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Mutant Tetrachromat Females Found
Hydrophobe writes "Red Herring reports that
at least one living human female has
four-color (tetrachromat) vision. Apparently, genetics dictates that all such tetrachromat mutants would be female. Compared to them, the rest of us are partly colorblind - they would be able to see colors beyond the standard three-axis RGB scale."
Woah! The colors the colors! Just think how much more satisfying the hallucinations would be!
Geordi from Star Trek TNG could do this ages ago.
If I wanted to make optimal use of a tetrachromat, I would have her color calibrate my monitor or proof printed stuff, or choose between photographic paper. That sort of thing. Looking at the real world and then looking at some poorer copies of it and deciding which was most accurate.
I wonder if these clever article writers have ever heard of LAB color- or Edwin Land's brilliant experiments synthesising full color from polarized white light and _red_ light? Color is a hell of a lot more mysterious than these people think.
As for the poor wretched colorblind websurfers- *ROFL* yeah, like there's any color-specific interface consistency on the web in the first place! Riiiiight.
So none of the guys' clothes will match in the eyes of women--great. If we don't get female assistance, every woman around will know what losers we are. We'll have to hire women to help us shop, so we can pretend we had girlfriends sometime in the recent past.
Just hack the color scanner used to match paint to do RGBY and attach to PC. Then scan your clothes and discreetly lable them with their RGBY values. OTOH, men will drive women crazy by having no problem with cheap RGB monitors vs the expensive RGBY model.
But, they seem to cover a whole span...there are no blanks where a "color" would hide... When you look at a rainbow, or the light through a prism, there aren't any blank spots.
Look at the slide shows. They show one slide with the spectrum as seen by a dichromat. There are no gaps in it, just yellow at one end and blue at the other (smoothly blending in-between).
A tetrachromat would see the extra primary color between yellow and red or between yellow and green. The other colors would be better defined. So what most of us see as an indistinct shade of greenish yellow, the tetrachromat would see as a distinct shade of [other]
It seems likely to me that tetrachromats would have poorer low-light vision than trichromats, or at least would require more light to see in color as opposed to black-and-white. Anybody understand the physiology well enough to clarify?
They probably have a lower threshold for seeing color (greater liklihood that the dim light is near the peak sensitivity of one group of cones). On the other hand, they probably have poorer resolution that trichromats since they either have more cones (and less room for rods), or the same number of cones, but less of each color.
> So none of the guys' clothes will match in the eyes of women--great.
And this would be different than the current situation *how*?
I've resorted to the "scream test" to get dressed. I come downstairs, and if my wife doesn't scream in horror, I'm ok for the day.
I've given up. We can't agree on which pants are grey and green, and which are blue and black. And she still won't admit that the plaid shirt matched the tasteful and subdued plaid suit . . .
The day I really worried was the time I came out of the shower and found clothes laid out on hte bed. I had to check with a female friend to make sure I hadn't been committing even worse crimes against fashion than usual . . .
hawk
Let me give you an example. There are lots of ads on the TV for cosmetic products to be used on eyelashes. Thick, curled lashes are said to be very important. Now, I've never looked at a girl and thought <austin powers>"nice eyelashes, baby, yeah"</austin powers>. But if females are willing to spend $ on products to improve their eyelashes, then it stands to reason that they must have an effect on males that (at least some) males are unable to perceive consciously.
or, find a willing test subject, who would volunteer to have artificial cone cells sensitive to say 800nm light, implanted in his retina, and connected to nerve fibers newly grown in his optic nerve, then figure out how to train his brain to perceive the signals.
Seems safer to me, than messing with my chromosomes. (presuming that the surgical and biotechnical techniques necessary for such a procedure means that techniques for undoing or repairing damage would also necessarily exist).
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
--
Goths don't have this problem.
-Mars
FYI
Mac OS X uses this extra 8-bits as an Alpha channel for transparency, just like any decent graphics program and video editing tool.
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
Is staying in an environment with ultraviolet light harmful? Like discos and trendy bars?
I know that UV radiation form the Sun and tanning machines is dangerous for the eyes and increases the risk of skin cancer. Are the doses or the range of the decorative UV lamps dangerous?
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
Somebody who could see in the near infrared would have capabilities similar to that of the Sony Nightvision cameras that were sold in Japan. If you set the night vision option on at daylight, the camera would be sensible to the infrared and the visible spectrum. One of the amusing results is that you could see through some clothes that happen to be quite transparent on the infrared.
When Sony found this, they rearranged the camera so that infrared detection is not available under normal light.
Or am I wrong?
I can't tell what are the Darwinian consequences of being able to see through the clothes of your potential mates.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
There is a website about "X-Ray" cameras.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
But, I think we all know that strict Darwinian evolution isn't in force as much in the modern world, anyway. If it's part nature and part nurture, someone having a personality that allows them to succeed in the modern industrial world would only be partly genetic, and thus only partly subject to Darwinian principles of evolution.
