Ben's favorite color is...

Red

Orange

Purple

Black

Grey

Silver

Gold

 

The amusing thing here is not that Ben has seven favorite colors, which seems extreme to me (I only have on favorite color: green, as anyone who's been in my house can tell almost instantly), but that he really can't see any of his favorite colors the way we see them.

 

You see, at Ben's last eye checkup, they managed to determine that he is completely red-green color vision deficient. That's the new PC way of saying he's red/green colorblind. The term was changed, apparently, because people were getting confused about the whole "colorblind" part. Ben sees colors, just not like a person with normal vision.

 

So? What does Ben actually see? For that we need to dip briefly into how the eye and light work. I am greatly simplifying here, so if you want the full nitty-gritty details, skip over to Wikipedia's article, which I, uh, borrowed from heavily for this blog.

 

Our eyeballs have 3 types of cone cells lining the retina. Each cone cell is programmed to collect a different spectrum, or color, of light. The cones collect red, blue, and yellow light, then combine those three primary colors to create the rest of the box of 96 that most of us can see. (All three combined make white. No colors perceived makes black.)

 

Due to some freak of genetics, Ben's cones don't perceive red so well. All colors are some blending of the primary colors. For example, a light red may also include some yellow and blue but not very much. So in colors that have a red componet, like red, purple, and orange, Ben sees them as some form of green, blue, or yellow.

 

We weren't sure whether he was having color troubles. I thought so because Ben has consistently called "purple" blue and he often has troubles distinguishing lighter colors: pale baby blue becomes white or silver to him. Dark green and black are often confused. A red and green of the exact same tone will confuse him. But he's also learned thru the last five years of us teaching him his colors that the top light in a traffic light is red; fire engines are red; grass is green; etc. He may not see "red" but he knows the color he sees on a fire engine is called red.

 

So how does Ben see the world? Wikipedia has some pictures for illustrations that I'll post here:

The colors of the rainbow as viewed by a person with no color deficiencies:

 

The most likely colors of the rainbow as viewed by Ben:

 

And a real life example, also lifted from Wikipedia:

The apples on top are viewed by a "color normal" person. On the left is a red Braeburn apple. On the right is a green Granny Smith.

The apples on the bottom are viewed by someone like Ben (red/green color deficient). That Braeburn on the left looks an awful lot like the Granny Smith on the right.

 

Wikipedia also suggests visiting this website: http://www.vischeck.com/ if you'd like to see more examples of how Ben might see the world differently.

 

So, what do we do about it? Pretty much nothing. Ben is color deficient. Can't go in and fix the cones in his eyeballs. We can continue to teach him the colors as we see them and not give him any grief for screwing up colors. Our doc recommended saying something like "Your eyes just see things differently than my eyes. I see that car as "red" (or whatever)." At Target today Ben quizzed either me or himself as we passed cars in the parking lot. "Is that black? Do you see that as blue? Green?" And in some cases he was right and in others, well, not so much.

 

Is this a handicap? Sort of. Some careers are currently closed to Ben (tho these may change as he grows up). For now, being a police officer, train engineer, or commercial/military pilot are probably unavailable to him. We haven't told him this. He really doesn't need to know until he's really interested in training up for something and then we'll look into it more.

 

I mean, right now he wants to be a Jedi Knight and so long as he can pick his light saber color, he'll have no problems.

 

Ben may have trouble while he's learning to read if he's given books without a high color contrast on the pages. Books with red print on a brown background will be very difficult for Ben to read (also green print/red background, etc.). For now, while he's still new at this whole reading thing, our doc strongly recommends black on white.

 

Is this common? Surprisingly so. About 10% of the men in this country have some form of color-blindness, with red/green being most common. Many men don't even realize they have a deficiency: it is so mild for them they might fail a specific color-blindness test but otherwise have no troubles (as is the case with Steve). For others, it is complete, like Ben's. True color-blindness (seeing in only black and white) is extremely rare (something like less than .001%). Color-blindness of any sort is very rare in women, affecting only .4% of the population according to some random reference that I have now forgotten.

 

Oh, and how do you diagnose? You put your kid in a very brightly lit room and ask him to find the number on an Ishihara test plate. The test plates look like this:

with differently colored circles and different numbers hidden there. If you'd like to see more, visit these sites:

 

As a general rule, tho, please don't self-diagnose on your computer, especially your laptop. Most monitors just aren't correctly calibrated enough to see numbers in the trickier plates and a laptop's color changes on the angle of the screen!

By the way, you should see a 12 in the picture above.

 

So there you go. Our boy Ben just doesn't see colors the way we do. And it's a bummer. But on the scale of having something wrong with your kid, we'll take this and be grateful it isn't anything worse.