Male Color Blindness Speech

ATTENTION GETTER:

A 15 yr old boy was in biology class when his teacher was talking about people with colorblindness. The class laughed as they all called out the numbers they saw from a sheet that the teacher was holding up. The young boy was doing the same thing until all of a sudden he didn't see one of the numbers and raised his hand. He told everyone that he couldn't see the number as he sat in amazement. The young boy had no idea he was colorblind until that day.

REASONS FOR LISTENING:

A.) Color blindness might not seem like that big of a deal however, to those who are color blind it is. It is mostly men who inherit color blindness, affecting about 1 in 20 men for every 1 in 200 women.

B.) I'm intrigued by the subject because that young boy was me and that's how I found out that I was color blind

SPECIFIC PURPOSE: So in my presentation I hoped to give ya'll a better understanding color blindness itself and give ya'll a taste of how exactly it is that we see the world

FORECAST:

I will do this by:

1. Explaining what it means to be colorblind and

2. Give you an example of how we see everything

BODY:

Point #1:

The human eye sees by light stimulating the retina. The retina is made up of what are called Rods and Cones. The rods, located in the retina, give us our night vision, but can not distinguish color. Cones, located in the center of the retina, are not much good at night but do let us perceive color during daylight conditions.

The cones each contain a light sensitive pigment which is sensitive over a range of wavelengths. Genes contain the coding instructions for these pigments, and if the coding instructions are wrong, then the wrong pigments will be produced, and the cones will be sensitive to different wavelengths of light (resulting in a color deficiency). The colors that we see are completely dependent on the sensitivity ranges of those pigments.

Many people think anyone labeled as "colorblind" only sees black and white - like watching a black and white movie or television. This is a big misconception and not true. It is extremely rare to be totally color blind. There are many different types and degrees of colorblindness - more correctly called color deficiencies.

People with normal cones and light sensitive pigment are able to see all the different colors and subtle mixtures of them by using cones sensitive to one of three