Some women may see millions more colors than the rest of us. WITCHES!

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Some women may see millions more colors than the rest of us. WITCHES!

The average human can perceive one million different colors, but researchers suspect that a small percentage of women may be capable of seeing one hundred times that amount. Who are these witchy women? No one really knows, but we’ll find them and steal their power.

Mutations in the genes that code for cones are responsible for color blindness in males. The fact that many of these genes reside on the X chromosome makes color blindness much more common among males than females, but it also gives rise to another possibility: a small percentage of women may actually posses four color cones.

Over at Discover Magazine, Veronique Greenwood tells the story of Newcastle University neuroscientist Gabriele Jordan, and her search for women in possession of this rare trait — one that could, in theory, allow them to experience the world in colors the rest of us can’t even imagine:

[These women] might experience a range of colors invisible to the rest. It’s possible these so-called tetrachromats see a hundred million colors [1004], with each familiar hue fracturing into a hundred more subtle shades for which there are no names, no paint swatches. And because perceiving color is a personal experience, they would have no way of knowing they see far beyond what we consider the limits of human vision.

As you might expect, the fact that the women Jordan is looking for have no way of knowing their perception of the world is, in effect, super-human has made finding them incredibly difficult. And it gets even more complicated:

Jay Neitz, a vision researcher at the University of Washington, thinks that potential tetrachromats may need practice to awaken their abilities. “Most of the things that we see as colored are manufactured by people who are trying to make colors that work for trichromats,” he says. “It could be that our whole world is tuned to the world of the trichromat.” He also suspects the natural world may not have enough variation in color for the brain to learn to use a fourth cone.

Via