Tetrachromic vision

Someone sent this to me ... thought I'd pass it along. From 2012.

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul...r-human-vision


--
"If war is God's way of teaching Americans geography, then
recession is His way of teaching everyone a little economics."
..Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing.

On Jun 16, 2017, Alan Browne wrote
(in ):


Someone sent this to me ... thought I'd pass it along. From 2012.

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul...r-human-vision

So I guess the bottom line is, there isn’t much point in taking
tetrachromacity into account when it comes to photographic color work since
it doesn’t effect men, and the handful of tetrachromatic women wouldn’t
be able to describe their color perception.

--

Regards,
Savageduck

On Fri, 16 Jun 2017 15:32:21 -0700, Savageduck
wrote:

On Jun 16, 2017, Alan Browne wrote
(in ):


Someone sent this to me ... thought I'd pass it along. From 2012.

http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul...r-human-vision

So I guess the bottom line is, there isn’t much point in taking
tetrachromacity into account when it comes to photographic color work since
it doesn’t effect men, and the handful of tetrachromatic women wouldn’t
be able to describe their color perception.

Of course they would. It's just that we trichromatic men wouldn't be
able to understand it.

A quesion which has always intrigued me is what evolutionary advantage
is there to having tetrachromatic women? Selecting foods perhaps?
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

"Eric Stevens" wrote

| A quesion which has always intrigued me is what evolutionary advantage
| is there to having tetrachromatic women? Selecting foods perhaps?

I saw an article about this many years ago.
It's one of those scientific "breakthroughs" that
cycles in the news. In the original article I saw it
talked about being able to perceive such things as
subsurface currents from looking at a river, because
of the extreme sensitivity in the red-orange range.
Very interesting stuff.

I saw an article recently about something
related. I can't seem to find it now, but I
think it was about giving new cones to mice,
which then recognized color differences they
hadn't seen before. The implication was that
at some point we might be able to switch the
color recognition of some cones in order to
give ourselves numerous cone types, and that
it's likely we could integrate that perception
usefully.

In article , Mayayana
wrote:

I saw an article recently about something
related. I can't seem to find it now,

so much for your fantastic filing system.

"nospam" wrote

| I saw an article recently about something
| related. I can't seem to find it now,
|
| so much for your fantastic filing system.

I didn't download the article. I just read a
blurb about it on Slashdot. I meant that a
Web search didn't turn it up.

On 2017-06-17 02:18:00 +0000, "Mayayana" said:

"nospam" wrote

| I saw an article recently about something
| related. I can't seem to find it now,
|
| so much for your fantastic filing system.

I didn't download the article. I just read a
blurb about it on Slashdot. I meant that a
Web search didn't turn it up.

Google is your friend.
There is plenty out there on the subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
https://theneurosphere.com/2015/12/17/the-mystery-of-tetrachromacy-if-12-of-women-have-four-cone-types-in-their-eyes-why-do-so-few-of-them-actually-see-more-colours/
or
http://tinyurl.com/zvbsmsp
http://www.iflscience.com/brain/tetrachromacy-allows-artist-see-100-million-colors/
http://www.popsci.com/article/science/woman-sees-100-times-more-colors-average-person#page-3
https://techxplore.com/news/2017-03-filters-tetrachromatic-vision-humans.html
--


Regards,

Savageduck

On Fri, 16 Jun 2017 19:46:59 -0700, Savageduck
wrote:

On 2017-06-17 02:18:00 +0000, "Mayayana" said:

"nospam" wrote

| I saw an article recently about something
| related. I can't seem to find it now,
|
| so much for your fantastic filing system.

I didn't download the article. I just read a
blurb about it on Slashdot. I meant that a
Web search didn't turn it up.

Google is your friend.
There is plenty out there on the subject:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
https://theneurosphere.com/2015/12/17/the-mystery-of-tetrachromacy-if-12-of-women-have-four-cone-types-in-their-eyes-why-do-so-few-of-them-actually-see-more-colours/
or

So the answer to my question is that while tetrachromacy is quite
common it just ocurs and doesn't give rise to any drastically obvious
evolutionary advantage. (That we know of).

http://tinyurl.com/zvbsmsp
http://www.iflscience.com/brain/tetrachromacy-allows-artist-see-100-million-colors/
http://www.popsci.com/article/science/woman-sees-100-times-more-colors-average-person#page-3
https://techxplore.com/news/2017-03-filters-tetrachromatic-vision-humans.html
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens

"Savageduck" wrote

| Google is your friend.
| There is plenty out there on the subject:

I've read about the subject. What I couldn't find again
was the mouse study. I did find what seems to be a
version of it he

https://slashdot.org/firehose.pl?op=view&id=114485

But it's 2007. Maybe that's another example of
"scientific breakthroughs" that cycle every few
years. But the article I remember reading recently
was talking about the possibility of gene transplants
to give humans as-yet unimagined color perception.

"RichA" wrote

| If we all had that, and the resolving
| power of an eagle's eyes, it would be great!

Maybe. Maybe not. Oliver Saks showed in his interesting
case histories that we have astonishing powers of
smell. One man was able to identify numerous people
in a room by smell at a distance. But he couldn't think.
When his intellectual abilities returned, his smell ability
disappeared. Smell seems to be too direct and primal
for us to be conscious of what we perceive and still "think
straight". Similar issues might apply to eyesight, given
that consiousness seems to be, in large part, a fabrication
built loosely on sense perceptions.

I saw a fascinating study at npr news this week.
Scientists studying people with severed brain halves
(typically for epilepsy treatment) were
researching side effects. In most cases people don't
notice a difference. But in most people only the left
brain is verbal. If a picture is flashed in front of the
left eye these people can point to it or draw it, but
verbally they report seeing nothing. But it gets more
interesting. The article is worth a read for how it
shows that we create our reality "back story" out
of whatever we've got in order to maintain a plausible
reality, with very little relationship to what we
normally think of as "objective" reality:

http://www.npr.org/sections/health-s...e-of-two-minds

The idea that better color perception would be better
is predicated on the false assumption that we're neutral,
subjective observers of an objective, stable reality. With
better eyes we could see "that" better. But that's misleading.
It's the same limiting subject/object assumption that
underlies science. It's also why science loses its footing
in anything but technical areas of exploration, and why
scientific types sound so ridiculous when they refute
things like religion. (The recent fad of "new atheism", with
it's seething partisans, is a good example.)
There is no such confirmable, objective reality. The
article above provides an interesting discussion of that.

A very simple example of how more powerful senses might
not be particularly useful:
Being able to discern every detail of our own capillaries
would be too much information to use, while looking at
a blurry photo that reminds us of an old girlfriend might
be powerfully evocative. The technical accuracy or
richness of that photo is irrelevant. It's the mental
association that makes it so moving. We like to think
we're rational beings moving through a physical world,
but actually we're psychic beings moving through
a noumenal world. Sense impressions are more the
anchors or seeds than the actuality. Our sense experience
is very limited and always imbued with meaning by associations,
preoccupations, etc. We go to the beach one day and find it
beautiful. The next day the same beach, in the same
weather, seems ominous. Why? Maybe indigestion is making
us feel the world is threatening and unstable. Maybe we got
bad news. But we discount such factors and would think
that anyone who says those are two different beaches must
be batty. Yet we did experience two different beaches. Trying
to prove they're made of the same sand grains is beside the
point. We're putting our conceptualized version of the story
of our experience ahead of our actual experience.

With minds like that, who needs senses?