Bloody Tetrachromats!

I wrote a post a month or so ago about colour perception and how women can see a whole selection of made up colours in between the actual colours that men can see.

It turns out that my theory is supported by science.

It would seem that a lady scientist called Gabriele Jordan, currently of Newcastle University published a paper a while back that suggested that some women have an extra colour detecting cone in their retinas that could enable them to see four primary colours instead of three, or at the very least be more sensitive to varying shades of colour. It's only women who have these cones for complicated scientific reasons involving chromosomes and uteruses. There's an article here that sums it up.

The upshot of it is that certain women may be able to see up to a million different colours, whereas a normal person (i.e. a man) can only see about a hundred.

The women that can't see a million different colours probably just pretend they can because they think it makes them better than men. In fact, it makes them more like birds, which are mostly tetrachromats. Which stands to reason, because birds are easily distracted by shiny things, too.

Here is a picture of that pesky tetrachromatic cone: