As a teenager, I worked as a delivery boy for a local pharmacy. It was also my duty to sweep the floor and to keep all the glass counters clean, so I spent a fair amount of time in the store itself.
One day, two women came into the store and stopped to look at a chart of nail polish colors that was taped to one of the glass counters. It was a chart something like the one below, but with all of the colors in various shades of red that were very close to pink at one end of the chart and which very gradually changed from one sample to the next to a very dark red at the other end. It was a one-way color progression.
One of the women offered her opinion to the other that "This shade is just lovely ...." and then pointing to the next sample over "... but this one is just ugly! Don't you agree?" to which the second woman quite vehemently voiced her agreement.
It wasn't that the goodness or badness of the colors were agreed upon by these two women that caught my attention. It was the strength of the chosen adjectives for each color that got to me. I saw that the two colors were adjacent to each other, so I made a mental note of exactly where they were located in that matrix.
After the two women left, I went over and looked at the two colors they'd been discussing and discovered that I could not see the color difference between those two adjacent samples. I could see the progression of color changes across the entire chart, but I could not see the difference between any two adjacent color samples.
I've been told that women are more sensitive to color variations than men are, but so far as I know, I am not color blind. I've never mistaken a 1 Meg resistor for a 1K resistor.
In a recent issue of Scientific American Mind, there was an article: "Regaining the Rainbow: A Gene Therapy Approach to Color Blindness" which you can find at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=regaining-the-rainbow .
There is mention there that some women may have four types of color receptive cone cells in their retinas instead of the usual three types. This doesn't seem to be found in men as I understand.
Maybe this is what I was up against.
John,
Have you ever heard it said that
men can not dream in color?
Posted by: Don H. | October 25, 2012 at 05:40 PM