Let’s talk a little about what being colorblind means so that you can better understand what an incredible experience it is for the people in the video to see colors for the first time.
There are several types of colorblindness. The first one is Dychromacy.
People who have it can only see 2 areas of the light spectrum whereas people with normal vision see all three – ‘red’, ‘green’ and ‘blue’.
People suffering from protanopia aren’t able to see ‘red’, people with deuteranopia are not able to see ‘green’ and those with tritanopia cannot see ‘blue’.
Sometimes not being able to see either green or red is called red/green colour blindness. Because for colorblind people ‘red’ and ‘green’ overlap making the way these types of people see the world similar.
Here is an illustration:
Doesn’t look good, does it?
It gets worse.
There are also people suffering from another type of colorblindness – monochromacy. These are the people for whom the whole world is painted in different shades of grey. They can not see colors at all. Which is why monochromocy is also referred to as ‘Total Color Blindness’.
‘It’s not that I can’t name them. There’s nothing there. That’s grey and that’s grey and that’s grey’. – this is how Andrew, who has this condition, describes it.
Monochromacy occurs in 0.00001% of people. Sounds like not a big percentage at all, right? But, taking into consideration that the population of the world exceeds 7 billion people, 700 000 people have this illness.
Can you imagine it? What if the whole world was just grey?
Let us give you a little demonstration.
This is how people with monochromacy see colors (or would be more correct to say do not see colors):
Would not make Holi, the famous color festival in India, very much fun, would it?
And another example, this is what your breakfast would look like. Appetizing?
Now forget the aesthetic qualities and just think about how monochromacy would make even the simplest everyday tasks difficult. Choosing an outfit, crossing the road, selecting a present..
And now that you know all this you can understand what kind of emotions people in the video are having when for the first time in there lives they realize that there is so much more color to this world. Please share this amazingly heartwarming video with your friends to make their day a little better too.
Photo Credit: Flickr
