By Anupum Pant
There’s a game on Android and iOS called Blendoku. In it, you are given a bunch of colours and are expected to arrange them into a gradient. Most levels are doable. But at times you get stuck and only trial and error seems to get you ahead. That’s because sometimes when the colours given to you to arrange into a smooth gradient are so close to each other, it becomes very tough for you to distinguish between them.
However, some women don’t seem to have that problem with arranging colours like this. These woman, due to a special gene found only in women, are blessed with something called tetrachromacy – a kind of a super vision.
Normally, humans have 3 kinds of cones, each of which is sensitive to red, blue and green. Some women, have a fourth kind of cone, supposedly a yellow one and are able to see 100 times as many colours as we see. To them, two colours which seem completely indistinguishable to you are clearly different. They can’t explain what they see. Just like you can’t explain the colour red to a blind person. The only way to determine that they do have a super ability is to check their genetic make up.