But then again - who knows what this _could_ lead to? I'm all for deliberate monkeying with our genetic code - once we understand it. (all hail the Human Genome Project!) There are any number of things we could do to improve our species once we have the knowledge to do so. I even came up with a list last week as I was pondering just such a subject:
And, if we ever figure these things out:
Why not? We've circumvented Darwinian evolution to a large extent, though, what with the holes in the ozone layer and pollution and all, we might well wind up with a lot more mutants, at least this way it would be controlled.
I once met a girl who had a condition known as "synaesthesia". It's the kind of condition geeks dream about and design computers to simulate (ie: the visualization plugins on xmms and winamp...)
STFU about slashdot bias.
You forgot this link.
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Why can't I moderate something "Wrong" or at least "Grossly Misinformed"?
Maybe the TTBs will turn out to be tetrachromats in addition to their other considerable gifts.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
The problem with being able to distinguish more frequency ranges than just R, G, B is that normal colour televisions are no longer adequate. Things wouldn't look quite the same on screen as in real life.
(Well, they don't anyway, but it would be worse)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Bees actually have UV photoreceptors in their eyes. That answers for a part of their ability to guide themselves by the sun. If I remember well, a bee eye has receptor for red, blue and ultra-violet.
Text. Good old black and white text.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
We've circumvented Darwinian evolution to a large extent, though, what with the holes in the ozone layer and pollution and all, we might well wind up with a lot more mutants, at least this way it would be controlled.
Everybody seems to have this perception of evolution as a force that can be gotten around. Evolution is really more of a principle, that because children tend to have traits similar to those of their parents, traits that enable more children, or children who have more children, or anything like that, will tend to become more common.
We haven't gotten rid of human evolution. We've simply changed the traits that get passed on or not. Evolution makes no claim about traits being "good" or "bad", there are simply those that become common and those that don't.
Mod down posts with a "Free Mac Mini/iPod" sig, they're spam!
So it would be precisely how it is now then? :) :)
I learned that if I want good clothes you ask a friend (make sure it is a friend) of the female gender to go shopping with you. Most females love to shop, especially if for someone else (I do not understand this phenomenon). The reason it has to be a friend, is if you bring your girlfriend they will buy clothes that they like you in, which would more than likely not be what you like (Another strange phenomenon). I did this and it worked, I met the girl who is going to be my wife next month
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
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Unselfish actions pay back better
Squant
boggles the mind.
:-)
At this point though, you're walking a fine line between science and philosophy. By the same token, how do I know that everyone else is not a zombie? In other words, I can (or think I can) excercise free will and consciousness and explore my thoughts. But perhaps all these people around me are automations that are physically identical to me but don't have that extra "stuff" that makes you a conscious being.
Hurts just thinking about it
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
Or require additional energy or brains.
The thing is, Darwin is finished with us. Or rather, we're finished with him. The relationship between genetic makeup and genetic success has been severely weakened by technology. Humankind's economic power is vastly greater than what it was only ten thousand years ago. Someone who has additional sensory hardware and needs to eat 2% more food might have been at a disadvantage when homo sapiens was first getting off the ground, and his genes would have been selected against. Nowdays, such considerations are irrelevant, so what used to be a bad tradeoff is now a good one.
Just because Darwin selected against something in the past, doesn't mean it's a bad idea. I expect a lot of human hacking to occur in the next thousand years.
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I'm not so sure about that. With the exception of very nasty genetic diseases, I think we have nearly severed the link between the manifestation of traits, and the spread of those traits. Nature does not have technology, political wars, welfare states, etc. A human's fate is more tied to his memetic buildup and environment/chance than his genetic buildup these days. For example, just about anyone who starves to death in the modern world, suffers not from a lack of ability to hunt and gather fod due to genetic weakness. They suffer from living under a bad political system, or from having a religeon that forbids birth control, or something like that.
Hmmm... are you suggesting that the deciding genes that may lead to a new level of natural selection, would be genes that have extremely abstract manifestations, such as a "gene for overthrowing tyranny?" Hmm...
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
When I learned about color, people saw on two color axes; there's red/green and blue/yellow. This is why some people are "red/green" colorblind; they don't distinguish properly between red and green.
That's *two* axes. RGB is not the way *vision* works, it's the way *DISPLAYS* work; it's additive light. Just like RGY is not the way *vision* works, it's the way *pigments* work.
I can't even begin to find a frame of reference for evaluating this claim, because it contradicts the rest of what we have about color models. We've known for a long time that RGB didn't model, correctly, the whole range of human color vision anyway.
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The resoltion isn't that great, but the price can't be beat.
So, Tetrachromatics have an increased chance of catching diseases in their children (improving offspring's chance of survival),
Maybe.
can match outfits better (improving attractiveness and desirability),
If the Males can't see the difference, though,
how does this improve desireability (unless it
becomes one of those unconsciously perceived
bits...)?
Tweet, tweet.
64-bit pixels would make sense for four-chromed, alpha-channeled graphics. Anything less than eight bits per channel makes shade variations coarse enough to be visibly noticed, so here's what I would venture:
struct {
int red : 12;
int NEW_COLOR : 12;
int green : 12;
int blue : 12;
int alpha : 16;
} pixel;
Which would probably not work well with today's generation of (32-bit) systems, but should kick ass with the next. And it gives us ordinary trichromats 36-bit RGB color resolution (very cool for GIMP and film work) *and* an ultra-fine alpha channel! Me likes!
iSKUNK!
