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Imagine how OP their colour perception would be if they did have that mental processing power
Oh that explains this scene
Technically, all the colors are fake. They’re just the halucinations of a brain trying to understand the input from sensory organs.
No, colors are real. And you see them.
Pink isn’t real. There is no wavelength of light that is pink.
That doesn’t make them fake, in the same way that x can mean 2. You are merely representing a given value (in this case light within a certain electromagnetic spectrum) in a useful way.
I hadn’t thought about it that way.
But is my red the same as your red? Hmmm?
if two people can both point to red and agree that it’s red, that’s close enough. anything beyond that is just pointless esoteric debate.
I disagree that it’s pointless. I think it may be beneficial to humanity (eventually) to establish whether or not there is an objective reality which we all experience.
i agree, but that’s a job for neuroscience, quantum mechanics, and psychology; not a pack of dorks on the fediverse.
But I want to contribute to humanity in a meaningful way!
-me, a dork on the Fediverse nearly incapable of contributing to humanity in a meaninful way
buy guns
It was a joke?
hahaha?
I hate that it invalidates this episode of radiolab, which is, without a doubt, a masterpiece of podcasting:
https://youtu.be/jibvu9BHV_k?t=795
i saved the video at the 13 minute mark where they do the audio representation of the vivid colors. still worth a watch/listen
But compared with human eyesight, they could still see more ‘colors’ - As we see (almost) the same white in incandescent bulbs as LEDs and fluorescents, they might actually see the component colors and their intensities.
Not unlike how we may hear a combination tone when multiple other tones are played, and hear the difference (or sum) of them.
How would you suggest they do that. White light near equally activates our 3 cones because all spectrums of light are in it.
White light near equally activates all 12 shrimp cones because all spectrums of light are in it.
Which spectrum of color is left out of white light that wouldn’t light up a cone associated with it?
6500k vs 5000k is noticeable for humans
I need to use wherewithal more in my daily life
Every lunar month, when there is a full moon, i try quitting caffeine
werewithdrawal
(I initially misread you comment)
I wish I had the wherewithal to use it more often.
My whole world is crumbling
How did they test if they could see color? Did they make little shrimp dioramas or something?
They asked them politely
The easiest way is to use the principles of conditioning. Pair a stimulus with a certain color light, then start flashing up different colored lights. If the organism is cued to the stimulus by multiple colors of lights, it means that they can’t really distinguish between them.
That’s how we tested when kids lose the ability to distinguish certain phonemes.
it makes me happy when people understand science.
They give them a miniature color blind print that has those numbers in them that are hidden if you are color blind.
The shrimp are holier than we are because they cannot see the devil’s color (it’s pink 🩷)
You mean light red?
That is clearly embarrassed white
Disappointed. But didn’t the have receptors for differently polarized light? What about that?
Polarization filters on retinal photoreceptor won’t make light wavelength (color) be perceived different, it just changes the conditions in which it’s detected. If those polarized cells would cover unique colors compared to the rest, it would kinda resemble the highlight effect in Mirror’s Edge, where something with a different angle than the surroundings stand out (sudden color gradient)
Color me appointed, at least we’re not missing out on fresh new colors!
Reminds me a little of CD digital audio. The original Red Book audio standard hasn’t really been improved upon because it’s uncompressed audio which covers basically all of the range of human hearing within the capabilities of any speaker we could build. It’s uncompressed because in the early 80’s when the tech hit the market, it was completely unfeasible to include the CPU and RAM needed to decompress audio in real time.
Shrimp has more color receptors because he doesn’t have enough neurons to run trichromacy, so he sees in EGA.
Shrimp has more color receptors because he doesn’t have enough neurons to run trichromacy, so he sees in EGA.
love this. nice job :)
I remember experiencing the EGA to VGA graphics evolution when I was growing up. I remember thinking the VGA almost seemed too real.
In my mind, this was a game that felt like it was pretend:
But this felt entirely too real:
Have you played The Crimson Diamond? EGA is back, baby!
If you love the old murder mystery games like the Laura Bow Mystery Series, you will enjoy this game
Oh man, I had completely forgotten about the old Laura Bow games! Might have to check this out!
Oh man.
12 year old me waiting for hours to rip mp3s from cds always wondered about this.
Like why isn’t it already compressed?
The answer is that storage was available but processing wasn’t. Amaze.
Mp3 is already compressed, as is the MP2 CDs use.
If it wasn’t conpressed, you’d be looking at CDs per track, instead of tracks per CD.
What are you on about? CD-DA, aka audio CD, aka red book audio, is uncompressed 16-bit PCM sampled at 44100Hz. It is lossless.
MP3 (MPEG-1/2 Audio Layer III) is a lossy encoding standard commonly used for online audio distribution and steaming. MP2 usually refers to MPEG-1 Audio Layer 2, which was most commonly used in Digital Audio Broadcast.
Neither are used in ‘regular’ CD audio.
