Blue Eyes Whining

Human eyes suck at blue tones of light.
Be advised it’s necessary to dumb this down somewhat, but it’s still fairly accurate for most of the human race.
If you could check the rods and cones on your retinas, you’d discover each receptor is tuned to some particular color — red, green or blue. That should explain a lot. We don’t actually see yellow for itself. The problem is only 10%, on average, are designed to see blue. Worse, our brains are wired to absolutely need blue in perceiving the shape of things. Take any photograph and filter out the blue, and we can’t tell what the image is. Filter everything except the blue and we can tell quite well what’s in the picture.
If you want to see this as the result of evolution, you have to realize evolution is not an unalloyed good.
Either way, we suck at blue even as we desperately need it. So we have come up with artificial ways of helping our eyes. You remember all the rage about those “Blue Blocker” sunglasses? The lenses were varying shades of brown or yellow. Actually, the best ones were orange, though faded orange tends to look yellow to us. The point is, orange is opposite blue on the color wheel. The objective is not to literally block out blue, but to shift the perception of our brains. Our internal visual processing simply adapts to any color lenses as much as possible.
Any lens will cut down the amount of available light. Our native sun is generally yellow. An orange lens makes everything just a little darker, which is actually good for your eyes. As we age, things become rather fuzzy and light-shot. That’s the vision’s wear pattern. Avoiding overexposure to direct sunlight over the course of your life is a good thing. Orange lenses make green and red easier to distinguish. They make blue more like black, which is just fine with our brains. As we age, adding a yellow-orange tint to the field of view helps most people. It shifts the hue range down and makes all details sharper.
That “Blue Blocker” fad was actually one of the few which had it right.

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2 Responses to Blue Eyes Whining

  1. Part of my pre-acceptance physical to the US Naval Academy included a color-blindness test that involved aligning blue colored blocks from lightest to darkest. The differences in hue between one block and the next were supposed to be imperceptible, though there was clearly difference between blocks 3 or 4 spaces apart. The goal was not to get it 100% right, but just to be close. When I did achieve 100%, the proctor assumed it was just lucky guessing on the details, scrambled the pieces, and had me do it again. I got it right three times.
    I have spidey-senses. All my senses are similarly heightened. Sometimes that’s proved life-saving (sniffing out fires onboard ship behind allegedly air-tight hatches); sometimes it’s a drain. It’s related to – if not a primary cause of – migraine. I have to be careful of overload. It’s why I have a pair of high-quality, wrap-around, polarized, yellow-brown sunglasses I wear pretty much constantly.

    • Ed Hurst says:

      It took a long time for medical science to realize migraines were often a side effect of various kinds of heightened sensory registry. All sorts of stuff, even Adult ADD, has more to do with side effects of oddball “enhancements” than some sort of actual problem. When so many chemicals thrown into our environment aggravate such conditions, it’s a wonder there aren’t more suicides.

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