Dreaming in Technicolour : Blind To Colour

"When people know you're colour blind, they mainly want to point at objects and ask, 'What colour is that?' and, A, that's tiresome and, B, it's not like that."

"When I gave the glasses a try, reds became much more vibrant, brake lights were brighter, buses stood out from further away and red flowers were suddenly vivid."

"After more than a week, however, I'm yet to notice much difference with greens and I would label the glasses as interesting, rather than life-changing."

Daniel Capureo, writer, London Daily Telegraph

Over 350 million people across the world are colour-blind. It is mostly males who are affected by the condition. One in 24 children is color-blind, a scientifically poorly understood sight anomaly. Colour-blindness is of passing interest to people not affected by it, a curious thing to be possessed of but to people for whom colour-blindness is a fact of their lives, it affects every part of their lives. And not everyone who is colour-blind is affected in the same way; the condition has many variations.

 

Mayo Clinic

Most people with colour-blindness are frustrated in distinguishing purples from blues and pinks from grays as they struggle to interpret chart and distinguish lights being off or on. The delight that fully-colour-sighted people take in viewing the changing foliage colours of autumn are denied these people, as are the brilliant decorations that mark the Christmas season. 

 

There are four types of vision cells in the retina at the back of eye rods providing low light, monochromatic sight, and three types of cones detecting colour, in people with normal eyesight sensitivity to the colour scale. People with colour blindness have faulty cones, the most common triggered by green light, then those for red and rarely, blue. Some entirely miss a set of cones and that is called dichromacy, where people see about one percent of the colour that people with normal vision can see.

A notable disadvantage for the colour-blind is the education system where geography and chemistry become difficult for the colour-blind, in addition to new lessons on interactive whiteboards and allied tech increasingly using colour. Society on the other hand, has made some helpful improvements for the colour-blind where many video games come with colour-blind modes inbuilt. As well, a system of dark and light kits to help the colour-blind has been initiated by football's governing bodies.

Recently, research makes the suggestion that wiring in the brain required in full-colour vision is there, leading eyewear company EnChroma to develop eyeglasses retailing in the neighbourhood of $238 to $484, as an aid for the colour-blind. The company issues the disclaimer that their technology will be of use to only 30 percent of users. For some colour-blind people there is no advantage to the glasses whatever, while for a small number their use provides a subtle improvement.

The company's chief executive states that "If you buy our glasses, you have two entire months to wear them, try them and if they don't work for you, you can return them". EnChroma makes use of a technology known as notch filtering, blocking a narrow band of light that causes red and green cones to overlap, for colour-blind eyes; in the process overcoming their inability to differentiate between colours. What has been discovered is that colour-blind brains seem to be receptive to the effect.

 

University of California, Davis expert John Werner found the effects of wearing notch filter lenses persist even once the glasses were removed in a small study carried out in 2019 that he co-authored. "When somebody doesn't drink wine, one glass tastes the same as the other, but after experience you become sensitive to the differences", he explained, as a metaphor for the adaptive brain's response to the glasses' effect.

In 2009 a married couple at University of Washington considered leading figures in colour vision research, used gene therapy successfully in restoring colour vision to a dichromat squirrel monkey by inserting a modified virus containing the genes for correctly functioning red cones into the monkey's eyes. Professor Jay Neitz who with his wife Maureen Neitz, make up an effective colour vision team, face ethical challenges in attempting to cure colour blindness in humans.

To proceed in a human trial using the same method that succeeded for the squirrel monkey goes a step too far in experimenting with human subjects, as viewed by medical ethics which relates to the potential for something going quite wrong as a possible outcome. The risk, during the experimental process with a human trial, of losing all vision for someone with mild colour blindness represents an impediment to the team's carrying on, backed by corporate investment.

 

EnChroma