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Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!
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James Catmur
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 08:02    Post subject: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

I was wrong to suggest any order of preference in what we all like to collect ( https://www.mineral-forum.com/message-board/viewtopic.php?t=687 ). We all collect what we like - Why do I like black minerals? Well I do as I have my own problem - I am color blind (daltonism) so cannot see the colors of minerals very well. I have lots of lovely purple flourite in my collection, but to me it is all blue! So I collect on form far more than on color. In fact many of those wonderful green pyros are lost on me from a color point of view, but from a form point of view I love them.

But that disability has meant that at times on collecting trips I find great things while others find nothing - they look for the 'right colors' while I look for the 'right rock type'. I have spent hours on a tip with a group who found almost nothing, while I took home the best azurite known from the tip (the rock showed neither green nor blue on the surface but it was the right dolomite type so I hit it!)

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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 08:15    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

Fascinating topic!. I don't know if it is so well know, but at least from my experience, is a lot of people color blind whom are collecting minerals...

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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 08:24    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

I had assumed that I was one of very few - as color is so important in their appreciation!

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lluis




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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 08:38    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

Good afternoon, James, List

Well, I understand you very well.
I see colors correctly (or at least so i said to me), but I am stereoscopically blind (I see only with my left eye, that as a secondary naughty consequence leads that I have a crossed dominancy (I am severely right handed (left serves me only as aesthetics) UHHHHHH!).
All handicas have its rewards: when I was talked about perspective I always thought that is evident by itself...And for me TV is always in 3D :-)

By the way, I was always toild that in daltonism, greens and reds are confounded.
May I dare to ask you which colour you see when the others say blue, green and red?

Just extremely curious (I, poor of me, would never see world as you see it; I see it like a photo. Always....Try to park! :-( )

With best wishes

Lluís
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 08:39    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

I suspect that a color-blind person might become a better crystallographer, as their minds would tend to concentrate more on shapes, without being distracted by extraneous factors like color. In fact, crystal shapes ar more important for identification than color anyway, as color is an unreliable or highly variable property in many mineral species.
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 08:48    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

Lluis

I see blue as blue, red as red but green is hard for me to be sure. Sometimes it is green but sometimes I am not sure and it gets confused with brown. Then if you place a small amount of red in an area of green I just cannot see it. I cannot see the red in purple, so it is blue. Some pinks look gray

Basically I have less red sensitivity than normal people - as you will know we only see in three colors (as found by James Clerk Maxwell - who used this to produce the first ever color photo and when you combine this with his discovery of electromagnatism you realise just how key he was to so many things we do today) so as one color is less well developed than the others I do not see color as others do. But imagine if we could see more than three colors - how different the world would look! So for those of us who see in less than three (about 2.5 for me) we see a whole new world!

James
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 08:51    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

Alfredo

You are correct that shapes mean far more to me than colors. Also shade is far more important than color - I know that grass that is very light is brown to you folk and dark grass is green. I often use shade to determine color (which probably makes no sense to people who are not color blind).

That is why crystal forms are so interesting to me - and I will prefer form over color

James
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 09:02    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

Hi, James

Thanks a lot for explanation.
As a curiosity, there is a colour that is perceived differently by people.
It would be a kind of green/blue (the one used by Olivetti in his Studio 45), that for me is clearly green and for my wife clearly blue.....

I would pay a lot to know how we all see colours!
Just a big enigma for me

With best wishes

LLuís
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 09:28    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

In japanese, "midori" is green and "ao" is blue, but I often hear Japanese people say "ao" for things that to me are quite clearly green, even vegetation, so I wonder whether there are cultural differences in the way colours are perceived/described? Perhaps the boundaries in the spectrum are different, so there won't be a 1-to-1 correspondence between the names of colours in different languages - which would be a problem in interpreting mineralogical literature by foreign authors.
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 09:32    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

James said:
- as color is so important in their appreciation!

But that isn't necessarily true. It's up to the individual collector to decide what aspects of minerals they find most interesting. There are plenty of people, not color blind, who choose specimens based on form and are not that concerned with color. I'm not color blind and I have a preference for specimens with good forms...

...though I do agree with Alfredo that the types of visual cues a color-blind person might rely upon would likely make them better crystallographers.

- Tracy

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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 09:36    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

Given my problem I am not competent to say but I wonder if it is to do with where we judge a color to have changed. Just like minerals can vary in composition and we have rules about when they change in name (eg Wolframite and Ferberite) colors are never pure so maybe what changes is not the name but the end point. Maybe 'ao' can contain more red than 'blue' can, if that makes sense

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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 09:41    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

It is said that no two people perceive colors the same way. It's all a function of how the brain interprets the data. There is no "absolute" red, blue, green etc so what I look at and see as yellow and what you look at and see as yellow are not going to be the exact same color. The sensory input which tells my brain "purple" will not match your sensory input. Sometimes I wonder what sunsets look like to others, how they differ from what I am seeing - it's interesting stuff indeed!

