I thought red/green color blindness was associated with a defective gene for a photoreceptor protein, coded on the X chromosome. The defective gene produces an abnormal protein that responds to light in the "yellow" spectrum, causing the subject's retina to encode all red and yellow light as the same color.
Given that the gene does nothing to nerve function or distribution, perhaps the neurological effect is a result of neuroplasticity, resulting from the brain getting identical signals from different neural bundles in the eye? (Eg, eye does a LOT of signal encoding before it reaches the brain, so a loss of signal fidelity in the eye will result in a difference in higher level processing in the visual cortex, to make up for it. This could explain the retention of the after-image effects.)
Has there been a multidiscipline study conducted? As is, this data would seem in contradiction of the genetics implicated, and the existence of tetrachromatic females. If the difference was mostly neurological, and not the result of an ocular anomaly, then tetrachromats should not exist.
Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/JAd5kWwlb3Y/story01.htm
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