and the ones that detect blues.
Our brain uses the information sent by the cones to determine the colors we perceive.
However, there will be issues if one or more of the cones are missing, or if they are not
working properly, or if they are detecting different colors than normal.
The most severe type of color blindness occurs when all the three types of cones are missing,
and the most mild occurs when the three types are present, but one of them is not working
correctly.
And depending on how they are working, or if they are missing, is how we can determine
different kinds of color blindness.
The most severe kind of color blindness, known as achromatopsia, results in the patient only
being able to distinguish a scale of grays.
In other words, they can only detect white, black, and gray.
However, this is the least frequent kind of color blindness in the world.
The next kind of color blindness in terms of severity is called monochromatism, which
occurs when only one of the three kinds of cones works correctly, and so the patient
can only detect one kind of color.
Then we have dichromatism, which occurs when the patient only has two working cones, and
results in the person having difficulties distinguishing reds from greens, or blues
from yellows.
And lastly we have anomalous trichromatism, where the patient has all three cones, but
some or all of them don't work correctly.
This is the most common type of color blindness, and its practical consequences are similar
to dichromatism.
So, as you can see tiktakers, there are many different ways in which we can perceive colors,
and for people who don't suffer from color blindness it's hard to imagine what life would
be like without some of the colors we can detect without issues.
So, we invite you to imagine what your daily life would look like if you were colorblind.
For instance, let's say you are driving through the city in your car, and a traffic light
is showing the red light.
In that case, everyone who is not color blind will immediately stop their car because they
understand the signal.
However, if you were color blind, you would need to learn beforehand what the traffic
lights mean at each particular position.
Now imagine that you are in the middle of a class, and the teacher starts explaining
something using a graph or a map: If they are divided by colors, and you were color
blind, that could be very confusing for you!
So now you know tiktakers: If you know of someone close to you who suffers from color
blindness, be helpful with them, and use other ways to represent things besides color whenever
possible.
Color blindness is hereditary, but other disorders exist which can produce similar effects, such
as Parkinson's, glaucoma, Alzheimer's, and cataracts.
Also, color blindness can be diagnosed by showing the patient special drawings composed
of multi-colored dots.
As of the year 2021, color blindness has no cure tiktakers.
However, several studies are being carried out which have shown good results in animals,
but they are not applicable to humans yet.
Either way, most people afflicted by this condition use different methods to substitute
colors in their day to day lives, and in different parts of the world, special contact lenses
and glasses have been developed which can be helpful to them.
Do any of you suffer from color blindness?
If you do, let us know in the comments how you deal with it.