If you go back about 5 years or so, the World Wide Web Consortium's logo consisted of three stacked green W's in what looks like the Optima font. They were green because Robert Cailliau, some guy at CERN, is synaesthetic as well -- he sees different colors for different letters, and all his W's are green. He's even got a full-color alphabet there.
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I had a teacher who saw colors "wrong". He wasn't colorblind, but the colors he saw were different from what everyone else saw. He had problems distinguishing odd colors that we would think are very different.
If her genetic sequence is directly derived from her parents then she isn't a mutant, even though she exhibits an attribute that neither of her parents had as individuals.
For someone to be a mutant, their genetic make up must be somehow altered from what we would expect it to be.
Probably
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Many animals have the ability to see Ultraviolet and Infrared light. Humans don't. Why is it that species before us like apes, monkeys, and orangatangs never got this super-sight ability?
Maybe it just isn't as useful as we think it is. After the millions of years of evolution we have undergone, we've got pretty groovy bodies and senses as it is. Perhaps Tetrachromatic vision was just an also-ran in the procession of senses that made it to the current draft.
It's possible that it would confuse, add little, and otherwise mess up our ability to see the world. Sure Infrared would kick ass for seeing though solid objects and at night, but there is also a possibility it would be too much of a good thing. Maybe hearing or smell was just more useful than these abilities. The brain cannot efficiently listen on all channels of reality. It has 3 or so channels for hearing and sight, 4 for taste and smell, and maybe 4 channels for touch. (a total of 21) Maybe another channel fed into the brain would overload it in many circumstances and therefore make a person less functional than, say, a trichromat who really used those senses well. Perhaps if we could shut off any new senses more selectively...
-Ben
I believe a search here on Slashdot for "cat eye" will let you see through the eye of a cat.
Maybe these greenish Slashdot separator bars should contain a tetrachromat-visible message in order to help Dr. Jordan in the search...
I don't think the classic Colour wheel can really be used as an indication that we are seeing the same thing, rather it just means that the colors we are percieving react the same way (if we each mix something we perceive and have tagged 'yellow' with something that have perceived and tagged 'blue' we get something that we perceive and have been taught to tag 'green').
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Not all LEDs give off pure light (all of one wavelength). Especially with cheaper LEDs with not-quite-so-pure stuff used in the construction, it's possible to have other wavelengths coming out.
"That's Tron. He fights for the Users."
In the Real World, a mutant is someone or something with a mutation, which is nothing more than accidental gene-tampering. People with XXY as their 23rd chromosome are mutants. People with six fingers on one hand("my name is Inigo Montoya...") are mutants.
Most mutations are "inferior" to the original species, in that they remove or surpress a capability. This woman is an exception; her mutation appears to give her a superhuman ability: a peculiar type of vision. In the comics, mutants are always the superior variety, with superhuman capabilities. While I don't imagine she is qualified to put on a silly costume and slam evil, she does have a special power.
--The basis of all love is respect
Any object is going to absorb/reflect a whole range of different wavelengths of light, not just a single one. To really be able to detect the true color (i.e. light reflective properties) of an object we'd have to have seperate wavelength sensors tuned to each possible wavelength of light! Instead normal people have three color sensors each with different response curves (peaks at red, green and blue) that let us differentiate a broad selection of sets of wavelengths of light...someone with additional sensors with different response curves is going to be able to differentiate (i.e. "see") more sets of wavelengths ("colors") than we do.
Just as someone who's red-green color blind can't see red or green, only "red-green", a trichomat is partially colorblind compared to a tetrachromat. Two objects that appear the same "yellow" color to us may in fact appear as colors "yel" and "low" to the tetrachromat - colors that are as meaningless to us as "red" and "green" are to the red-green colorblind person.
A man with XXY could be a tetrachromat. This is similar to calico cats--normally, only female cats can be calico, but the occasional rare XXY male can also be calico.
Most black lights don't give off *only* UV light. If you can see a glow from them, then they're giving off regular light as well. Or, alternatively, a light could be giving off only UV, but normal light could be produced from nearby objects (like your shirt).
Or at the very least the Mystery Men...
man.. this is the biggest load of shit I have read in a long time. Obviously not a single member of their research team is colour blind. I am colour blind (very much so, I wear pink shirts to work) and I find their claims about using the Internet to be utterly false and insulting. I think their testing conditions must have sucked (if they did any testing) or the sites they visit are a lot different to the ones I visit.
How we know is more important than what we know.
"Here it gets interesting. Suppose a woman inherits one X chromosome with two slightly different green photopigment genes. And let's say her other X chromosome has the normal complement of red and green photopigment genes. Because of a well-known biological phenomenon called X inactivation -- which causes some cells to rely on one X chromosome and others to rely on the other -- that woman's retinas would have four different types of photopigments: blue, red, green, and the slightly shifted green. (It would also be possible, through a different genetic sequence, to produce blue, green, red, and a shifted red.) X inactivation is only possible in women, so there has never been, and probably never will be, a male tetrachromat."
So you see, it doesn't matter which parent has the tetrachromacy, a "normal XY" male child will not have the opportunity for tetrachromatic vision, because he will only have one X chromosome.
