Some women can see up to 100 million colors. Are you one of them?

Move over, Superman. When it comes to real super vision, an undetermined number of women have it —and a British scientist is trying to track them down.

 

These women may see up to 100 million colors compared to the one million colors other people may perceive, according to an article on Discover Magazine.

 

"It’s possible these (people called) tetrachromats see a hundred million colors, 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," Discover Magazine said.

 

Newcastle University neuroscientist Gabriele Jordan and her colleagues, who have been searching for such tetrachromats for the last 20 years, may have found one - a doctor based in Northern England identified only as cDa29.

 

Jordan estimates these tetrachromats may make up as many as 12 percent of women, the magazine article said.

 

First hint of 'tetrachromats'

 

The first hint of tetrachromats came in a 1948 paper on color blindness by Dutch scientist HL de Vries, who was studying the eyes of color-blind men.

 

These color-blind men have two normal cones, but also possess a mutant cone that is less sensitive to either green or red, making it hard for them to distinguish the two colors.

 

When De Vries tested the daughters of one subject and observed that they were not color-blind, they needed more red in their test light than normal people to make the match precise.

 

He deduced the mothers and daughters of color-blind men had the mutant cone and three normal cones—a total of four separate cones in their eyes.

 

He suspected the extra cone could be why the women perceived color differently, not because they saw less than most people but because they saw more.

 

De Vries speculated that such women might be using the fourth cone to distinguish more colors than a trichromat, but he buried this insight on the last page of the paper and never wrote about four-coned women again.

 

In the 1980s, neuroscientist John Mollon of Cambridge University, then Jordan’s adviser there, was studying color vision in monkeys and became interested in De Vries’s note on tetrachromacy.

 

Mollon and Jordan realized that since color blindness is common, four-coned women must be as well.

 

Researchers sought out the mothers of color-blind sons and had them take matching tests similar to the one used by De Vries, but with a twist: if they were true tetrachromats, they would not be able to make a satisfactory match, because they would be able to sense color gradations beyond those available on the test.

 

Yet, Mollon and Jordan found that women with four cones could consistently make a match on the tests, leading Jordan to speculate the fourth cone was not active.

 

New testing method

 

In 2007, Jordan, now at Newcastle, returned to testing using a new method - having test subjects sit in a dark room, peering into a lab device, and seeing three colored circles flash before their eyes.

 

To a trichromat, the circles would look the same, but to a tetrachromat, one circle - a subtle mixture of red and green light randomly generated by a computer - would stand out.

 

Under this test, only a tetrachromat would be able to perceive the difference, due to the extra shades made visible by her fourth cone.

 

Of the 25 women who all had a fourth cone, one woman, cDa29, got every single question correct. — TJD, GMA News