Color Code: Researchers Seek Those with ‘Super Vision’

What if you could see millions more colors than the average woman?

by Lesley Kennedy • MORE.com Reporter

Think you’re doing a pretty swell job of seeing all the brilliant colors around you? Well, there are color super-seers out there who scoff at your little eight-crayon Crayola box while they bust out a 64-crayon collection to play with.

Discover magazine reports the average human can see one million hues—yes, we’re dumbing this way down—thanks to three types of cones in our eyes.

“Every moment our eyes are open, those three flavors of cone fire off messages to the brain,” according to the magazine. “The brain then combines the signals to produce the sensation we call color.”

Well, some people, called tetrachromats, have four cones, which could enable them to see 100 million colors, Discover reports—and they probably don’t even know it. But a Newcastle University neuroscientist and her team have been on the hunt for folks with “super vision,” and after decades of searching, they have found the first documented tetrachromat.

So what does the world look like to someone with amped-up color vision? Sadly, the researchers can’t say, as color perception is hard to relate, according to the magazine.

Still, we bet there’s a job available for the tetrachromat at Pantone.

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