Nobody notices it because the brain re-calibrates itself

May 9, 2013 11:44 GMT  ·  By

A team of University of Liverpool researchers writing in the May 8 issue of the scientific journal PLOS ONE detail how, as a person ages, they go colorblind.

The only reason why almost nobody ever notices this is because of the brain's ability to re-calibrate itself and compensate for the eyes' diminished ability to properly record information having to do with hues.

EurekAlert says that the specialists have reached these conclusions following their analyzing the eyesight of 185 volunteers aged between 18 and 75.

The people who took part in this study all had both their optical media and their neural mechanisms analyzed by the researchers.

Thus, it was discovered that the older the individual, the worse the cone receptor located in their eyes performed when it came to processing hues.

Interestingly enough, older volunteers also displayed increased activity rates in the higher levels of their visual systems (i.e. their neural mechanism).

Study author Dr. Sophie Wuerger commented on the findings of these experiments as follows:

“We found that colour vision remains fairly constant across the life span, despite the known age-related yellowing of the lens.”

“This suggests that the visual brain re-calibrates itself as we get older,” said specialist went on to argue.

Although it is very much true that their going colorblind goes unnoticed by the majority of people, Dr. Sophie Wuerger and her fellow researchers explain that certain changes in eyesight nonetheless occur.

Thus, their experiments have shown that younger and older people do experience certain small differences as far as their ability to record the shades of various colors is concerned.

More precisely, shades of green more often than not appear a tad yellowish to those past a certain age, whereas younger people have no difficulties seeing them as green.

The same phenomenon happens in the case of other colors on the yellow-blue axis.