Color Blindness

Color blindness affects more people than one might think. I think back to my freshman year of a high school - a time where I thought these things didn't exist - and I can remember being in biology class learning that a few of my classmates were actually color blind. My teacher had asked all of us to look at the Ishihara plates and read off the number, and there were a handful of people who couldn't do it. It turned out though that there were some plates they could read and some they could not, showing the properties of dichromats. Monochromats see everything in shades of black, white, and gray because the cones in their eyes do not work. Therefore, they are truly blind to color. Dichromats on the hand see color, but perceive it differently than a person with normal vision.