[Guest]

In contrast to the deeper waters of the other topic I got going at the mo, here's something a little more light and frothy.

Suppose you were born with the wires of your optic nerve all jumbled up, so the nerves which should attach to your green-light-sensing cones were actually attached to the red ones, and vice versa (actually I just looked this up on Wikipedia and it's not that simple, but what the hell, lets imagine it is)

So every time you look at something green you see red. When you look at something red you see green.

To everyone else the world looks like this:

but to you it looks like this:

But if someone points to something red and says, "what colour is that?", or course you'd say "red", since "red" is the word you have learned to describe things that look green.

How would you ever know you see things differently from other people?

If you could get corrective surgery to fix the problem, would you take it?

[grey cells]

Thank god , when I first saw the baby , I thought he/she was afflicted with green-baby Syndrome . :lol:But seriously no parent should be presented , by god , with a baby having blue-baby syndrome.

Coming to the topic , I definitely don't want to be in those guy's shoes.

1. As far the first question is concerned , I assume there would be no problem as to the identification of the disease . If I knew I had to say red , when the colour I actually saw was green , then I know for a fact that I see things differently from people .

2. As to the second question , I would definitely get corrective surgery done , if I am assured of even a 1% chance of success , provided there are are no major side effects . Agreed it might be a little difficult for to me to adjust to the new scenario , but as I had learnt earlier to identify red as green and vice-versa , I am sure it would be very much possible for me to adjust to the new hue of colours.

[Brandonb]

1. If you were born with it, then you would just plain grow up normal as everyone else, and no one would know (including yourself) that you saw the colors backwards. Because as a child you would just associate (like everyone else does) that the color that you are seeing is called red. Even though the color that everyone else is seeing is green. You would never know the difference. Sure, plants are green (you see red) but know the color as green.

You still would not know the difference, even in a scenario where that a child would see yellow and blue make... they see red (because they have it backwards), but know it as and say, green. Even if a color chart is shown to the child, it still would not become apparent that the child has them backwards. The child would see red in b/w the yellow and blue, but still call it green. He would see green as a primary color, but still know it as red.

2. Why fix the problem? No one would know that some had the problem (which actually means that it's not even a problem).

Edit: btw, if the red and green are swapped in those pictures, then why isn't the tree-line red?

Edited May 12, 2008 by Brandonb

[itachi-san]

Maybe you have this problem and just don't realize it ...think about it.

[Guest]

A friend of mine cannot tell the difference between red and green

but how do you know that we are not all seeing diferent colours at the moment like if i say the the colour of my font is black someone else may think that the colour of the font is what i call green or blue

Think about it.

[Guest]

I can't tell the difference of those pictures. I've been explained that I have some weird rare form of colorblindness. I can't tell colors. I can see all colors to the best of my knowledge but if you put blue and purple up against each other, I can't tell you which one is which. I've never had issues, some questions I can't answer of course. If it wasn't for them labeling the crayolas, I'd be screwed.

So, here is what I can't tell:

Reds - Greens - Browns - Some darker yellows (compared)

Orange - Green - Dark Yellow

Blue - Purple - Soft Reds..

Anyways.. someone explained it to me that its the intensity of the color that separates the individual color from another to me.

So.. yeah.

[Guest]

I always end up telling people that its like having a pallet of colors in your head but not having the names below them.

[Guest]

1. If you were born with it, then you would just plain grow up normal as everyone else, and no one would know (including yourself) that you saw the colors backwards. Because as a child you would just associate (like everyone else does) that the color that you are seeing is called red. Even though the color that everyone else is seeing is green. You would never know the difference. Sure, plants are green (you see red) but know the color as green.

You're probably right, though its possible that the parts of the brain which respond to red and green are somehow different in their responses. Look at the connotations we attach to red and green. Red: anger, danger, arousal, blood, heat. Green: safe, calm, tranquil, vegetation, sickness. Are these entirely the product of individual experiences? Creatures which are yellowy-orange, or yellow and black, are often venomous or poisonous to eat. Colour codes like that are probably hard-wired into the brains of many creatures. Vegetation has been mostly green, and blood mostly red, for much longer than humans have been around, so maybe we evolved with these associations hard-wired into our brains. Maybe the emotional ones (anger, calm) are also hard-wired. In that case the experience of seeing things could feel very different.

Edit: btw, if the red and green are swapped in those pictures, then why isn't the tree-line red?

Yes, I was wondering about that too. Most of the colours there are shades of dark yellow. Surprising how green it looks though. I did it in photoshop, which probably monkeys about with the colours a bit.

I can't tell the difference of those pictures. I've been explained that I have some weird rare form of colorblindness. I can't tell colors. I can see all colors to the best of my knowledge but if you put blue and purple up against each other, I can't tell you which one is which. I've never had issues, some questions I can't answer of course. If it wasn't for them labeling the crayolas, I'd be screwed.

So, here is what I can't tell:

Reds - Greens - Browns - Some darker yellows (compared)

Orange - Green - Dark Yellow

Blue - Purple - Soft Reds..

Anyways.. someone explained it to me that its the intensity of the color that separates the individual color from another to me.

