Author Archives: Cassidy Slade

Making Life More Livable

Leave a reply

For my second blog post, I wanted to talk about something regarding colorblindness. The reason I chose this topic was because it was something that really intrigued me throughout the entire semester. I have hardly been taught about colorblindness nor have I ever really thought about the hardships that an individual with colorblindness has on a daily basis.

The article I found was titled, Outlook on Colorblindness, and it starts off by giving us different statistics regarding individuals that are colorblind—1 in 12 men suffer from some type of color blindness and 1 in 4 women carry the colorblindness gene. Melinda Beck wrote this article and does a great job with making everyone aware of the hardships that people who suffer from color blindness go through on a daily basis, such as tasks as simple as seeing if meat is fully cooked to tasks as life threatening as determining whether a stop light is lit up red or green. Luckily, with technology, our world is starting to become more colorblind friendly, technological services such as websites, smartphone apps, and even video games are making it possible and easier for a person who is color blind to use their services. For example, many video games are starting to come out with a ‘colorblind’ mode.

What really stood out to me is it may even be possible for people suffering from colorblindness to be employed in jobs that were once closed to them, such as becoming a pilot. Melinda then goes into explain how a vision scientist, Jay Neitz and his colleagues think they may have found a cure for colorblindness. What these scientist did was, whatever gene the colorblind person was missing, they would inject that gene (being held in a virus) into the retinas of the colorblind person. This treatment is still undergoing a lot of changes, but in 2009 these injected these missing genes into colorblind monkeys, and to this day they are still able to identify colors correctly.

The reason this article relates to our class is because we went into great detail about color blindness, and how a person who is colorblind usually lacks a specific cone: someone who lacks L-cones are known as Protanope, someone lacking S-cones are Tritanope and someone lacking M-cones are known as Deuteranope. Later in the article, Melinda talks about the Ishihara Test plates, which are the tests where a circle is filled with smaller, colorful circles, and in the center is a number. Someone who is colorblind typically won’t see the number in the center. This article really stood out to me because I’m glad that people recognize this as a problem and scientists are working their way towards helping people who are colorblind.

Works Cited

Beck, Melinda. “New Outlook for Colorblindness.” The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, 6 Nov. 2012. Web. 24 Apr. 2014.

Doubting Your Eyes-Cassidy Slade

2 Replies

For my first blog post, I was having a hard time thinking of a personal experience which related to something we learned in class, so I decided to look online for articles regarding a topic that really stuck out as interesting to me so far in the semester. I was really struck by our lecture where we learned about brightness and contrast and how the response of edges are influenced by the light surrounding the edges, so pretty much the intensity of an object depends on the surroundings of that object, along with the Hermann Grid and Cornsweet Illusion (lecture 5.) It was really cool to me how a box of the same color surrounded by a lighter contrast appeared darker then that same colored box surrounded by a darker contrast.

The article I found was written by a man named Phil Plait, who goes into great detail of how optical illusions can have you doubting your eyes and what you are really seeing. At the beginning of the article there is an image of two “lozenges” which are pretty much three-dimensional squares that appear to be different shades set on top of each other. The one on top appears quite a bit darker then the one on the bottom, but if you put your finger up blocking where the two squares meet, they appear to be the same shade. We learned about this phenomenon when talking about the Hermann grid. With the Hermann grid, each rectangular box gets a little bit brighter and then starts getting darker and finally goes back to the original shade, yet the different shades get averaged across the entire grid to make it look like they’re shading from lighter to darker. (See Image Below)

greysquares_illusion.jpg.CROP.original-original

This article directly relates to our class because it is an exact example of the Craik O’Brien-Cornsweet effect, which we also learned about during lecture 5. The Cornsweet effect is when one side of an image appears to be darker then the opposite side of that image, even though both sides of that image are the same shade of grey. Pretty much, with the Cornsweet effect and this article, our brain sees the upper square as being darker then the bottom square, with that being said, along with the different levels of contrasting shades between the two squares, our brain perceives them as different shades.

Throughout this class, I have learned time and time again that the brain has a funny way of playing tricks on us, and this is an exact example of how our brain can play tricks on us.

 

Plait, Phil. “An Optical Illusion You Will Swear Is Fake. It Isn’t.” Slate Magazine. N.p.,n.d. Web. 15 Mar. 2014 <http://www.slate.com/blogs/bad_astronomy/2013/12/07/optical_illusion_shades_of_grey.html>.