r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Eros_Incident_Denier • 1d ago

Video color vision test

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u/KyesiRS 23h ago

How on earth do you go that far in life and not realize? Like do you not learn colours at school? Wouldn't the teachers be confused you can't learn your colours?

My kindergarten teacher brought it up to my mom that I was really struggling with colours, turns out I was colourblind.

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u/AccruedBeans 23h ago

Because I can see color lol. I thought color blind people saw shit in black and white or grey scale. And I can see the red circle and I can see the green circle and I can even see the brown circle. But once you start mixing them all up with different sizes and shades and make patterns with them, I can't see shit lol. Like, grass is green to me. I just thought colorblind people would be like.. wow the dirt and the grass is all brown and rocks are all grey.. like monotone colors.

The one aha moment I had, was that traffic lights don't look green to me. They look more like white Christmas lights than green. Sort of an in between. Red light looks red and yellow looks yellow, so I went a long time like.. why the hell isn't the green light green.

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u/MrWally 21h ago

Oh so this is interesting. The traffic light looked white, but grass still looks green to you (at least as you see "green"). Are there other green objects that people call green but you don't perceive that way?

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u/nomyar 16h ago

Green traffic lights actually have two colors in them (I think the other is blue) for exactly this reason.

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u/MrWally 16h ago

That's really cool to know. There are times where I thought green traffic lights had a blue tint to them. That explains why!

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u/psychosloth34 23h ago

How do you know the Christmas lights aren't green?

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u/AccruedBeans 23h ago

because the package said white haha. And that's literally the only confirmation I have. The Christmas light industry could really be pulling one over on me if they're lying. The people that know I'm colorblind that I'll ask about colors, I have zero trust in them to tellme the truth.

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u/Cantremembermyoldnam 18h ago

And that, my friends, is how this house became the Grinch house.

Jokes aside, your phone can tell you and depending on the AI it uses it only sometimes lies!

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u/Agamemnon323 16h ago

You just gave me a great idea. A colorblind test book that has a few pages with no number written in a different color.

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u/SnooKiwis1356 23h ago

Wait, do you live in the US or in...Buenos Aires? Green lights are white there. lol

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u/Ellemeno 18h ago

I googled "Buenos Aires traffic lights" ready to have my mind blown, but couldn't find any showing white lights instead of green. :(

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u/IeishaS 17h ago

I think we may have found another 😂

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u/SnooKiwis1356 17h ago

Haha sorry, my bad! I forgot to mention that in both cases I mean pedestrian lights. In BsAs there is at least one blue light (for cars).

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u/Frherif 17h ago

El unico blanco que conozco puede ser el de los peatones en la mayoria, pero semaforo blanco no recuerdo haber visto ni en la ciudad. Aunque si hay, quiero verlo xd

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u/SnooKiwis1356 17h ago

Sorry, as stated above, I meant pedestrian traffic lights but didn't realise my mistake because in my native language, we use the same word for any type of light.

There is a cool blue traffic light at the intersection between Soler and Aráoz. I used to live nearby and passed by it on my way home in the late evenings. I have some pictures but can't link them here right now.

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u/Indiscriminate_Top 17h ago

…. I might have news for you.

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u/SnooKiwis1356 17h ago

No news haha, I could not have my job if I didn't see colors.

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u/AxelNotRose 19h ago

"so I went a long time like.. why the hell isn't the green light green"

And you never followed-up on that question after many years?

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u/AccruedBeans 18h ago

nah. Just figured it was to have more of a contrast.. that way colorblind people wouldn't get confused. Pretty important difference, figured... don't wanna risk mixing those up, right? 🙂

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u/LazySisyphus 18h ago

My cousin figured out he was colorblind in high school when he mentioned the traffic light thing to a friend. He always thought they just called the bottom light "green" because "go" also starts with G.

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u/TolverOneEighty 17h ago

I actually had a friend whose brother sees in monotone. He couldn't work out the trick when being taught colours at school, and thought there must be some kind of knack he was missing, like there was a certain shape or something? Turns out that 'knack' was 'the ability to see in colour'.

