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In Theory... (Science)
Revolutionary
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I just read that our eyes can only recognize colours about 400-700nm in wavelength. If I rolled around in toxic waste and got genetically enhance to see, say, 200-900nm in wavelength, would I see all sorts of freaky colours others would be oblivious to?
I have too much spare time.
(I hope this is the right forum for this.)
I have too much spare time.
(I hope this is the right forum for this.)
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Whilst the cone cells in our eyes are responsible for the wavelengths of colour we can absorb through our retina, your brain also probably couldn't decode information outside that wavelength properly either, so even if your cones could pick up higher or lower wavelengths it'd probably just interpret them within it's working colour gamut.
Alternatively, it might break your brain and you start interpreting those colours as smells or tastes or sounds or numbers or emotions like those people that do that. The brain does have a habit of improvising when it is presented with too much or too little data.
Thanks for the help. I'll try burn my spare time elsewhere :P.
Also, if you've got time to kill, there is far more information than I cared to read on wikipedia about how our brain actually decodes the data from our retinas. Might help you focus where exactely to inject the toxic waste.
edit: and to be more precise, your eyes and brain can only sense light of wavelengths 400-700nm or so, which are parsed as the various colours. Colours really only exist in your head.
Apparently it looks like a sort of bright blue-white or something, which makes sense as that is the colour next door...
P.S. All the pigments in the eye respond to the same range of wavelengths; you see different colours because the different pigments respond with differing intensity to various wavelengths (if it didn't work this way, colour-blindness would be far more devastating as you would simply not see a given set of wavelengths, instead of simply not being able to differentiate them completely). The blue-whiteness of UV light is because the pigments all respond pretty equally to UV, but the "blue" pigment is just a touch more active.
P.P.S. The brain is far more adaptive than most people think it is. An extra colour channel is nothing compared to the integration of a completely new artificial sense as occurred in the case of that bonkers Cambridge professor that walked around with permanent web access wired up to his glasses - his brain grew another sensory region by rearranging part of his visual cortex to deal with the new info. And that was without surgery of any kind.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
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The human brain is very adaptable, but my understanding is that adapting to deal with new sensory input can only happen when we are very young. This is why babies with certain vision problems need to have them corrected immediately - if it's not, then they will never see, even if the problem is corrected. Mr_Rose, do you have a link to that story about the professor?
Also, just because this is a common misconception, the part of the IR band that we're talking about here is not the part that lets you see heat. That's a much lower-frequency wavelength, and you need different types of receptors and optics to image it. Your eyes are opaque to thermal IR, so seeing heat would mean having two other "eye" type organs, like the pits that give pit vipers their name.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/
Now, a new 'rod' receptor that is also sensitive to a wider range of frequencies might work ok. Things would look a bit peculiar though I imagine.
There's the problems with focusing and so on though.
Something with a lens is a must.
Eh? Does this happen in all cases of lens removal? Because I've had my lenses removed thanks to cataracts, and I'm not sure I notice anything like that. But then, I've been this way since I was three, so it's possible I'm just used to it.
As far as I know it's only occasionally reported though I don't know if that's genetic or because the people who have their lenses removed late in life accept the ability to see a bit extra as part of the process of getting used to missing parts or what.
Certain people believe that aphakic children shouldn't be exposed to "black light" for this reason though and some other media sources have reported UV sight as an after-effect of aphakia.
It is of course entirely possible that you have adapted due to long (and young) exposure, though I think it would be interesting to do some comparative colour studies with you. Do you wear corrective lenses of any sort? Because quite a few of those come with UV filters built in as well.
P.S. IANAD. Just a Biology student with a penchant for unrecognised/unreported human abilities.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
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Actually the test was to allow underwater divers the ability to sense underwater environments by sending electrical signals to their tongue, allowing them to taste the geography of the area around them.
Can we get a source on that? I'd love to read more about it.
I also know that the opposite is true; I read a report on a study of language ability in children and they discovered that the first language you learn alters what sounds you can distinguish; the example given was native Japanese speakers not being able to distinguish western "r"s and "l"s after the age of two, or something like that.
P.S. Something occurred to me about "spare" colour channels in humans, specifically relating to hallucinogens; I hear that frequent users of such substances report the ability to see "colours" that aren't represented in the normal spectrum whilst under the influence, suggesting there's plenty of perceptive "room" to add another primary colour....
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
Yeah, the first is due to not being exposed to the sounds produced by the other languages. If the child were exposed to English as a mild secondary, they would not have that problem simply because Japanese was their primary language.
And the hallucinogens deal... I mean, lots of people on certain drugs have their brains messed up in a variety of ways. Unless real research was done saying it was a valid perception, it could just as likely be the equivalent of a short circuit that simply manifests itself as a new color. Still interesting, just not so sure it would be evidence of more viable "color space" in the human brain.
Without any scientific evidence whatsoever to support my claim... I'd say that's the direct result of the hallucinogen, not the brain being able to distinguish more colors through the eyes. Hallucinogens are powerful and fucked up.
