Oliver Sacks is a physician, best-selling author, and professor of neurology and psychiatry at Columbia University Medical Center. In 1997 Dr. Sacks wrote a book about tiny Pacific atoll of Pingelap, where the genetic disease of complete color blindness (achromatopsia) is much more common than in the rest of the world.

One year after that BBC made a four-part documentary including the Island of the Colorblind. Hereafter you can watch this video, which is split into six smaller parts.

Watching this documentary you can learn a lot about color vision, how it feels to live with complete color blindness and of course a lot about the people from Pingelap.

Island of the Colorblind — Part 1 of 6

Island of the Colorblind — Part 2 of 6

Island of the Colorblind — Part 3 of 6

Island of the Colorblind — Part 4 of 6

Island of the Colorblind — Part 5 of 6

Island of the Colorblind — Part 6 of 6

If you want to read more from Oliver Sacks, you can visit his personal homepage at www.oliversacks.com.

The company Terry Neese Personnel is looking for several people who are color deficient to participate in a study for air traffic controllers at FAA (Federal Aviation Administration, US).

As they are located in Oklahoma City, you should live around this area.

You’ll get a compensation of $25 per hour and shouldn’t be older than 30 years.

If you match the criterias and would like to participate, please contact Vicky at vicki@tneesepersonnel.com or call her at 405-942-8551.

I took this as a hint to have a closer look at the question what you are willing to pay if some treatment would be available which could do that job. We are not that far yet. But there are some promising tests with monkeys which showed that genetic injections into the eye can help them to get back what they are missing—a third color receptor.

So let’s assume such a treatment would also be available for us and answer the following question—but only if you are colorblind yourself!

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

Maybe this poll still doesn’t show the truth because I assume that younger people might not be able to afford a high price and older people would have done it earlier in their lives, but not anymore. What do you think? Would you have payed for it, if only it would have be available ten or twenty years ago? Please leave your comments as it would be very interesting to hear your opinion on this.

The poll is running for the whole month of December. So stay tuned for the results in January while subscribing to Colblindor.

Many people who suffer from any form of color vision deficiency are looking for a possibility to improve their color vision or even cure it. It is interesting to learn what people are willing to pay to reduce this handicap and get a broader color sensation. Here are the results of the poll:

Would you pay money to correct your color vision deficiency?

In the first chart I merged together all the votes which would pay from $1 to more then $10,000 to improve color vision. This gives us a broad view if people are willing to pay money at all.

The result shows, that less than 20% are not willing to pay any money at all to improve their color vision or even cure a color vision deficiency completely. Out of the rest around 60% would spend money for an improvement. Overall around one third would only pay if the actual treatment or used technique would completely cure their color vision deficiency.

How much money would you spend to improve your color vision?

The second chart shows only the votes from colorblind people who are willing to spend money to improve their color vision.

There is a broad range of the amount people would pay to lessen their handicap. The lower end starts at something between $1 and $300 and the upper limit I suppose goes up to several $10.000!

If you look at the graph the votes are quite evenly distributed over the whole range. But on the other side there is something you could call a split between $5.000 and $10.000. I suppose this comes from the fact that some people above that limit are willing to pay almost any amount just to get rid of their color blindness. Below the limit of around $3.000 to $5.000 many people would pay some money but can also arrange themselves with their handicap.

If we strictly just take the lower limits of each range we get an average of around $3.300 which some colorblind people are willing to pay for an improvement of their color vision. This makes an overall amount of almost half a million dollars just for the people who voted on this poll! I wonder how much money you can earn if you really can cure color blindness…

After the poll on Would You Pay Money to Improve Your Color Vision? we will have a closer look into the question on how much money you would pay to cure your color blindness? — Stay tuned!

There are some genetic experiments taking place to increase the color vision for colorblind people. The tests look really exiting and the results look promising. But nobody knows yet, how much of a perfect human color vision you—as a colorblind fellow—could gain through this genetic treatment. And of course nobody knows yet how big the price tag would be for it.

There are also tools available like colored contacts or Seekey and other possibilities to help colorblind people are under development. But are they worth the price?

On the other side many colorblind people have the dream to once become a pilot (or firefighter, or policeman, …), and would be willing to pay for a cure of their handicap. Unfortunately we have no clue yet, if any future treatment or tool will ever be able to give us back a color vision good enough to pass the requirements which are in use today. Of course, we can look into changing those requirements, but that’s another story.

The following poll is for colorblind people only—sorry:

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

To answer the above question you might have to know what I mean by improving your color vision ability. I would say this is something between being able to answer our most annoying game “what color is this?” and curing it completely. I don’t talk about curing color blindness here on purpose, as it is interesting to see if you would also pay money for an improvement of your color vision.

The poll is running for the next ten days. So stay tuned for the results and the follow up poll about how much money people pay for curing color blindness while subscribing to Colblindor.