This article was born of me just honestly answering the survey, I encourage you if you are colourblind to do the same and give Joanna a hand in making her book a success.

Second, I don’t know Daniel if you are monitoring comments, however after you turned this into an article I was inspired by your example to take what I’d written and polish it up some and expand on a few things in a couple of places.

My updated version of this article can be found on the BBC here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/plain/A63242679

RH.

It’s tough to try and explain a sensory depravation in a way that makes sense to people who have fully working senses (as your issues with garlic make clear) I’m very flattered if you think I succeeded.

I do think of coca cola cans as red, but my red is very similar to my green or my brown. (as a game of snooker will swiftly attest) So it’s transplanting that colour out of a meaningful context means I’d not necessarily recognise or think of it as red.

You could stick it an anomaloscope, for example and I’d probably match it with a green. Because although the condition is typically genetic or acquired, light is a physical property of electromagnetism and the physiology of colourblindness is physical, located in the eye or sometimes the brain – colour itself is a sort of social phenomenon, at least in so far as naming colours goes.

I can see in colour, and I confuse what I see as similar colours because of my altered spectrum (like your friend) but – the disabling part of this is when there no alternative to recognising colours by sight alone then I am exposed.

I really really like the “Flavor Blindness” analogy as everytime I am pregnant flavors skew in a way that puts me at a loss for words. Garlic smells wonderful to me when I am not pregnant, but when I am pregnant I smell garlic, and know it is garlic, but it is NOT the same smell. It is a very baaaaad smell, but when my husband askes “what does it smell like?” well, it smells like garlic, just not the garlic that makes Spaghetti and Lasagne tasty, it is an evil smell… LOL

So thank you Daniel for a great site, and Richard for a great article.

PS, I don’t usually call things by their color when I am alone. I mean when I see a rainbow I see all the colors, but I don’t say what pretty red, orange… I am more usually captured by brightness, vividness, and the contrast in a setting. I mean unless I am driving along and there is a house painted bright purple and gold, or a brown house with turquoise trim then I will say, “wow, that’s really purple” or “thats quite the turquoise” but usually I see what I see and don’t try to put names to things until I try and describe them to someone else. :D