Color Me Bad

Throughout life, we learn to associate colors with different tasks: red means stop, yellow means caution, and red and yellow together mean McDonald’s. I learned my senior year of high school that green and pink together induce nausea, but only after we chose them as our class’s Homecoming colors. Oddly enough, though, not everyone sees color the same way you do.

Apparently some women can see more colors than the rest of us, which may cause them to spend more time comparing shades of lipstick and picking out the perfect outfit. Thus, scientists have finally discovered why women take more time to shop than men. Called tetrachromats, these people can see four different channels of color, instead of just the red, green and blue variety that most humans can see. Unfortunately, there is no way to describe these other or more intense colors; if you've read The Giver, you probably know what I mean. For those of you who haven't, most of the people in the book see in black-and-white, except for a select few who can see red. Those who can see red in the book cannot describe why the red objects look different, since no one can conceptualize the color. Anyway, there's also no online vision test for these extra colors, since computers monitors tend to use three colors.

Of course, there are people who can't even see all three colors, in a characteristic that is more common in men than women: color blindness. Many mammals are color blind, but, thanks to science, there are now three mice that can see color. This was done in an effort to figure out the evolution of our eyes -- or play God, if you're of the Brother Micah variety. The researchers bred "genetically altered" mice (whatever that means) into passing along a gene which allows the mice to see the color red. If the scientists wanted to get really fancy with the human-rat vision evolution, they could've also given the mice a nifty pair of contact lenses, since mice are relatively nearsighted, or a pair of glasses for those that are stuck in the 1980s.

Nearsightedness, or the inability to see distant objects clearly, is caused by light not quite reaching the retina while remaining in focus. It's almost as though your eyes are too big for the amount of light they let in, and thus the light cannot reach the back of the eye. Farsightedness, the inability to see close objects clearly, is caused by too much light hitting the retina before the object comes into focus. You could also pretend that I said your eyes are too small for the amount of light they let in.

Anyway, besides just seeing colors -- or not seeing them, in some cases -- there are also people who feel colors. No, this isn't some sort of New Age philosophy, but an actual neurological condition. Called synesthesia, people with this condition can not only feel colors, but also hear, smell and taste them. There are variations of synesthesia, such as seeing time, and there is no explanation for any variation. While it would be neat to experience this condition without the use of illegal drugs, I am truly glad that I do not have it; pink is my favorite color, and I would hate to feel nauseous every time I see it.