Tetrachromat

On my way home from work, I was listening to Incognito, a neuroscience book on tape (I know, I'm a huge nerd, whatevs).  I knew 90% of the stuff on it just from taking 5 billion psych classes, but there was one new fun fact.. apparently, in the last few years, they've discovered that some women have a mutation which gives them four color-detecting cones in the retina, rather than the usual three.  The results of this are huge; a normal person can see 1 million colors, but a tetrachromat would be able to see 100 million.  SO MANY COLORS.

You can read more about it here: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06256/721190-114.stm

Anyway, it's genetically related to colorblindness, because boys who are color blind inherit either two red or two green cones from their moms (color receptor genes are on the X chromosome), so moms with colorblind sons have a greater chance of having this mutation with an extra color cone, which lies somewhere in the orange range.  My brother is SUPER colorblind; he can't tell the difference between lime green and peach.  It's SO bizarre to me, but you know, he doesn't know any better, and he gets along just fine.  But now I have become thoroughly convinced that I can see way more colors than the average person.  I can't recount how many times I've been irritated because two different shades of tan don't match, or two different shades of black, and someone responds "but they're both BLACK." And sunsets, don't even get me started.  Every evening, I can't tear my eyes away from sunsets because they have SO MANY COLORS. Maybe this explains my love for rainbows. Maybe.  And color in general.. because there are soooo many of them, periwinkle and mauve and macaroni and cheese and apparently, as many as 999,999,999,997 others.

 p.s. I will marry the boy who gets me rainbow roses... random sidenote.