This condition that impedes seeing in color and hence color perception is, color blindness. People with color blindness are not aware of the differences among colors that are obvious to the rest of us. There are three different types of color blindness that have been identified: Deuteranopia – red-green color blindness, Tritanopia – blue-yellow color blindness and total color blindness (National Eye Institute, 2015). Red-green color deficiencies are by far the most common forms of color blindness, this type of color blindness is found in approximately 6% of the male population and 1% of the female population. In the case of red-green color blindness, the medium wavelength sensitive cones (green) are missing. People with this condition can only distinguish 2 to 3 different hues, where somebody with normal vision can generally see about 7 different hues (National Eye Institute, …show more content…
People affected by this type of color blindness confuse blue with green and yellow with purple. So the term blue-green color blindness would be more close to the truth because the colors blue and yellow are usually not mixed up in this type of color blindness. Blue-yellow color blindness is very rare, one out of 10,000 people are affected at most. In opposite to red-green color blindness, blue-yellow defects are on chromosome 7; this means it is not a sex-linked feature and therefore women and men are equally affected (National Eye Institute, 2015).
Total color blindness is an extreme vision abnormality, that leaves a person completely unable to see any color. Total color blindness leaves people seeing things only in black, white and gray. Total color blindness comes from a condition called rod monochromacy. Rod Monochromacy is where the rod cells in the retina are present and functional, but all types of cones are either not working properly or missing. Rod monochromacy is very rare, it is thought to only occur in around 0.003% of people or less (National Eye Institute,