Babies - Color Blindness

"All babies are color-blind when they are born."

Color blindness, a color vision deficiency, is the inability to perceive differences between some of the colors that others can distinguish. It is most often of genetic nature, but may also occur because of eye,nerve, or brain damage, or due to exposure to certain chemicals. The English chemist John Dalton published the first scientific paper on the subject in 1798, "Extraordinary facts relating to the vision of colours",[1] after the realization of his own color blindness; because of Dalton's work, the condition is sometimes called daltonism, although this term is now used for a type of color blindness calleddeuteranopia.

The normal human retina contains two kinds of light cells: the rod cells (active in low light) and the cone cells (active in normal daylight). Normally, there are three kinds of cones, each containing a different pigment. The cones are activated when the pigments absorb light. The absorption spectra of the cones differ; one is maximally sensitive to short wavelengths, one to medium wavelengths, and the third to long wavelengths (their peak sensitivities are in the blue, yellowish-green, and yellow regions of the spectrum, respectively). The absorption spectra of all three systems cover much of the visible spectrum, so it is not entirely accurate to refer to them as "blue", "green" and "red" receptors, especially because the "red" receptor actually has its peak sensitivity in the yellow.