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I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
The article didn't mention this, but does this mean she's losing resolution to gain color, or does the resoltion stay the same?
As a visualisation aid, imagine an LCD with 3 subpixels. Assuming that the pixels didn't shrink, if we went and added a 4th subpixel, we would have to sacrifice resolution when doing so.
You could make signs only a tetrachromat can read ... Hows that for paranoia and the age old conspiracy theme?
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
A better question might be "Can living beings perceive an infinite amount of colors?" Color is just a function of wavelength, and there is obviously an infinite number of discreet wavelengths within the visible color spectrum.
This is, or at least touches on, a common misconception. I'll try to explain.
There is vastly more color information in what we see than we percieve. Yes, monochromatic green light has only one frequence, and is percieved as green. But simultaneous blue and yellow light contain two different frequencies, and is percieved as the exact same green color. And it doesn't even contain any green light!
Almost any light we see is made up of a huge number of frequencies, which our eyes and brains, using 3 measuring points, somehow averages out to one single color that it presents to us as what we "see". But there is much more in the light than the small summary we see.
One application of this is cameras that "see" in different frequencies that are used for air surveilance. A camouflage that may look like it melts in perfectly to the human eye, may be made up of completely different frequencies, and be easily detectable this way.
I've often wondered about IR and UV vision since my days as a D&D'er 20 years ago... If you could see IR and/or UV, how would you perceive them? Would you see "heat trails", or would you simply see extra (undescribable to normal humans) colors?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
According to an article in Science News (sorry, the article itself isn't online, but here's the references for the article), about 70% of the genes that code for chemoreceptors in our olfactory bulbs are faulty (in the average person. For some people it's worse). For dogs, the number of genes is roughly the same as humans, but all of theirs work.
The question is, what would happen if you modified a human embryo to correct this? ( patch -d1 <good_genes.diff) Would you get a human with a dog's level of scent-awareness? Would some other sense suffer (less visual acutity/worse hearing/???) Remember that even in humans, the olfactory bulb is wired in pretty fundamentally (down in the reptile part of our brain.) Consider how smells can trigger memories. What then?
Also, most folks here have been talking about having infrared. Sorry, but you aren't going to be able to see thermal IR: your own body heat would jam it. At best, you could see "optical" IR like your remote control puts out. Unless you are trying to break into a security area that uses IR detectors, or you like watching your Palm talk to your Furby (get your minds out of the gutter, you trolls, and into the sewer with the rest of us) this would be of little use.
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How do you know that we both perceive colors the same way? Perhaps the way I perceive blue in my mind looks just like the red that you perceive in your mind.
I used to consider this a problem, but really, it is moot. If I can say "red" and you know what I mean, and if you can say "blue" and I know what you mean, then it's all hunky dorey. We all perceive some color approximately n nm wavelength as a given name for a hue, and that is all that matters.
Now, if we took my eyeball or optic nerve and transplated it in you, maybe something would register with different synaptic signals. You'd see a solarized (hue shifted or mangled) signal. You might not even be able to interpret my brightness signals. However, your brain would, if given some time, retrain itself to the new inputs.
[
Maybe by the time I have kids, I'll be able to engineer their gene code to include this ability and others like it...
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Actually, here's the link. The plug-in works great, once you get it installed...
We're bought and sold for corporate gold
This may or may not be normal. If the black light is a cheap one, it will produce visible light as well, which is the trivial case. It's also possible that a molecule in the page can absorb a photon of UV light, and then emit the energy as one visible photon and one infra-red (or lower energy) photon. Again, it is visible light that reaches your eye.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
If the mother was a tetrachromatic, then that person would not be a mutant.
Unless the child is a pentachromat. Picture this: mother is a tetra chromat, say, with one normal X chromosome and one with genes for two slightly different red cones. If the father is colorblind with two slightly different green cones, the daughter has a 50/50 chance of being a pentachromat. Find a (rare) colour-blind mother with two slightly different red chromosomes on each X chromosome, and you can (almost) guarantee all daughters would be pentachromatic. Now, if we can mutate one blue cone, we can go for hexachromatic kids.
- W. Blaine Dowler
http://www.bureau42.com
Sorry to say, I'm just not buying this. Ever taken a long-exposure color photograph by moonlight? Colors come out normal. Similarly, ever looked at moon rock? It's about as close to neutral grey as a rock can get.
... You're just trying to see like a woman. All of Mankind has been trying to think like one for centuries.
If we could think like them, things like "feel good movies" and potpoury (sp?) might one day make sense as well!
Ceci n'est pas une sig.
Yes, perhaps so. Since the tetrachromats can see an additional color between red and green (i.e. yellow?), they can distinguish finer variations of colors in the spectrum. The higher the bit-depth, the finer the differences between colors. What looks like a smooth 32-bit gradient to you might look pathcy to a tetrachromat.
I don't think the idea is that tetrachromats see "other colors." They have cells that are sensitive to a fourth frequency somewhere in what we know as the visible band of light, where most of us have cells sensitive to only three particular frequencies (which vary slightly among individuals, but are always supposed to be red, green, and blue). What this means is that when you look at two red shirts and think they're the same color, a tetrachromat might be able to see that they are in fact slightly different colors. It's kinda neat, but it doesn't give night-vision or anything like that. The real significance, like the article said, is that this could tell us something fundamental about the human brain and its malleability.
