The 18-year-old Alex Loch suffers from rod monochromacy. This is one kind of achromatopsia with a constricted over all vision.
The normal eye has rods and cones which support each other to see what we see. Cones are responsible for color and bright light conditions whereas rods are taking part in darker light conditions. Wich rod monochromacy your vision is determined solely by rods. Cones are completely absent or not working.
Alex Loch describes his vision conditions as follows:
Colorcell wants to find the most beautiful color combinations. I came across this project today through Picto’s entry about The terrible fashion curse. He talks about a wardrobe of a colorblind and how four colors are enough to choose from. Colorcell.org is about choosing the nicest color combination made out of four colors.
What can you do:
Create a new colorcell out of four colors.
Choose your favourite colorcell in the so called livingspace which can hold at most 100 living cells.
Kill your cell, which is also called the suicide option.
If you select a cell the fitness of this cell is increased. Based on the fitness a cell will live longer in the livingspace. But take care, if a cell gets selected to often it will die because of overfeeding.
Every day there is a whole process going on in the livingspace. Cells are aging, some are dying and get burried in the cell cemetery and some cells, most likely the ones with a higher fitness, can crossover and give birth to a new cell.
This project is running since 25th March 2002 and there is a whole load of statistics to look at. If you want to compete with my cell, go to colorcell and create your own most beautiful color combination.
The first poll of Colblindor was about color blindness – what else. I asked if you are colorblind yourself or not, or if you maybe don’t know it yet and are reading Colblindor because you would like to find out about it.
Over the last ten days 15 readers participated in the poll and I would like to thank everybody who attended. Only one out of them doesn’t know if he/she is colorblind or not. I hope this person learned something about his/her color blindness while reading through the articles.
The other 14 votes are split up into 6 persons who are colorblind and 8 who are not. Because only a handful of people joined the poll this can be interpreted in two ways:
Readers are split fifty-fifty into them who are colorblind and them who aren’t. Because we know from statistics that only about 10% of the population is colorblind, there are relatively more colorblind people looking for some information about their handicap.
The non colorblind lead the field of readers. Most readers aren’t colorblind and are looking for information about color vision deficiencies and related topics.
When the poll started I would have bet that there are more colorblind readers than not. This assumption was proven wrong and there are two causes I can think of which led to this result.
People are searching for information about color blindness not only for themselves but also for their partners, family member, friends are maybe even their pets.
Many untypical readers landed at Colblindor the last days through contributions to the Tangled Bank #54 and the writing project about blog goals from ProBlogger. This maybe falsified the result to some extend.
But enough speculations. Paint your own picture – more or less colorful, it doesn’t matter.
Divya from India asks me the following question. She tells a short story about acquiring color blindness after a heavy head injury. Here are the lines Divya sent to me:
my boyfriend suffered an injury while playin cricket recently and the optician diagnosed it as tritanopia..heres what happened..he was aplying and was kinda nauseous and he puked in his helmet and fainted and fell backwards and got a hard blow on his head from the bat and a whack from the ground at the back of his head again and got knocked out/fainted..he was out for almost an hour and when he regained consciousness he was colourblind…the optician said its tritanopia..and he can only see luminous stuff as in highlighters and violet stuff and other stuff appears gray…what i want to know is…is this permanent or is it temporary…and if it is curable how can it be done…
I will try my best to answer the above questions and give some more insights about acquired color blindness. As I am not a professional in the field of color vision professional help should be frequented for detailed clarifications.
Unfortunately color blindness can be caused by severe head injuries. By far the most occurences of color blindness are congenital. In very rare cases people with perfect color vision abilities can be affected by an impaired vision or color vision deficiency after a brain trauma, a stroke or some other kind of severe head injury.
Such vision deficiencies are caused by a damage of the optical cortex. Several cases are described in scientific papers but there are no results concerning the cause of the loss of color vision. Some speculate, that the patient’s abnormality arises from partial destruction of the chromatic mechanism. The case described by Divya above about an acquired tritanopia may also occur, if the rod-cone mechanism is damaged.
Unfortunately as much acquired color blindness as congenital color blindness are not curable or at least there are no methods known to this day. As an acquired color blindness is without much doubt caused by some damage in the optical cortex most likely there will be no cure in sight in the near future.
Also because most often a severe damage causes the color blindness, there is evidence to suggest that this trait will be permanent and not only a temporarly impairment.
As this is the 101st article at Colblindor this is another good reason to think about my blog goals and share my thoughts, why I’m doing this, why I’m trying to write good content and why color blindness is worth blogging about.
Here is my list of blog goals, rated in order of appearance:
Get to know the colors of blogging. Five month ago I didn’t know anything about weblogs and blogging. From the first moment on I was very fascinated about how weblogs are defining the new internet area and a new type of information flow. This made me feel that I had to learn more about it and this can be done best when joining the blog community with my own project.
Write about a colorful niche. Everybody can write about almost everything. I didn’t want to have another live journal and that’s why I’ve chosen this small niche I’m writing about now. Also I couldn’t find a website which highlights all the different topics around color blindness and I think I can produce some extra value here.
Sprinkle colors in my English writing skills. As English is not my mother tongue this is a great place to improve my English skills. Not only because of that I have chosen to write this blog in English but also because of the English reading audience is much bigger than the German. This was also in the back of my mind when choosing the language because striving for a big readership is another reason for this blog I can’t deny.
Apart from the above blog goals I also have to admit that I am a techie. That’s why I can’t sit still for a week not to try out something new in my blog. And I am also addicted to statistics. Maybe because of my studies in mathematics I can’t take my eyes away from daily hits, visits, inbound links and much more.
