this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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That never made any sense to me. If the problem is with the cones in your eyes, then filtering the light going into them isn't going to magically do anything. At best, you might be able to do stuff with contrast to make colors more distinct, but someone that's red-green color blind could only have that actually fixed with new eyes.
Turns out that some people have overlap in color perception that muddies things, and when you use these glasses to filter out the "in between" wavelengths, everything becomes easier to distinguish.
Whereas I believed it with the analogy of hearing aids. There are a lot of people with hearing issues who can benefit from a simple amplification, or a more complex amplification of specific frequency ranges or filtered sound. By analogy, it seems perfectly reasonable that color-blindness may not be a binary condition so many people could benefit from more clearly distinguishing or amplifying certain frequencies. If I have a hard time distinguishing red from green, why wouldnโt glasses that filter red and green differently potentially work?
Hearing aids aren't really comparable. You still hear fine, but volume needs to be at a higher intensit. Hearing aids solve the problem with simple amplification. Corrective lenses for myopia and hyperopia are similar, correcting errors in something that's essentially just calibrated wrong.
Color blindness is more like being deaf. Don't think of your eyes as being one input generating a single image, but each eye being four inputs generating four images that are then composited. With color blindness, at least one of those pre-composite images is just not being generated at all. Like how a genuinely deaf person can't benefit from hearing aids because they don't have funcional ears, a colir blind person can't get new colors from simple lenses because they don't have cones capable of detecting those colors.
You can play music really loud for someone who's hearing is degrading and they'll hear it fine if it's loud enough, but you can't get someone who is red-green color blind to see green by ramping up the intensity of the green; they can't see that color for much the same reason I can't see ultraviolet or infrared.
From the posts of people saying it helped, I assume that like deafness can be a spectrum from hard of hearing to no inner ear nerves, color blindness can vary from limited cones for a color to no cones at all.