here is a super great source and super genuine video of this technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TiITQDPClI
kevintli
I've seen several videos like this before, and this made me wonder why there wasn't a "permanent" fix for colorblindness if this technology already existed. I learned some interesting things:
EnChroma was actually founded and is still headquartered in Berkeley!
There is unfortunately still no low-cost solution to colorblindness, which is why things like EnChroma glasses or contacts are not ubiquitous.
Also, EnChroma seems to not be 100% reliable — it depends heavily on the type and amount of colorblindness.
Surprisingly, there are actually very few alternatives to EnChroma. I wonder if this has to do with their patent, or if scientists just don't fully understand how to "fix" colorblindness yet.
melodysifry
Watching these clips of colorblind people seeing certain colors for the first time made me wonder about how their brains process these new colors. In another class I'm taking (Language and Thought) we talk a lot about the ongoing debate on whether the way that we perceive color is universal across all humans, or whether it's influenced by other factors, particularly culture/language.
There's evidence supporting both arguments, but interestingly, a lot of studies have found that for adults, the labels/names that we've learned for different color categories influence the way that we perceive and discriminate between different colors, but only in the right side of our visual field: We have a faster reaction time for discriminating between colors with different names in our right visual field than our left, and slower reaction times discriminating between colors with the same name (like different shades of blue) in our right visual field compared to the left visual field. This is because information in our right visual field is processed by the left hemisphere of our brains, which also handles language, and thus, the labels that we've learned for different color categories interfere with processing in the left hemisphere.
For toddlers who haven't yet learned any names for colors, this left hemisphere interference doesn't happen. I wonder how this would play out for colorblind people who are able to see different colors for the first time using technology like the EnChroma glasses. Since they weren't able to visually discriminate between certain colors at the time of language acquisition, would the way that they perceive these colors for the first time be more similar to toddlers without color terms? Or would they be able to “match” the color terms they previously learned to the colors that they are seeing for the first time, making them exhibit the same hemispheric lateralization of color discrimination that we see in adults?
here is a super great source and super genuine video of this technology: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4TiITQDPClI
I've seen several videos like this before, and this made me wonder why there wasn't a "permanent" fix for colorblindness if this technology already existed. I learned some interesting things:
Watching these clips of colorblind people seeing certain colors for the first time made me wonder about how their brains process these new colors. In another class I'm taking (Language and Thought) we talk a lot about the ongoing debate on whether the way that we perceive color is universal across all humans, or whether it's influenced by other factors, particularly culture/language.
There's evidence supporting both arguments, but interestingly, a lot of studies have found that for adults, the labels/names that we've learned for different color categories influence the way that we perceive and discriminate between different colors, but only in the right side of our visual field: We have a faster reaction time for discriminating between colors with different names in our right visual field than our left, and slower reaction times discriminating between colors with the same name (like different shades of blue) in our right visual field compared to the left visual field. This is because information in our right visual field is processed by the left hemisphere of our brains, which also handles language, and thus, the labels that we've learned for different color categories interfere with processing in the left hemisphere.
For toddlers who haven't yet learned any names for colors, this left hemisphere interference doesn't happen. I wonder how this would play out for colorblind people who are able to see different colors for the first time using technology like the EnChroma glasses. Since they weren't able to visually discriminate between certain colors at the time of language acquisition, would the way that they perceive these colors for the first time be more similar to toddlers without color terms? Or would they be able to “match” the color terms they previously learned to the colors that they are seeing for the first time, making them exhibit the same hemispheric lateralization of color discrimination that we see in adults?