And last but not least I would like to earn a lot of money from blogging. But this is something I don’t emphasize as my blog goal but something that’s most welcome as soon as it starts flowing.
Two days ago it happend again. It wasn’t the first time and it definitely won’t be the last this happened to me.
Can you spot the Green Banana?
I like bananas. Not as much as my son does like or better love them, but I like them. If they are not too ripe with brown dots all over, that’s how I like them most. But of course they shouldn’t be green anymore. Yellow is the color, the color of a tasty bananas.
If you read the above sentences I suppose you can already spot the problem which arises when you are affected by color blindness and would like to eat a tasty banana.
Already when I am shopping I don’t see the difference between green and yellow ones. They all look ok to me. And at home the same problem arises again: When are they ripening from green to yellow?
And that’s why from time to time I start eating a green banana. Only one bite and even I recognize the mistake. You just can’t eat a green banana, they taste horrid.
Sometimes that really bothers me. They just look the same. I can’t see any difference at all. Everybody else has no problem to see the banana isn’t ripe yet. But through my colorblind eyes they aren’t distinguishable. And that’s why I have to swallow the bitter pill or better said the bitter bite of green banana sometimes.
I found this little tool where you can show Websites at Graphs through ProBlogger. So I thought I’ll join in and put up the graph produced by my weblog.
Colblindor as a Graph
blue: for links (the A tag) red: for tables (TABLE, TR and TD tags) green: for the DIV tag violet: for images (the IMG tag) yellow: for forms (FORM, INPUT, TEXTAREA, SELECT and OPTION tags) orange: for linebreaks and blockquotes (BR, P, and BLOCKQ. tags) black: the HTML tag, the root node gray: all other tags
As the dots are quite small my color blindness gets in my way to read the graph at its full value. It is not easy at all to tell the different dots apart from each other because the colors are not distinguishable.
Where is the Black dot among all those Blue ones?
Blue is very close to Violet,
Orange flows into Green,
Green is anyway the same as Red and
Yellow is sometimes hard to see at all.
It would be much better to use some kind of patterns to distinguish the different types. Only three different colors should be used in graphs that they can been told apart even by colorblinds. If you have a look at the legend above you would have to choose three well distinguishable colors and two extra patterns to make the website graph more readable.
Human beings have 23 pairs of chromosomes. Out of these 23 pairs 22 are autosomal chromosomes which are equal in both sexes and encode body functions. Only one pair consists of two sex-chromosomes which are different for men and women. The 22 pairs of equal chromosomes are numbered from 1 through to 22. The sex-chromosomes are labeled with X and Y, whereas women carry the combination XX and men the combination XY. This all sums up in a total of 46 chromosomes which make the human genome.
Human Karyotype
Color blindness was actually the trigger to start mapping the human genome. It all began in 1911, when red-green color blindness was assigned to the X chromosome. This was based upon the observation that color blindness is passed from mothers to their sons. Thereby the women are usually not affected because of the normal copy, the second X chromosome. Men in contrary can not oversteer the defective chromosome, because they are carrying just one X chromosome.
The project to decipher the whole human genome is these days much more advanced. Scientists are working eagerly to encode the whole approximately 30’000 genes in the human genome.
If we have a closer look at the chromosomes which are involved into color blindness, we should distinguish between the different types of color blindness because they are encoded at different places in the genome.
Red-green color blindness
This term combines four different types of color blindness. Protanomaly and protanopia are caused by defective or even missing L-cones (long-wavelengths). In opposite defective or missing M-cones (medium-wavelengths) are the source of deuteranomaly or deuteranopia. The genes encoding the L- and M-cone photopigments are located side by side on the X chromosome. Because of the genes are highly homologous and adjacent to one another, recombinations between them is common and can lead to anomalous pigments.
Blue cone monochromacy
As this type of monochromacy is caused by a complete absence of L- and M-cones, blue cone monochromacy is encoded at the same place as red-green color blindness on the X chromosome.
Blue-yellow color blindness
Tritanomaly and tritanopia which are commonly referred to as blue-yellow color blindness are caused by defective or missing S-cones (short-wavelength). These photopigments are encoded in genes which reside on chromosome 7, an autosomal chromosome. This is why blue-yellow color blindness occures at the same rate on both sexes.
Rod monochromacy
The total loss of color vision is called rod monochromacy or complete achromatopsia. In this case the retina does not have any cone cells at all. It is known to be an autosomal recessive disease and can be provoked by different circumstances. Recent studies show that it can be encoded on chromosome 2 as well as on chromosome 8. Earlier studies assigned chromosome 14 to rod monochromacy but this could not be reconstructed.
The genes encoding L-, M- and S-cone photopigments are very well understood and determined whereas the source of rod monochromacy is a topic which still needs further research. Supposably different circumstances can cause rod monochromacy.
Type
Chromosome
Deuteranomaly
X Chromosome
Deuteranopia
X Chromosome
Protanomaly
X Chromosome
Protanopia
X Chromosome
Tritanomaly
Chromosome 7
Tritanopia
Chromosome 7
Blue Cone Monochromacy
X Chromosome
Rod Monochromacy
Chromosome 2/8
The table on the left hand side shows on a glance the different types of color blindness and their related chromosomes. We have at least 4 different chromosomes out of the 23 pairs which can be the source of color vision deficiencies. Further studies of the human genome will show which chromosomes carry the encoding genes for rod monochromacy as this is still a subject under research and therefore this table will maybe undergo some adjustements in the near future.
I put up a new poll. Actually it is the first poll on Colblindor. If possible I would like to find out if the readers of Colblindor are colorblind themselves or not. Or if they maybe don’t know yet and landed here to find out about it.
The question is as simple as this: Are you Colorblind?
Please join the poll, if you like. I will summarize the results in ten days.
