Causes of Color Blindness Information
Pinpointing the causes of color blindness
is pretty easy – in nearly 99 percent of cases it comes from a genetic disorder. Color blindness is not a serious condition, and it won't usually have a detrimental effect on the way you live your life.
That being said, more extreme cases of color blindness can certainly be a hindrance in some professions, and it never hurts to have as much information about something as possible.
The first step when it comes to understanding Color Blindness is getting a handle on the way the eyes normally work. Eyes are a lot like cameras in the way they filter and process light. First you have the lens, the outer, clear layer of the eye. Light comes in through here and strikes cells in The Retina that each have a different part to play in the final picture.
These cells are called rods and cones, and everybody has these in some quantity or another. The rods have nothing to do with color. They take care of the differences between light and dark, and the more rods you have the better your Night Vision will be.
Cones are the miracle cells that are responsible for color vision in humans and animals. These cells take the different wavelengths of light that constitute different colors and convert them into useable electrical signals for the brain.
When you combine both the rods and the cones, you have normal vision. Let's look at the way color works to determine the causes of color blindness. Colors are simply light traveling in different wavelengths.
Some of these wavelengths are longer, like in red, and some of them are shorter, like in blue. If you look at a prism or a rainbow in the sky, you're always going to see those colors in the same order. Now, when those wavelengths enter the eye, there are different cones that are solely responsible for picking out a different wavelength.
There are three types of cones in the normal human eye and these take care of a different wavelength: long, medium, or short. Therefore you could say that certain cones are responsible for a specific few colors, like red or blue.
The most common causes of color blindness are when a person has less of a certain type of cone, which means that they're not bringing in that specific color as well as they should. In the final picture formed by the brain, this color is then washed out or blended together with a different color.
One of the single most common forms of Color Blindness is called Red Green Color Blindness . In this situation, the person can't tell the difference between red and green colors. This makes Christmas time a real drag. In their eyes, both of these colors are identical.
A less common Type of Color Blindness is called blue-yellow Color Blindness , in which the same thing happens, but with yellow and blue instead of red and green. Most people have no idea they're color blind.
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Causes of Color Blindness to Color Blindness Test Chart
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