No, it was something to do with chemical pollution. You see, early photographic film released an extremely toxic by-product in its manufacture, so everything seemed to be colored in different shades of gray at the time, including human eyes. Later, they perfected the process by filtering out the color-destroying chemicals and colors came back to the world. If you look at paintings from before the invention of photographic film, you'll see that they had colors then.
Maybe, and maybe not. Having a fourth color receptor will not necessarily be an advantage, since three receptors are enough to recognize all the colors between infrared and ultraviolet, where most of the Sun's light emission falls. The main advantage is in distinguishing between slightly different levels of saturation, not hues, and only for nearly 100% saturated colors different from red, green, or blue. As most colors found in nature are less than 50% saturated, there's no big advantage in tetrachromacity.
If there really was a great advantage at a small cost, this mutation would probably have spread through the whole human race by now.
Why? We, trichromats, look at a CRT and see green as green, but the addition of green and red as yellow. Why should the addition of an extra primary color make any difference? Tetrachromats are still limited to the same basic model as us: seeing a continuous range of colors from a combination of a discrete number of primary colors.
The same problem occurs when we print colors. In a CRT we have one set of three primary colors: red, green, and blue; and in a printer we have to generate the same colors from a different set of primary colors: cyan, magenta, and yellow. This means that some colors in a CRT cannot be printed, and some colors in a printer cannot be shown in a CRT.
If you show the color space in a 2d plane, you'll see why: each set of primary colors describes a polygon, where distance from the center sets the saturation and angle from the vertical sets the hue. The tips of the primary colors are the most saturated colors, which can be reached only by a vector pointing in exactly that direction. The region near the center is where less saturated colors reside, that region can be reached by any combination of primary vectors. By adding more vectors to your polygon you are making it closer to a circle, and increasing its area. But the difference is near the tips of the vectors, the low-saturation region is covered by any combination of at least three primary vecotrs.
So, married and otherwise compromised guys looking for an adventure would keep an extra, non-matching, set of clothes hidden in a drawer at work?
Actually, we're all just mutant protozoa.
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Zardoz has spoken!
Oper on the Nightstar
Klinefelter's Syndrome is where a male is XXY instead of XY. Most such men are infertile, but according to NIH some can father children.
So, if a female tetrachromat passes the gene to a Klinefelter child, and that man fathers a son, could the son be a "normal" tetrachromat male?
Of course we are talking about multiplying several very small percentages together, so the odds are very low, but it's still interesting.
I think it's far more likely that someone will hack the genes to create a male tetrachromat. Imagine what it would be like if DaVinci, Van Gogh, or some other great artist had the capability. Then again, imagine what it would be like if they screwed up and caused his testes to produce the Ebola virus instead of sperm.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
Wonderful, as if we males don't already get enough grief from females about our lack of fashion sense....
"one treats others with courtesy not because they are gentlemen or gentlewomen, but because you are" --G. Henrichs
First off, receptors are not color specific. They respond to all visible radiation. They do have three different response peaks, which is why your monitor can fake you out using only three diffent kinds of flourescent dye. But there's nothing magical about "red", "green", and "blue", You can base a color space on any three non-complements. (Printers prefer Cyan, Yellow, and Magenta.) In fact, everybody's response curve set is slightly different, so the RGB frequencies on your monitor probably don't correspond to your actual receptors.
Come to think of it, I'm not even sure the "normal" response peaks correspond to anything like red, green, or blue. But I'm no expert. Is there a neurobiologist in the house?
It's also important to distinguish between ideal color spaces and implementations thereof. Your monitor generates red, green, and blue by flourescing specific dyes. These dyes are chosen for practical reasons, and the colors they generate aren't really "pure". A color space lives in an ideal, platonic place where there primary colors have a pure state that doesn't exist in nature. Anything in the real world is a mixture of multiple wavelengths.
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The main advantage is in distinguishing between slightly different levels of saturation, not hues,
Not entirely. I'd say the big advantage would be from compound coloured objects. Eg an orange shirt (that is actually woven from red and green fibres) will look orange to us and something completely different to a tetrachromat. It's not just RGB monitors that are geared to trichromats, but the physical pigments and fibres that we mix for everything else to make hues as well, and wherever you acheive a hue by mixing colours, you risk it looking different to a tetrachromat from a pigment or fibre that is genuinely that colour.
Cool - we could look like those guys in City of Lost Children :-)
:-)
:-)
I would love to play with those things. If you ever do go into production, you've made one sale here
Wow - and with a bit of work and study, you could probably learn to use these to colour-coordinate in tetrachromatic space, then you could be the only guy in the world who looks stylish to tetrachromats, who are all female...
(Hey - it's just a thought!
the physical pigments and fibres that we mix for everything else to make hues as well, and wherever you acheive a hue by mixing
colours, you risk it looking different to a tetrachromat
Why? We, trichromats, look at a CRT and see green as green, but the addition of green and red as yellow. Why should the addition of an extra primary color make any difference? Tetrachromats are still limited to the same basic model as us: seeing a continuous range of colors from a combination of a discrete number of primary colors.
