The island where every tenth person sees only in black and white

This island is known as the "Color Blind Island" and researchers have been coming to it for years to understand what exactly happened there that made its inhabitants see the world without colors.

The answer goes back hundreds of years

Walla!

health

27/05/2022

Friday, 27 May 2022, 08:15 Updated: 08:54

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Color blindness is a fairly common visual impairment that results from difficulty distinguishing between different colors like red and green or blue and yellow.

Complete color blindness, on the other hand, is considered a rare and severe defect that manifests itself in the distinction of the degree of lightness or darkness of shades only on the gray scale.

This type of color blindness is called achromatopia, and a person suffering from these lashes will see shades of gray instead of the different colors.

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Such color blindness is very rare around the world, except for one island in the Pacific Ocean where 10 percent of the population can only see in black and white.

And the explanation for this strange and unusual phenomenon is deeply rooted in the past, and has managed to intrigue researchers and writers for many years.

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In 1775, a typhoon hit Pinglapp Island, leaving only 20 survivors, one of whom was king, most of them relatives.

Centuries later, this bottleneck in the population became the cause of complete color blindness in a significant portion of the population.

The explanation is that the king, who remained on the island with only 19 subjects, had a recessive gene that caused color blindness among future generations, as the inhabitants of the few islands continued to reproduce among themselves.

An article published in the American Journal of Human Genetics raised some speculations as to how this happened.

For example, one of Typhoon's survivors had seven children from three wives, and one of his descendants married his cousin.

The researchers estimate that the gene existed on the island even before the storm, but because there were so few survivors it was transferred more massively.

"With so few people on the island, a lot of hybridization took place, and the garden became common in the population," it read.

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The story of the islanders became known around the world, and quite a few researchers came to Pinglap to understand how such a thing happens, and how they adapt to a colorless life.

One of them was the neurologist Oliver Sachs, who published in 1998 the book "The Island of the Color Blind."

The book's description states that "Saks arrives at the coral island of Pinglap, where he finds an isolated community of color-blind people from birth.

May also experience sensitivity to light.

Close-up of a man in black and white (Photo: ShutterStock)

The gene that causes complete color blindness affects 1 in 30,000 people worldwide, but, as mentioned, up to 10 percent of the island's population suffers from the phenomenon - and about a third of the population carries the gene.

People who suffer from complete color blindness are unable to see any color, and see the world in black, white and gray, due to the complete lack of functional color-capturing cones.

In addition, people with full achromatopia may also experience sensitivity to light, reduced visual acuity, and involuntary eye movements.

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