All Kinds of Blindness

Last night I was watching 60 Minutes, yes the durable television news show, and no, I did not then look for Murder She Wrote reruns to watch afterward, (but I thought about it).  First of all I love 60 Minutes, always have, even as a child.  This fact has nothing to do with my topic today, but I feel it necessary to let you know that if it is covered on 60 Minutes, it is relevant to me.  I also miss Andy Rooney, and felt like he was own crabby granddad (he was not).

Anyway, the wonderful Leslie Stahl did a piece on Face Blindness.  What?  Yes, some people can not visually discern between faces.  Even the faces of their own family members.  All faces just look like eyes, nose, and mouth.  Facial features between people are indistinguishable to those afflicted with face blindness.  This seemed so amazingly odd to me.  All the people that were interviewed for this piece were of normal (and a few of extremely high) intelligence, and had successful careers.  Some had families, one woman could not identify a picture of her own daughter's face.  Really these were regular people that can not recognize faces.  This was simply astonishing to me.  These people rely on voice, body shape, and other features to identify people.  So the changing of a hair color or style, could result in a face blind person not recognizing you at all, even if it is a close co-worker or spouse or sibling.  The kicker...most of these people did not realize they had an issue recognizing faces until adulthood.  They all admitted they were always challenged in social situations, but had (and still have) no idea what they are missing.

My son is colorblind.  It is a genetic trait so he always was and will see color in a way that most of the population will never understand.  Yes, most colorblind people can see color, but differently, a bit more muted in shading.  Their world is not black and white. Complete color blindness does exist, but is very uncommon. Honestly, I did not have confirmation that my little guy was colorblind until a year ago.  All through pre-school and kindergarten he identified colors on all assessment with no concerns mentioned by his teachers.  Looking back, this is pretty amazing because some shades of greens, blues, purples, and grays are all very similar for him.  He compensates by memorizing shadings and having reference items for colors.  It is quite amazing that at seven years old he does this.  Then I remember, that is all he knows.  He has no idea what he is not seeing.  I only know from doing some research how he does see things, but only in a very limited way.

 Normal color vision seeing
 rainbow colors.

 My son seeing rainbow colors with his
type of color deficiency.

These are the rainbow color pictures that I  found most helpful in understanding red/green color deficiency.  Which is my son's type.  There are several types of color deficiency.  Selfishly, I only care about the one that effects him.  Mostly because I have to help him in some situations.  I am completely amazed that we had no idea.  It really shows how much people can compensate for conditions.  I also feel sad when I look at the two different pictures of a rainbow, because I can see how many colors he will never see.  However, as I said before, he does not know, he will never know.  FYI, his favorite color is blue, which is cool because know we are seeing the same thing.

These two examples of blindness, that those afflicted have no idea what they are missing, remind me that we all have blindness in our life.  Most of our blindness can not be diagnosed by doctors like face blindness and colorblindness. Some people are blind to other people's feelings, some are blind to bad relationship patterns,  some are blind to their own ignorance.  We all are a blind in some way.  Perhaps going through our whole lives not knowing what we are missing and not seeing.  Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is bad.  I know that my son's color blindness has helped me understand him in a different way.  I admire how hard he has to work to compensate, and he has no idea.  My spouse often puts things in perspective for me at by saying, "You know, sometimes we don't know, what we don't know".  And I guess that statement covers all kinds of blindness.