A colour blind person also uses the same basic model, but more (or fewer) points of reference certainly makes a difference.
When we see yellow, obviously it means that there is a response from both the R and G cones (as both can see yellow). However, we can get the _same_ response from the right mix of red and green, thus an RGB monitor produces yellow. But a tetrachromat has a cone for yellow, and that cone is saying "there is nothing here" (it will pick up a little bit of red and a little bit of green at the extremes of its senstitivity, but nothing in its peak area), thus the tetrachromat can distinguish faked yellow created by mixed fibres or RGB, from true yellow as emitted, by say, an LED.
The point is that while we can all see yellow, some of the colours that our brain assumes are yellow actually contain no light in the wavelength of yellow, and the tetrachromat could distinguish the difference.
Or to put it another way, while we all use the same method as you say, many products of our 3-primary colour techniques won't withstand 4-primary scrutiney.
You shouldn't need to use a search engine. Just go to your favorite porn site (with sick fetishes) and you can see all the photographic proof you need that women can pee standing up. Of course, in these pictures they aren't usually aiming at a "proper" urine receptacle, but what the hell, to each his/her own.
Bite my yammer.
Now our X-Woman would look at these two experiments and say, "How can you say it's the same color? It's not!"
Did I get it right?
Now not only does my sweater not match, but it doesn't match my slightly translucent glowing aura.
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Let me give you the lowdown
Great, now every man -not just the colourblind- will have to listen to his wife nag that he dosnt know how to dress himself.
Of course illumination has an impact - but if there's a hue that is fairly strong, the strength of said hue will outweigh it, like a deep bass or high whistle can be heard over other sounds.
sulli
RTFJ.
If the 4 color vision is a good mutation, it will hopefully propogate into the general population eventually (well, half of it anyway :)
Is that supposed to be a pick-up line? I bet she could see right through it.
Steven
-- I have marked myself unwilling to moderate-- I don't have other accounts to artificially inflate the karma of
If they're so bloody good at visual perception...
why do they keep sh^tting on my car thinking it's a body of water?
Yet another egghead theory shot down by common sense.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
Enhanced night vision with ultraviolet perception would be very beneficial when it's dark and would greatly counteract a woman's inability to drive during the day...
it makes my brain hurt just trying to imagine what having 4 color vision would be like... kinda like trying to imagine 4 dimensional space... ooh... headache....
"I hope I don't make a mistake and manage to remain a virgin." - Britney Spears
At night, when we're seeing mainly with our rods
That's strange. At night I think mainly with my rod. Or at least that's what my girlfriend says.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
"And like that
Confused--what do you mean by "hue" as opposed to "color?" Do you mean that we perceptually segregate colors into hues?
In the brain, the three types of color receptors (call them R, G, and B) feed input to circuits in the lateral genticulate nucleus (LGN). In the LGN there are circuits which recombine the colors to form three new axes: and "intensity" axis (R+G+B), a "red-green" axis (R-G) and a "yellow-blue" axis (R+G-B) This is because the "red" and "green" photoreceptors actually overlap over most of their range, so to get useful information out of them, you need to take the difference. This also has the peculiar result that most beople can't imagine colors that are in between green and red, or betwen blue and yellow.
(actually, what I should say is that it is known that the monkey LGN works this way, and we have no reason to believe that the human LGN works differently.)
Since the top (violet) end of our visual range is less than twice the frequency (more than half the wavelength) of the bottom (red) end, we perceive less than one full visual "octave".
The reason that very high frequency light looks purplish (hence "ultraviolet" instead of "ultrablue") is because it starts to excite the red photoreceptors in addition to the blue ones. If it only excited the blue receptors, it would look blue. It happens that some very high frequency where the blue receptors are barely excited (remember the response of a photoreceptor, plotted against frequency, looks like a bell curve--receptors respond to a range of frequencies.) is twice a frequency that is near the bottom of the red range. There is a resonance phenomenon (ask a quantum chemist, I'm just a neurobiology student ;) that means that the red photopigment can be excited weakly by radiation at twice the frequency of its fundamental. So near-ultraviolet light is picked up by both red and blue receptors.
I have a positive modifier on Troll. When I mod someone Troll their karma should go UP!
So when I was a kid, somewhere I heard the idea -- maybe from my mother -- that you could tell whether or not someone could was lying by looking at their face coloring. A flush of a "yellowish" color was said to enter the forehead of a liar.
Hmmm.
I'd always thought it was a psychological ploy: if someone claimed they could tell when you were lying, then you may as well give up and tell the truth.
But if there are tetrachromats, or even other kinds of better vision, maybe they CAN see things like this....
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Thank you, that's a much better version than mine.
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So none of the guys' clothes will match in the eyes of women--great. If we don't get female assistance, every woman around will know what losers we are. We'll have to hire women to help us shop, so we can pretend we had girlfriends sometime in the recent past.
A lot of comments here reflect a somewhat, uh, uninformed view of color vision. I was going to write up a little summary, but then decided to try my Google skills out.
