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.

Here comes my story which happened just the other day and shows one more time, why colorblind men are suffering under LED lights:

I bought a new wlan router and when I started it up all the lights turned on, one after the other. So far everything ok. But then the connection didn’t work and the story begins.

At this moment I didn’t think about the colors of the lights. They were on and that’s what they supposed to be in my colorblind eyes. So I started looking for the error, tried several settings, restarted the router many times and so on. After about an hour I started to think about the colors of the LEDs: “Are they really green? Or maybe yellow?”

As I couldn’t tell what colors they were I asked my not colorblind son who is 3.5 years old. He started naming the colors from the left side: “Yellow, yellow, red.” — “What?!”

I asked my son again and again. Telling him that he might mix up the colors. In the end he really was mixed up and started to say what I wanted to hear from him, that all the lights show the same light…

Now here comes the funny part of the story: As I couldn’t make it work I called the support line. A nice women tried to help me to fix the problem. When she asked for the colors…. Well, I said for me they look ok, but my son tells me something different. She couldn’t really believe that I couldn’t tell her if one light is red or not. I felt so stupid and I thought she thinks I’m stupid.

After the unfortunately fruitless telephone call I remembered my little tool Seekey. And this time I thought: “Wow! My son is right, I’m wrong, and I’m really so stupid.” Through the Seekey I could see that there really was a difference between the lights. I still couldn’t tell the colors, but at least knew that there is something going wrong.

Isn’t this incredible. Just some little LED lights can make your time sometimes so frustrating. I still can’t tell if the lights are red or yellow. And if you say they are green, I would believe it. — And again my request: If you are working with LEDs make sure that your colorblind friends can also see the colors!

Dear readers,
Tell me and be honest: can you see a difference in color between this picture and the first one? – I definitely can not.

By the way, the story with the broken router was done after a few more calls and a whole afternoon of searching for the bug.

PS: I asked my son one more time to confirm, that the colors are really different. He said: “Yellow, yellow, red” and smiled at me… And hey, my wife just said she would call it green-green-red. Now if even the not colorblind aren’t sure how can I ever be sure? :-)

Last week we were with the whole family on ski holidays. It was snowing almost the whole week long. Not really good weather, but anyway we had a good time with all the snow.

One day together with my 3 yo. son we took some plastic plates which are meant to sit on and slide down the hills, like some sort of sledges. One of them in a bright yellow and the other one in a bright green. Both very bright colors.

When we stood on the hill my son said: “I take the green one, you can have the yellow sledge.”

I said: “Which is the green one?”

He looked at me — puzzled. (What does he mean? Why does he ask me that? One is green and one is yellow, that’s for sure. Is my father to stupid to see that?)

My son said: “Can’t you see the colors?”

I said: “No, I’m sorry.”

—

And I suppose, he forgot about it again just in that very moment. A next situation like this will arrive soon, I’m sure.

My red-green color blindness turned out to be quite a handicap while trying to find all the apples on the tree. The apples are mostly yellow with some of them turning red. I also wanted to pick the rotten ones which show any color between yellow-red and brown.

Appletree – taken by ms.Tea

As the tree has many green leaves and brown branches it was really hard work to spot all yellow, red and brown apples. Not because they were hidden inside the tree but because I couldn’t really spot them by their color.

The picture here pretty much shows you how it looked like. You might say now, that there isn’t a huge difference between the apple and the leaves even for somebody with normal color vision. But for my colorblind eyes, there is no color difference at all. I can only spot the apple by its shape.

Conclusion: I definitely wont become a fruitpicker—at least not in this colorblind life.

This time it happened when coloring a simple graphics illustrating a project lifecycle model. It consists of six modules and therefore I was looking for six different colors for coloring them. And this was where the whole problem started.

How can I choose six different colors from a set of about twenty crayons, which I won’t mix up? The simple answer is: I can’t.

I really tried to find colors which are easily distinguishable even for my eyes. But with my color blindness this is almost impossible. I’ve chosen the following colors:

• Blue
• Yellow
• Red
• Violet
• Orange
• Green

I arranged them in the above order to be sure not to mix them up. The color pairs blue/violet, yellow/orange and red/green looked very close to each other for my colorblind eyes.

But of course it didn’t work. Suddenly I didn’t had the correct order anymore and it started to get problematic. So I didn’t color red and green right away, because they are the most problem colors for a red-green colorblind guy like me. I colored them only after my presentation, when there was more time to have a closer look at the crayons.

So everything was perfect now? Unfortunately not. I couldn’t believe it but someone else (with not color vision problem like me) did point out to me, that I colored two modules in blue…

How could I just mix up violet and blue? I used the wrong color again. Unbelievable but I just can’t distinguish six colors.

And what do I learn for the next time: Ask somebody else to do it for you.