‘It’s fascinating. I did not think that colour vision would be of such significance, rather that birds of prey simply have better visual acuity than humans and that was the reason they detect objects so early and at a great distance. However, colour is of considerable importance,’ says vision expert Almut Kelber: a biologist in the functional zoology department at Lund University in Sweden.
In fact, the dark brown species seems to have a superpower – it has the best colour vision of all animals investigated so far, exceeding even humans. If an object has a different colour from the background, the Harris’s hawk can sense it at twice the distance compared to human vision: a stunning discovery.
‘The hawk weighs less than one kilo and has small eyes. Nonetheless, it can see many times better than us, even though it is so small and light’, says Kelber’s colleague, Simon Potier who is a falconer.
Kelber and Potier’s study confirms that a black-and-white view of nature is illusory and puts colour blindness, or colour vision deficiency (CVD), in the spotlight. The affliction affects about one in 12 men (8%) and one in 200 women. In Britain this means that there are about three million colour blind people – about 4.5% of the population, most being male, says Colour Blind Awareness (CBA) – an organisation founded to boost public understanding of the issue and be the United Kingdom’s first reference point.
Outwardly, like dyslexia, colour blindness appears to be no great barrier to success. After all, statesman Bill Clinton apparently grapples with telling the difference between red and green, meaning he needs special lights when appearing on camera. Likewise, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colour blind and supposedly chose blue for the colour of his platform’s trademark because, from his perspective, it has the most punch. ‘Blue is the richest colour for me: I can see all of blue.’
Another colour-blind star, rock group Steppenwolf’s frontman John Kay, is quoted as saying that thanks to the malaise his world is black, white and grey. Even more surprisingly, Dark Knight director Christopher Nolan blurs his reds and greens, apparently making it hard to read battery recharge LED indicator lights. Another reported sufferer, Australian artist Clifton Pugh, was still a three-time winner of the country’s prestigious Archibald Prize.
According to CBA, in the UK colour blindness is not treated as a disability – a point confirmed by a Dorset legal case at the start of 2018. Usually, however, the CBA says, colour-blindness should be. Schools, hirers and enterprises must treat colour blindness like any other impairment, it says, adding that, globally scant research has been conducted into colour blindness’ impact on daily living, because of widespread ignorance about the challenges that it poses.
As a result, colour blind people have been treated the same as everyone. The situation must change, CBA says, because while the CVD community learns to cope, its needs have to be addressed.
Oddly, it is often the counter-intuitive advantages rather than the downsides that win attention, perhaps because the pluses, which have a martial slant, are intriguing. A key source of the positive take is a terse, unattributed paper titled Colour-blindness and camouflage, which ran in the international science journal Nature in 1940.
There are at least three ways in which certain colour-blind observers might see more than the ordinary person. For example, in a building camouflaged with large irregular patches of colour, the actual outline of the building may be lost in the jumble of these patterns. But the colour-blind person may be scarcely conscious of the variegated colours, so that to him the outline of the building may be almost unaffected by the camouflage, the paper states.
Computer scientist Stuart Grais – a photographer and instructor at DePaul University in Chicago, notes that, because of the handicap’s surprising upside, in the military, colour-blind snipers and spotters are highly valued. That said, Grais confirms the condition brings many frustrations and risks.
‘Apart from making terrible strawberry pickers, people who are colour blind are excluded from certain jobs for safety reasons. For example, they cannot be airline pilots, policemen or ship captains. Their everyday lives are also fraught with occasional minor hazards: how to match clothing, how to decide whether the power indicator on the stereo is red or green, and how to choose an appropriate colour scheme for decorating the house,’ he writes on his university blog.
The pink cricket balls that were withdrawn over colour vision issues
He adds that weather forecast colours can also present problems. Ditto maps generally, because of the colour coding on legends, and alarmingly, traffic lights, for obvious reasons.
Other tricky areas include sorting ketchup from chocolate syrup, green from ripe tomatoes and rare from well-done meat. What is more, for people with a green deficiency a pile of spinach may resemble a cow pat. Imagine being a colour-blind chef.
Colour blind UCL psychologist Dr John Barry argues the condition is thoroughly negative. ‘For the average person today, colour blindness has no advantages in everyday life or professionally. This is especially true in a world where computer and online graphics mean that colour printing costs aren’t a barrier to the use of the widest palette of colours,’ says Dr Barry.
In his research into colour blindness’ impact on quality of life (QoL), the honorary lecturer in the Clinical, Educational and Health Psychology Faculty of Brain Sciences found that colour-blind people suffer from a range of issues, including potentially serious healthcare problems. He cites being unable to see blood in stools and missing a sign of bowel cancer: a horrible drawback.
‘But the greatest problems were in terms of career choice, and things like reading coloured charts and graphs at work: these were highly statistically significant differences experienced by colour-blind people compared to normal sighted people,’ he says.
His research suggests that between 8% and 9% of the population experiences a range of problems that could easily be solved if regulations were in place to make charts, etc, colour blind-friendly. That aim could be achieved through choosing colours that are more visible, he says.
Nightmare combinations to avoid include green and red, green and brown and blue and purple, according to the consultancy Usabilla. Equally, on its own bright pink can pose a sporting problem.
In August last year, English cricket’s governing body was charged with discriminating against sufferers after introducing a pink ball for the first day-night Test match. Colour Blind Awareness contacted the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) requesting it review the use of the ball which CBA said was very hard for people with the condition to see.
CBA founder Kathryn Albany-Ward says many colour blind spectators contacted her organisation complaining of being unable to spot the pink ball. Contrast between the ball’s colour and the background was lacking, Albany-Ward said.
Cricket competitors struggle too. Colour-blind wicketkeeper Matthew Wade has found it tricky to pick out the pink ball, but he adapted. It just takes a little longer to work out the depth of field, according to Wade who claims the more you play the more you adjust.
Even so, colour-blind former England player Gary Ballance has previously said he finds it tough to tell the pink ball from the pitch. In fact, Ballance reportedly even only sees the red ball late when it emerges from a challenging background. Former Australia batsman Chris Rogers missed a match early in his career for the same reason. Helpfully, it emerged in June 2016, cricket ball manufacturer Kookaburra changed the seam’s colour from green to black.
Searching for a cure
As for the search for a cure – hardly any promising avenues exist. The exception is the research project conducted by University of Washington ophthalmology professors Jay Neitz and Maureen Neitz who claim success treating colour blindness in monkeys through gene therapy.
If the treatment is found to work and approved for use, for some people colour blindness could be reduced or cured with a single visit to the ophthalmologist. Injections of other medications into the eye are already routine procedures in most ophthalmologists’ offices,’ writes American Academy of Ophthalmology analyst Dan Gudgel.
The Neitzs are cautious, however. ‘While gene therapy has successfully allowed red-green colour-blind monkeys to see new colours that they have never seen before, we still don’t know what their internal perceptions of those colours are like, or if any psychological side-effects might result from humans suddenly being able to see a new dimension of colour,’ they write.
Meantime, they are recruiting subjects game to be pioneers in the cure for red-green colour blindness. ‘That is, willing to accept the risks involved knowing that it may not work.’ But it works for monkeys, in particular star squirrel monkey Dalton, who appears on their website. The digitally tweaked picture of him meant to simulate how the scene would seem to an entity with red-green deficiency is revealing: it shows how drab the world can be from the reverse perspective.
Mind you, the Nietzs also portray him integrated among a feast of colour that the upmarket raptor studied by Potier and Kelber might appreciate. The Lund team’s research shows that the wider species’ proverbial acuity goes beyond focus. Hawk-like vision can also imply prismatic scope.