FMF - Friends of Minerals Forum, discussion and message board

[James Catmur]

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!)

James

[Jordi Fabre]

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...

Jordi

[James Catmur]

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

James

[lluis]

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

[alfredo]

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.

[James Catmur]

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

[James Catmur]

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

[lluis]

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

[alfredo]

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.

[Tracy]

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

[James Catmur]

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

James

[Tracy]

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

[Les Presmyk]

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.

[James Catmur]

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.

[Les Presmyk]

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.