• Thorry84@feddit.nl
    61·
    1 day ago

    Please note being colorblind doesn’t mean everything is in gray, that’s only in very rare cases and isn’t the case for dogs.

    Most eyes see color by having cells that are sensitive only to certain wavelengths of light. This is normally a bell curve, which means a those cells are sensitive to a larger part of the spectrum. There can also be overlap in the spectrum different cells are sensitive to.

    The concept of color isn’t a physical thing, the cells just respond to parts of the spectrum. The brain however interprets those signals and assigns concepts to those signals. This is what we call color. At a young age we teach our children if you see this signal we call this red, this signal we call blue etc. Because this only happens in the brain this is somewhat subjective and we can have colors that aren’t directly related to a wavelength of color (like magenta, but also stuff like white, black and metallic colors for example). This is also why we can trick our brains to see a color, just by mixing around some signals. This is how stuff like monitors, TVs and colored led lights work, they just emit enough energy in the right parts to trick our brains into thinking it’s a certain color. Back in the day we didn’t do this very well, which lead to “harsh” light, which looked right on a glance but caused headaches and fatigue or even pain when looking at it for a long time.

    There are different kinds of color blindness and to different degrees. Online are simulators where you can see how people (or dogs in this case) view the world. There are also animals that are sensitive to a greater range of the spectrum, in their eyes they would think we were the colorblind ones. So colorblind doesn’t usually mean literally can’t see any colors. In reality a lot of people are slightly colorblind and would never notice it. It’s like the stereotypical discussion of the wife wanting to paint the wall eggshell instead of off-white and the man not being able to see a difference between those two.

    More reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_blindness

    • shroomato@lemmy.world
      1·
      18 hours ago

      It’s like the stereotypical discussion of the wife wanting to paint the wall eggshell instead of off-white and the man not being able to see a difference between those two.

      This is actually due to women being better at discerning colors than men.

      • Thorry84@feddit.nl
        3·
        10 hours ago

        Yeah but note this is also a huge stereotype. Like with a lot of differences between men and women, the difference isn’t that big and there is a huge overlap between men and women. On average men see a little bit less color than women, but this doesn’t hold up on an individual level. And with the huge overlap it isn’t by definition every woman sees better than a given man. So depending on the individual it’s perfectly plausible the man in a couple actually has better color vision than the woman.

    • ragebutt@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      All dogs are colorblind. they only have 2 types of cones so they can differentiate blue and yellow but still would potentially struggle with stuff like light blue vs dark blue. red, orange, green aren’t visible to them at all. It’s similar to red green colorblindness in humans but not exactly. They have much stronger low light and peripheral vision though

      • ryedaft@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2·
        1 day ago

        So they don’t see in monochrome, like in the comic? Which makes the comic weird.

        And when you call them colourblind isn’t that only by human standards? Aren’t all humans then colourblind by insect standards?

        • LeninOnAPrayer@lemm.eeEnglish
          1·
          1 day ago

          Yes. It’s colloquial use though. Dogs are “colorblind” by comparison. But it’s not like every dog has some flaw. They see exactly as they should be.

          I’m sure some dogs are actually doggy colorblind. Like a dog that has a problem with their cones and might actually see in black and white only.

    • mlg@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      Dogs are red-green color blind. They see a brighter and less detailed world when compared to humans. Peripheral vision is better than humans (dogs see more of the world), but distance is not judged quite as well. Dogs excel at night vision and the detection of moving objects. Figure 1 is a rough guesstimate of what a dog and human might see when viewing a color band (the electromagnetic spectrum).