It is lossless.
I’m not sure that’s the right word for uncompressed digital audio, because it’s lossless compared to what? Presumably an analog recording or the original input signal? Because Shannon-Nyquist, with CD audio you can’t get anything higher than what? 16kHz out of it, but within that limitation you can reproduce any arbitrary waveform within a speaker’s ability to produce given the laws of physics regarding inductance and inertia.
MP3 does use a lossy compression, but you can maintain listenable quality while cramming about 10 times as much audio into a given space. You can get just over an hour of Red Book audio on a CD, and about 11 hours of mp3s, give or take. You might get lower audio bandwidth or various kinds of artifacts but it’ll still sound pretty good, it’s way more practical to store and transmit over the internet. We didn’t Napster no .wav files.
FLAC and similar formats use lossless compression, kind of like a .zip file. If you rip a CD to FLAC, and you were to then burn a CD from that FLAC, the data on the new CD would be identical to the old one. So you get as-perfect-as-we-can-do digital audio, but only 5 or 6 hours worth would fit on a CD. Someone somewhere on this earth has filled a compact disc with FLAC files, I’m sure.
I’d like to subscribe to the format facts newsletter. Can you do VHS next?
Each frame of video on VHS actually occupies a diagonal section of the tape. That allows the width of the tape to be effectively longer which means it can store more information. It’s also why the image will jitter a bit when the tape is paused since there’s multiple frames of data under the read head at any given time.
Is moral of your story that adults having frequency detection limited to 16khz, with older adults lower, might still be able to detect music well enough?
The way mantis shrimp see is nonetheless super cool and interesting. They likely have no conception of 2D color at all, and can only sense the 12 different colors in general. Furthermore, only the midband of their eyes see color, when the eyes are moving and scanning for prey, they don’t see color at all, which probably helps offload mental load for their small brains. Once they do see something, they then stop moving their eyes to determine the color of what they’re looking at.
Also, mantis shrimp have 6 more photoreceptors in addition to the 12 colored ones, to detect polarized light. They likely see them the same way that they see color, so they probably don’t consider them anything different than wavelength which is what we interpret as color.
Ed Yong’s An Immense World has a section on this and I’d highly recommend it. The ways animals sense and perceive the world are often so different for ours and it’s so fascinating.
For anyone wondering why they would need to see polarized light: I actually looked into this a few months ago!
Other animals that are trying to blend in with the environment often use countershading appear less conspicuous. The problem with this is that this method can’t replicate the polarization of the light behind them, making them stand out if you can see that sort of thing. ((Sunlight in the ocean is always polarized based on the direction of the sun (look up fresnel equations for s and p polarized light))). Even transparent creatures will interrupt the polarization in some way, so this is a very useful skill to have.
More specifically, polarization changes with the angle of reflection of the surface towards the detector / eye / camera, so every bump in the surface gets a color gradient different from the surroundings when seen by a polarization sensitive eye
“Spiders can detect danger coming their way with an early-warning system called eyes.”
Really fantastic book. I did have some notes though. Firstly, if honeybees have such low dpi vision, how can they see each other dance? I assume it’s because they’re experiencing the dance some other way, but how? (Also it’s hella dark in there, isn’t it?)
He says many times that humanity’s umwelt is dominated by sight, but I very much disagree. To lose my hearing or sense of touch would make me feel quite blind, as I use them to perceive things outside my cone of vision constantly. Being in deep water is unnerving for this reason, because I can’t “see” what’s around me, and I have this whole new area below that I can’t hear either. So I have to wonder whether other people feel the way he does or whether my usage is more unique.
He really blew my mind when describing exafference and reafference because these things are reliant on a sense of self in the first place, which means that even the worm in his example must have some form of ego.
how can they see each other dance? I assume it’s because they’re experiencing the dance some other way, but how? (Also it’s hella dark in there, isn’t it?)
By touch. This 50s video shows it well.
Oh, I see. I thought they communicated much more complex information than that, but it’s very practical for simple directions with no further details.
You show that you are dominated by sight even as you say you aren’t.
Losing your hearing or touch would remove peripheral senses, yes, and certainly that would be unnerving, but think how much worse it would be to lose sight. Hearing wasn’t even a factor for you beyond your peripheral, because what you can see is so much clearer, so much more comprehensive, than what you can hear, that hearing is negligible where you have sight.
Hearing is a backup sense. Something you lean on when you don’t have sight, but its fidelity is poor enough in people that we rely nearly wholly on sight, when we can.
Losing that cone of vision impacts us far more than our hearing, although of course losing either is massively detrimental.
I can see only in a limited area at any given time, but I can hear in a full sphere around me simultaneously. I don’t think it’s accurate to characterize such a large area as “the periphery”. One sense is imprecise and covers pretty much everywhere while the other is detailed, but very limited. Both senses work in concert to build a full map of the world, and the loss of either is concerning. I’m more comfortable in a blindfold than isolating headphones though, because I can still echolocate while my vision is impaired, but my vision has no way of emulating hearing’s function. I’d have to be constantly looking around all over the place.
