Cerebral Achromatopsia: A Rare Disorder
Color blindness is a disorder that is much more common than most people realize, in fact 1 in 12 men or about 8% of all men have some form of color blindness (CBA). Color blindness comes in all different forms and it is not just limited to one type. The most common variation of color blindness is red/green colorblindness in which individuals affected have difficulty differentiating various shades of red and green (CBA). While this is the most common type of color blindness Mr. I, who is the patient in the case study titled “The Case of the Colorblind Painter” from the book “An Anthropologist on Mars” by Oliver Sacks, has monochromatic color blindness, which is where an individual sees only black and white. This type of color blindness is the rarest of all variations. Whats even rarer about this case in particular is the way that the color blindness was induced. Typically colorblindness is passed down genetically and people are born with it, but in this case it was caused by trauma. This is called cerebral achromatopsia and the colorblindness that is caused is also different from typical colorblindness because instead of affecting the cells in the eye, it affects how the brain processes color (Neuropsychologia). Knowing this, it makes the case of the colorblind painter even more interesting due to the rareness of the case and how it not only is a unique case of colorblindness, because it is caused by trauma, but also because the variation of colorblindness is the rarest of all of the different possible types.
Written by Michael Amadio