I don't even know how more colors could exist. A larger spectrum exists outside our visual range, but I think the colors we have pretty much covered.
B.net: Kusanku
As for the existence of other colours, I don't see why that is such a difficult concept. If a colour-blind person has difficulty with the distinction between red and green, does that mean they aren't separate colours to everyone else? If they only experience two primary colours and you experience three, why couldn't someone else experience four or more?
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
There are three categories of hallucinogen - psychedlics, dissociatives and deliriants. Psychedlics distort a signal leading the brain to interpret data erroneously. Dissociatives selectively block data leading the brain to invent data to fill in the gaps. Deliriants cause out and out hallucinaations, creating data which doesn't exist at all.
None of them discover real data that we just didn't notice before. They either badly misinterpret data or cause fictitious data to be invented.
It's like trying to solve a problem without all the facts. No matter how logical your solution if it's based on only partial data it's still going to be wrong.
I think you're misunderstanding the point. No one is saying that hallucinogens can cause people to sense real things that they otherwise wouldn't. What is being suggested is that in some cases they can cause the brain to act in ways that it only would otherwise if it were connected to different sensory organs. For example, years ago I read an account of someone who used hallucinogens and claimed that one of his hallucinations was a vision that included having a wider than normal area of vision (I believe the exact description was something along the lines of having a can opener run around the sides of his head and opening up extra space to see out of).
I can easily see how it would be possible for a drug to stimulate the brain in such a way that the person would see colours made up of other than the three primaries most humans see. That is making a big assumption though, which is that our brains are capable of doing that at all.
Because hallucinogens have a wide variety of powerful effects, it's also entirely possible that the "new colours" or "wider vision" weren't actually happening, but that the people in question were so affected that they misinterpreted normal stimuli. This would be have to happen at a very basic level - IE *not* in the part of their brain that actually "shows" them the image their eyes are sending, but in the conscious part that interprets that image. An example of the former would be how many people report a distorted sense of the size of their limbs. That is happening in the part of their brain that "shows" them the image, because they really do see a visual distortion. What I am talking about here would be with how it was interpreted. Sort of like the difference between hallucinating a dragon and simply interpreting the shape of patterns on the wall as a dragon even though visually it is unchanged.
A significant problem here is that because hallucinogens have such powerful effects, it's not really possible to treat the people using them as an accurate source of information about their experiences. The only straightforward way I can see to find out for sure is to give a human a tropical bird's eyes through wacky genetic engineering and see if they can distinguish the extra colours.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/
What I am saying is that even though hallucinogens can't make you capable of seeing infrared light being reflected off of an object in the real world, I can see how maybe they would stimulate someone's brain so that they would perceive as part of a visual hallucination which was not caused by seeing infrared light a colour that was made up of at least one primary colour other than red/green/blue, as if their eye had an infrared colour receptor as well as r/g/b and had transmitted that to their brain. But because hallucinogens change a lot more than just what a person is seeing, it's not really possible to say for sure that just because someone claims that they saw a new colour that they really did.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/
Apparently you need to start young to do it completely, but anyone can train their eyes to focus better underwater. I have and I doubt that I harbour any peculiar mutations of the eye.
*This is actually how the ability became known to science; some anthropologist was studying these people in the eighties or nineties and was perplexed by their hunting ability which seemed remarkable, so she asked them how they see underwater....
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
I am so sensitive to it that it very distracting. The effect is very noticeable on LCD displays.
Also, I have to disagree that motion trails are caused by the hallucinogen. Everybody experiences them as a result of the (slow) chemical reaction in the rods and cones of the retina. The difference with the hallucinogen is that the afterimage is incorporated in to the full conscious image, rather than disregarded as unimportant information.
Do you have a source for that claim? Hallucinogens can cause a variety of time-based visual distortions, of which motion trails are only one, so it seems unlikely to me that that one in particular has a completely different cause than the rest.
http://www.thelostworlds.net/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c49dS76KhGc
A little off topic but it's pretty amazing how he can learn to "see" without his eyes.
This will be here until I receive an apology or Weedlordvegeta get any consequences for being a bully
And most of our adaptability is entirely encompassed by our brains and nervous system...essentially, what other species have to build in, we can learn and copy as individuals, as necessary, even if one or two things require the construction of artefacts first.
Nintendo Network ID: AzraelRose
DropBox invite link - get 500MB extra free.
Cockroaches. And rats.
And yes, humans are quite smart. I think proper communication and writing play a bigger part than you might think though. Not having to relearn everything every generation.
I can give you a source, but to understand what I'm talking about, all you need to do is wave a bright light in front of your field of vision. It will make a trail. This is because the photoreceptors are bleached out and chemicals haven't returned to their normal, unstimulated state.
Maybe we are talking about two different things. I am talking about the normal motion trails that everyone sees. It sounds like you are talking about something much more dramatic, images lingering around much longer than they should.
Anway, here's the wikipedia on photoreception.