While sound is not nearly as dominant, it’s absolutely not just a backup sense. It’s the fastest perception we have (the best rhythm game players can play blind but not deaf), it covers all directions, and even in our sleep we still respond to loud sounds.
Sound perception is so fast that it’s often what directs you to look in the right direction, even if what you’re reacting to happened in your field of vision.
Funny enough, even our peripheral vision is faster than our central field of vision, to help us avoid predators coming from behind! Our forward directed vision is for tracking and understanding what’s in front of us, sound and peripheral vision is in large part for environmental awareness. They’re co-dependent!
Humans can even learn echolocation!
I have heard that the incidence of suicide is higher in deaf people then in blind people, which would suggest that, while our senses are sight dominated, losing our hearing has a bigger impact in some way. That said I can’t find a citation for that, so make of it what you will.
This is the best I could find on the specific topic: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7888369/
People with visual or hearing sensory impairments had twice the odds of past-year suicidal ideation (OR 2.06; 95% CI 1.17 to 2.73; p<0.001), and over three times the odds of reporting past-year suicide attempt (OR 3.12; 95% CI 1.57 to 6.20; p=0.001) compared with people without these impairments. Similar results were found for hearing and visual impairments separately and co-occurring.
Or maybe the blind people just miss more.
Hearing is a backup sense.
That might vary by person, but for me it’s not. If I had to pick between being able to see and being able to hear, it’d be hearing, hands down. Being able to see is amazing and I’d miss it, but hearing is just a whole other dimension.
Being able to know how someone is feeling, just by hearing their voice. Listening to music and hearing all the shapes, colors, and feelings that come with it. The colors aren’t always ones you can see, like blue or yellow. It’s hard to describe. I’ll close my eyes and just listen at a concert (not the whole time) and same with TV, a lot of times. I usually remember it better that way.
If I have to find something in a backpack, I’ll often do it by feel. I probably look like a raccoon washing its food, but it just works for me. You can tell things apart by feel and sound.
That’s neat.
It makes me wonder if your hearing is better than average or if your eyes are worse, making it not so clear-cut.
Do you need glasses, or have you ever had your hearing tested for whatever reason?
I think this speaks to a significant misunderstanding that most people hold of the way vision actually works.
Most people imagine that vision is a relatively simple process by which our eyes detect and transmit to us the nature of the world. Not so.
Eyes are complex and interesting organs in their own right but fundamentally what they do is relatively simple. They are able to detect and report to the brain certain qualities of the light that hits them. Primarily these are: intensity, direction, and proximity to three points on the frequency spectrum (what we perceive as red, green, and blue). But this data alone is not vision. Vision is a conscious experience our brains create by interpreting and processing this data into the visual field before us—basically, a full scale 3D model of the world in front of us, including the blended information on reflection and emission that color entails.
Quite amazing! Most of this takes place in the human brain, and not the eyes. From this perspective, it is not terribly surprising that an organism with more complex eyes but a much simpler brain might have worse vision than we do.
Ha! I read the following Science new article just today about how Purple Only Exists In Our Brains. It’s written for a younger audience (I think), but it lays out how our sight works, and how our brains trick us into seeing purple (a red-blue colour, as opposed to violet).
Poor shrimpos, no purple for them, I bet.
It’s amazing and crazy to think, too, that the “theater” our brains create is an equilibrium point of laziness (to save energy) and usefulness (to help survival). So, surely, there are things we are just unable to see. But also, probably, there are different things that get mapped to the same things in the “theater.” I’m just speculating though but it makes sense.
We don’t really detect direction of light exactly. Instead we detect the location in the eye where the light landed, and have lenses to focus the light onto our retina. That relationship does imply some of the directionality of the light, by ignoring light that goes in certain directions and relating the direction of light that does get detected to the location it ends up.
By the same logic, we don’t detect light, just the change in shape of certain proteins. The sky isn’t blue, it’s a subset of sunlight. We don’t really touch things, we transmit forces with tiny magnets. Computers don’t really do math, they just arrange states in certain ways.
The world
is beautifulmakes my brain release endorphins
*we detect the direction of light by the location in the eye…ect.
There fixed it for you.
ect.
etc. It stands for the Latin words et cetera.
You haven’t been saying ectcetera have you? Oh no.
Correctors better come correct.
Yeah I was trying to avoid those details. I think it’s fair to summarize that as a system that detects the direction light is coming from.
Horrible news
Ruined my day tbh
Isn’t it amazing how birds reverse engineered airplanes?
Did a shit job of it too, got the wings all flapping around like a bunch of idiots.
I want to see a bird swing around its break as a propeller.
That’s silly thinking. Everyone knows birds aren’t real, so they’re just late-stage planes created by engineers forced to follow certain constraints.
Shrimply*