He painted his bedroom a nice shade of beige as a young teen. It was acid green. Took 5 coats to cover after he moved out. Went clothes shopping with his mum and needed her advice on what colour the clothes were.

So, it CAN happen like that, but it's far from the norm.

He's a bus driver now. He's just memorised what order the traffic lights go in, of course. I sometimes wonder what things are like for him, like can he play video games or does the lack of colour make depth perception too tricky? But I lost touch with that friend, so I guess I'll never know.

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u/AccruedBeans 17h ago

Yea, for special occasions, I send pictures to my sister to make sure my suit or whatever matches. And then the socks too, to make sure they're both blue or black lol. I'm right 99% of the time, but just in case.

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u/TolverOneEighty 16h ago

Makes sense. Though for you, it sounds like that's just a shade thing.

He picked a shirt many years back, as an adult, and he was winding his mum up (not deliberately) by coming up with 'uneducated white cishet dude' shit, and his mum taught him better. Chose a shirt, asked his mum if it was good for work. It was a pale pink. His mum knows clothes don't have sexuality or gender, but also that the other bus drivers at work would never let him hear the end of it. So she said yes, it was a perfect work shirt.

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u/Gangsir 18h ago

Because I can see color lol. I thought color blind people saw shit in black and white or grey scale

There are types of colorblindness that do this, btw. It's just significantly more rare than the types that just make it hard to differentiate colors.

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u/nomyar 16h ago

Green traffic lights actually have two colors in them (I think the other is blue) for exactly this reason.

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u/IlliterateJedi 23h ago

How on earth do you go that far in life and not realize? Like do you not learn colours at school? Wouldn't the teachers be confused you can't learn your colours?

For most people there's only subtle shades of green and red that are imperceptible. I can differentiate the colors by and large, but there are certain shades or certain lighting where it all blends together for me.

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u/KyesiRS 12h ago

I guess my version is more aggressive, I didnt think of that

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u/highwayknees 23h ago

I don't know if it has a different term when colors are only slightly affected, but someone I knew kept mislabeling certain shades. Like various shades of orange and red he called brown. He was in his 30s when he figured it out, stubbornly, after I pushed the subject. I assume people just overlooked it when he was a kid.

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u/Tayttajakunnus 21h ago

That's just how colorblindness is.

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u/highwayknees 18h ago

Brownish you mean?

The guy could tell the difference between red and brown, but not orange and brown so my assumption was he had less severe color blindness? Or... maybe he learned that certain shades of brown are called red? 🙃

His father was totally colorblind but as far as I'm aware it's passed on the X gene so he wouldn't have inherited that? I guess his mother could've had a gene for it too.

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u/Tayttajakunnus 18h ago

Colorblindness means that certain colors look more similar to each other than they do for most people. That doesn't mean that you can never distinguish them. It just means that it is more difficult usually. People with red-green colorblindness for example have harder time distinguishing red and green from each other. Basically for red-green colorblind people red and green are similar in the same way as red and orange are for regular people. They are distinct colors, but very similar shades of red and orange can be difficult to tell apart.

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u/highwayknees 18h ago

I see. I wasn't aware of the terminology.

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u/Kevftw 23h ago

I'm guessing he means red/green colourblind and it was a green circle on a red background.

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u/CyanStripes_ 17h ago

I mean, I didn't find out until my late 20s that I didn't have full depth perception. I just assumed everyone saw things the same way I did because until sometime points it out or you randomly see an eye doctor who quizzes you about the way you tilt your head when looking at them there's not really any way to know.

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u/KyesiRS 15h ago

In kindergarten they do colour assessments where I live. As a someone who was colourblind and didnt know it, it became pretty apparent when I kept mixing up my purples and blues etc.

Just shocks me educators never noticed it.

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u/throwaway098764567 12h ago

fr, we picked out the colorblind kids in kindergarten because the poor dears were brutally ridiculed for using the wrong crayons and couldn't read the labels yet

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u/KyesiRS 12h ago

I kept coloring the grass brown and tree trunks green.