I came up with this definitive article on Color Vision by Peter Gouras. It's very deep, with a special focus on the neurology of color vision.
Another potentially interesting link is the Color Vision Q&A from Rochester Institute of Technology.
What's especially fascinating to me about color vision is that it still isn't fully understood. The low level parts, such as rods and cones, and even some of the "early vision" parts of the brain, have been studied for a while now. However, there are lots of higher level brain activities that are still quite mysterious. As such, making color photographs "match" across computer screen, print, video, etc., is still a subjective art, claims of rigor in "color management solutions" notwithstanding.
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
The trick is to use a pair of my patented spectral shifting eyeglasses. The extra colors are visible as discrepancies between the two eyes, a somewhat glittery effect.
I have a prototype pair here. I haven't done an experiment along the lines of Dr. Jordan's, but my intuition is that you'd be able to pass the tetrachromat test.
In theory, this technique can give you up to hexachromic vision. In practice, the color shifts in the yellow area are by far the most pronounced.
The prototypes cost me about $1000. The optical coating technology is pretty straightforward, and it should be possible to manufacture these in quantity for $20-$30. Anyone interested in going into production?
LILO boot: linux init=/usr/bin/emacs
> Evolution makes no claim about traits being "good" or "bad", there are simply those that become common and those that don't.
I'm not sure how you think that some traits will get passed on, though. It's not through magic. If the traits in one type of mutant wind up being passed on, great. It's only going to GET passed on if that creature reproduces, which it won't do, or won't do ANY MORE THAN THE NON-MUTATED ONES, unless there's that mutant is in some way 'superior' as far as getting their genes propogated. Otherwise, those genes would wind up staying in approximately the same projected percentage as they are currently. Unless the progeny of the mutant becomes statistically more-numerous than the non-mutants, it won't become commonplace.
Slightly-improved colour detection in this day and age will do little to nothing to make those people able to reproduce more than a non-mutant. _Maybe_ the ability to detect one's progeny being ill _slightly_ faster than another might help, but with modern medicine - I find it highly unlikely.
My private theory has always been that colours are analogous to musical tones. Under this theory, while there may be an infinite number of frequencies and hence an infinite number of distinct "colours", they actually sort themselves out into a limited number of hues analogous to the tones of the musical scale. The reason we are unaware of this phenomenon is that the human visual range extends approximately from 700nm to 400nm. Since the top (violet) end of our visual range is less than twice the frequency (more than half the wavelength) of the bottom (red) end, we perceive less than one full visual "octave".
Of course, the only way to test this theory, as far as I can tell, would be to engineer some lucky (or unlucky) child with the genes for extended-range pigments, let them grow up, and then ask them if 400nm light looks somehow the same or different than 800nm light.
"The deep-fried Mars bar is a symptom of a wider crisis." -- Nutritionist Ann Ralph, on the Scottish diet
Anybody can read by a blacklight, at least on most paper. Chances are the paper will flouresce slightly, basically turning invisible UV into visible light. Some paper will flouresce more than others-- depends on how it was made, depending on the brand, etc.
What you see coming from a blacklight (violet) is only a fraction of what's actually there because it's mostly in the invisible part of the spectrum.
Now maybe our corneas also filter out some violet light that we would otherwise be able to see, but I don't know anything about that.
Incidentally, in a dark room with a blacklight on, you can see every single spot on the carpet where your cat has ever barfed, pissed, crapped or where somebody spilled something-- no matter how clean the carpet looks in normal light!
It's quite a hideous sight, although pretty useful for determining where you're supposed to pour the cleaning fluid.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Neitz Color Vision Lab
"This message is composed of 100% recycled electrons."
but does this mean she's losing resolution to gain color, or does the resoltion stay the same?
:)
:-)
No, the resolution is really the department of the rods - that's where you get most of the image defintiion, the extra cones just means the colours are painted into that image with a cruder brush, which, if you've mess around with image channels, you'll find makes virtually no perceptual difference. (It's quite weird actually - we can't define by colour to save our lives
An example that is probably due to the same phenomina - put green text on a red background, and adjust the tone such that there is no tone-difference between the colours (ie your rods see a flat grey - no text at all) then try to read the text using just your cones. You can do it, but your eyes will totally bug out
"People will think things match, but I can see they don't."
Does this mean that all of my girlfriends have been tetrachromatic? I often hear this about my clothing...
sulli
RTFJ.
I don't think you see the value of having an alpha channel, or transparency channel.
As you point out, it does no good in the framebuffer.
But just think of all the many, many places ahead of the framebuffer where graphics are manipulated? If non-Mac software would universally support alpha channels in graphics formats then think of now naturally graphics would appear to work to end users?
You paste two pictures into your word processor. The two pictures partly overlap. The degree of transparency of each picture (indeed each pixel) is determined by data within the picture itself. Both pictures might be partially transparent so that you could still see the text underneath the two pictures. Bring one of the graphics into the GIMP, crank the alpha channel to fully opaque, now copy&paste the pic back to the word processor, and it obscures everything behind it.
By the time it gets to the framebuffer all you care about is RGB, no alpha.