- Tracy

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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 09:46    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

I believe color blindness affects more people and collectors than they are willing to admit, acknowledge or even know they have. Ed McDole, a famous and infamous western U.S. miner, collector and dealer, was color blind. While the story was he was totally color-blind, whatever that means, apparently he was only affected by one or two colors and could see other colors accurately.

For those of us who are not color blind, we may wonder how someone gets through life not seeing all of nature's colors. I am extremenly near sigthed and I am sure there are people who wonder how I wear contacts or even glasses. One makes do with the strengths and weaknesses that result from our genetics and environment. I can certainly see where someone who is color-blind could make a better crystallographer than someone who depends on color for mineral identification.
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 09:57    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

There are some people who are totally color blind - they see in black and white. The rest of us lack some of the sensitivity to one of the three colors, most often red. So maybe Ed could not see one of them at all.

I have always heard that color blindness is more common in people from northern lattitudes, as color is less critical in choosing the right food, etc. But I have no idea if that is true.

And as Tracy says, we all preceive colors slightly differently so maybe we are all colorblind to some small degree and it just depends how much.
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 10:24    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

Then there are the obvious differences between men and women when it comes to colors. I categorize 5 different shades of blue as light blue, medium blue, dark blue, navy blue and yes that Tsumeb azurite is blue even if it looks black. Paula has separate names for each of these blues and at least five more.

I am fortunate because I am not color-blind, just term ignorant.
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 10:36    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

So it is clear that color is not a constant across cultures or even the sexes! Yet we all seem to prize that 'apple green' color in pyromorphite (which I have to admit I cannot see) - so how do we know it is the 'right' apple green. I guess we learn from hearing others say "this is the best color" and then we make it the best color in our eyes! Of course we could get the wrong idea, and I guess we do from time to time, and I also guess that the best color changes in time (I am sure a victorian collector would not think the same way we now do).

So in the end it is all in the eye of the beholder- but we train ourselves to value the color other people value (and I really love the blue Flourite from Berbes!)



B597 fluorite.jpg
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Fluorite and Baryte from Berbes, Asturias, Spain, 11cm x 6 cm, obtained in 1999
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 11:10    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

I would submit that it's all part of the individual learning process. I'm weak in crystallography so I trained myself to consider crystals based on what I hear others say about their quality. Over time it's getting easier to spot "good" crystals on my own, much the same way as over time a color-blind person would train themselves to find specimens which others value for their color. It's all about information-processing and skill sets.

By the way, I don't think Les Farges pyros look "apple-green" at all (actually apples make me think of red, not green) - not meaning to complicate or confuse things... :-)

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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 11:16    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

Tracy

Another cultural difference - in the US apples are red while in the UK they are green? And to me the Les Farges ones are normally brown (but that does not count for much!)

James
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 11:36    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

Smithsonite from the 79 mine in Arizona is judged by its closeness to being apple green. I am not sure I can define it but I know it when I see it, especially if I am buying or selling the specimen.

Maybe we all need to carry color swatches around with us so we can compare colors that way. No, because the paint companies and fashion designers work hard every year to come up with new names for the same colors. Oh well, I am going back to my 5 shades of blue (maybe adding a 6th - electric blue) and calling it a day.
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PostPosted: Aug 05, 2009 11:36    Post subject: Re: Color blind (daltonism). Disadvantages and advantages!  

Les Presmik wrote:
....I believe color blindness affects more people and collectors than they are willing to admit.

That is the critical point. I have two theories (maybe both are wrong ;-) and they are closely related to each other.

My first is that there is a higher percentage of mineral collectors who are color blind than in the population as a whole, and that this is because minerals really fascinate them since, apart from the color, they see things that non-colorblind people do not see, i.e. the form, their intimate structure, or some other very detailed aspect of the mineral. What I mean to say is that in exchange for the disability they get some form of "radar" which means that they see the minerals very differently and in a way that is pleasing

My other theory is that we don't really know this high percentage, because color blind people are (logically) very worried that dealers will try to fool them, so they never tell anyone, especially dealers, about their colorblindness. They only admit it when over a long time they have built a good relationship with a particular dealer and therefore feel safe in revealing it, knowing that probably the dealer will not take advantage and try to sell them poorly colored minerals that no one, not even the colorblind, would buy

Jordi

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