Do You Have Super-Vision?

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

Recently, we wrote about how the cones and rods in normal human eyesight function to perceive color and take over from one another as the light levels fall. The average human sees colors in what is called a trichromatic color space of Red, Green and Blue, which corresponds to the three types of photoreceptors, or cones, in our retinas. But, cutting edge research is showing that this may not be true for all of us.

A 20-year long research study has been able to identify at least one person with the ability to see in a four-color space. Referred to as a functional tetrachromat, this woman is able to distinguish colors invisible to others. She apparently possesses a fully-functioning fourth retinal cone that lies between the standard red and green cones. To give you an idea of what her Super Vision is like, when she looks at a rainbow, she can see ten distinct colors, while the rest of us can see only five. The accepted number of hues that an average human with trichromatic vision can dif…