I did the pictures by switching the Red and Green of the RGB, so if you can't tell the difference maybe your "red" and "green" cones just trigger the same signal in your brain (not switched like in the OP). Also the groups of colours you mentioned have similar luminosity and blue content but have variable levels of swapping red for green. I can tell you the bottom picture looks pretty wierd, well the baby does anyway. Nice to know if you had a baby who looked like that you'd love 'em just the same (though you might be wise to have a doctor take at look at them). Maybe your colour perception is more or less two dimensional, consisting of blue level and red/green level.

Colour blindness seems to come in all sorts of wierd and wonderful flavours. I have a friend who's very slightly colourblind. Some of those colour blindness test cards (like this) she can't see the hidden number, but if you blow it up on screen she can, so it has something to do with how big things are. So she can see all colours, but not in detail.

I find it fascinating because colourblind people really don't see the world the same way, and a lot of the time they don't know this. Consider the associations with red and green I mentioned above. Do they mean the same to you? If you can't tell red from green I don't suppose they can. Colour influences mood so your whole experience of a lot of things must be different.

It makes you wonder how perception in general varies. What if you only felt pain half as much as everybody else? You might think the rest of the world was a bunch of wusses, not knowing what it feels like to be in their shoes. Everybody hears, tastes and smells things a little bit differently, and puts it all together in the mind differently. There is no "right" way to perceive the world (except the way I do it).

[Guest]

I thought my nose was bleeding but it'snot!

Does it matter how it looks to each other if you can view lifes rich tapestry?

Animals cope with seeing in black and white, some with no vision or almost no vision - I day leave it alone and not correct to the average view, surgery carries risks anyway! If it was my condition I would have been used to it from birth STOP AT THE GREEN LIGHT! - THE ONE AT THE BOTTOM!

[Guest]

The only number I can see is 25 in that test.. The other ones I can tell there is a slight pattern to the number but when I try to follow the number around I lose my frame of reference and never come up with a number.

BTW... Animals don't "cope" with seeing black and white. Its the only option. Their world isn't marked by color identification like ours. And about the streetlight issue, red yellow green lights aren't bad because of their position. When you come to a single flashing RED or YELLOW light is when it becomes an issue. I've always just done what the guy infront of me does or if there is nobody... slow down and go through. That part really sucks not knowing.

[itachi-san]

I thought my nose was bleeding but it'snot!

Does it matter how it looks to each other if you can view lifes rich tapestry?

Animals cope with seeing in black and white, some with no vision or almost no vision - I day leave it alone and not correct to the average view, surgery carries risks anyway!

Well, you cope without night-vision and sonar! How do you manage?

[Guest]

Well, you cope without night-vision and sonar! How do you manage?

I manage as best I can!

[Guest]

Good topic, and one i've pondered from time to time, so I thought I'd add my view on the matter (sorry, couldn't resist).

Suppose you were born with the wires of your optic nerve all jumbled up, so the nerves which should attach to your green-light-sensing cones were actually attached to the red ones, and vice versa

If you were born with the wires of your optic nerve all jumbled up, what are the chances that both eyes would be jumbled up in exactly the same way? Surely both eyes would have to have exactly the same 'incorrect' mapping for your view of the world to be different to that of other people, and for you to not be aware.

Say for example you were born with one eye with the cone cells mapped the 'normal' way and one eye with the cone cells mapped the 'wrong' way, surely this would always be apparent (close one eye and the world looks a certain way, close the other eye and it looks completely different.

Perhaps though, in this case, your brain (the wonderful machine that it is) would compensate for this in your infancy (a 'soft' remap to compensate for left eye / right eye differences so the image from both eyes appears the same). Taking that thought further, maybe everyone goes through this; a sort of calibration if you will.

As for my own eyes: one of my them sees colours in a slightly warmer tone than the other (it's fractional, and only noticable when I'm looking at something pale and well lit, and closing one eye at a time). I wonder if anyone else here has found this?

[Guest]

do you go for Kodak or Fuji, you could use corrective glasses ???

[Guest]

Interesting topic. It's directly related to the philosophical notion of qualia, the idea that there are specific, unexplainable experiences associated with sensations. The section on Daniel Dennet's criticism is quite germane to the topic since one of his thought experiments to disprove the existence of qualia involved swapping optic nerve signals.

Incidentally, I tend to agree with previous posters who said that you wouldn't know, so you wouldn't elect to get the surgery. All of the natural associations you make based on color (red/hot, green/vegetation), would still be in place, so you wouldn't know they were wrong. Nevertheless, I do believe there is an objective sense of beauty shared by humans, and flipping the colors would probably make different things appeal to you than to others. I also think it's entirely possible that there are intrinsic qualities to colors that affect how we perceive them which would not be overridden by a simple nerve swap. For example, is it possible that some colors look good next to each other due to mathematical properties of their wavelengths? In music, there are simple mathematical proportions between the frequencies of notes in a just scale. A note which is one octave higher has exactly twice the frequency (half the wavelength), and the ratio of a fifth (e.g., C,G) is 3:2. As a result, swapping your brain's perception of C and G would cause music to sound terrible. You wouldn't simply adjust because that's all you'd ever known. Perhaps there would be a similar, if much smaller, effect from swapping colors.