Another cool thing about this is that you no longer tend to think of pictures as "rectangular". Pictures are arbitrary shaped. Of course, they're rectangular, but just some of the pixels are fully transparent.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Sorry, the article states that the extra photoreceptor cones are sensitive to a wavelength in between red and green, directly on the range of visible wavelengths. At the most extreme, they would be receptive to a yellow-orange colour, although most of them hover around slightly different shades of green or red. No UV vision for you. (PS - aren't most remotes IR nowadays? Less harmful if you aim it at your eye).
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
Tumbleweed writes: Unfortunately, it almost certainly won't spred into the general population unless it's done on purpose. Tetrachromat vision doesn't give any measurable survival advantage in the modern world, therefore it won't be in a majority of the 'surviving' population.
If you read the article, you could have avoided shooting yourself in the foot.
From the article: Would there be any practical advantages to tetrachromacy? Dr. Jordan notes that a mother could more easily spot when her children were pale or flushed, and therefore ill. Mrs. M reports that she has always been able to match even subtle colors from memory -- buying a bag, for example, to match shoes she hasn't laid eyes on for months. And computers, color monitors, and the Internet raise a whole raft of possibilities. Just as someone with normal three-color vision surfs rings around a dichromat on the Internet, a tetrachromat, looking at a special computer screen based on four primary colors rather than the standard three, could theoretically dump data into her head faster than the rest of us.
So, Tetrachromatics have an increased chance of catching diseases in their children (improving offspring's chance of survival), can match outfits better (improving attractiveness and desirability), and might be able to intake more data.
Not sure how this sounded to you, but I'd say that the genes for Tetrachromatics are beneficial (at least to the female half of our population).
Get cataract surgery, and you'll be able to see UV light. Apparently, it's been noticed that people who've had their corneas removed can read by a black light. I'm not sure what the practicle applications of this would be, but I suppose you could read War and Peace at a rave.
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there aren't any superheros flying around in the real world
That's what you think. Guess you're a trichomat, right?
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
By the same token, how do you know that we both perceive colors the same way? Perhaps the way I perceive blue in my mind looks just like the red that you perceive in your mind. We all kind of assume that we see the colors the same way. But, it could easily be the case that they we all see them differently.
Sure, things like the color wheel dictate a certain amount of consistency in each individuals perception. But the color wheel could be rotated to a different angle for each person. Or perhaps the world to me looks like an inverted negative to you. The fun part is that there is absolutely no way to tell.
Does this mean that the web safe palette drops from 22 to 2? Just black and white now...
-- toolie
If the human brain can adapt to 4-color sight, then I wonder how much longer before someone tries to engineer extra infra-red cones. Infrared-sensitive eyes have long been a part of the cyberpunk genre of fiction, but the idea of growing up with "natural" infrared vision in addition to normal color vision would be wonderful.
If we ever moved that way, though, would we have to come up with new color words -- words that most of the population couldn't understand?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
There might be colors (shades of blue and violet) that can be distinguished at twilight but not in bright sunlight because of the importance of rods to vision in the reduced light. I keep meaning to go check, but haven't.
A mutant is the term you would use because the scientific term for what this woman has is a genetic mutation.
It is actually such things as the X-Men that gives the term a misunderstood meaning. A mutation doenst have to be anything as drastic as in the movie "The Fly" for example, and certainly, there arent any superheros flying around in the real world. Im sure if you looked closely enough, most of us have some sort of genetic mutation in our DNA, but they just arent significant enough to manifest themselves in any noticeable way.
If the 4 color vision is a good mutation, it will hopefully propogate into the general population eventually (well, half of it anyway :)
The ivory tower has never had to reach so h
Rods see intensity (ie B&W). A couple more interesting facts: rods react to changes more quickly, and to smaller changes as well. Cones are concentrated around the centre of your eye, whereas there are relatively many more rods in your peripheral vision. This is why it is easier to see movement out of your peripheral vision, and easier to spot something that is a different colour by looking directly at it. Pretty cool if you ask me. Peripheral vision sensitive to movement to spot attacking predators, and central vision sensitive to colour differences to spot hiding prey...
It may look like I'm doing nothing, but I'm actively waiting for my problems to go away.
--Scott Adams
A better question might be "Can living beings perceive an infinite amount of colors?" Color is just a function of wavelength, and there is obviously an infinite number of discreet wavelengths within the visible color spectrum.
Scientists have come up with some finite number of colors that can be percieved by humans. (I can't remember the exact count off the top of my head - check any perception textbook.) However, a machine with high quality photon sensors can distinguish between a much higher number of wavelengths, even though it doesn't have the perception of color. If we wanted it to describe that color for us as a perceptual experience, it would simply map that wavelength to a human-defined color table.
It is fair to say that there are an infinite number of colors out there, just that we can't see them all.
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"How many six year olds does it take to design software?"
dinner: it's what's for beer
Forget an extra receptor, when I was growing up I could have sworn that my mom had a whole extra eye in the back of her head.
The slashdot headline is premature in stating that a tetrachromat had actually been found.
"Nevertheless, Dr. Jordan declines to say that she has finally found a tetrachromat, partly because her testing is still a work in progress."
HER: Honey, can you find my red shirt for me?
HIM: Yeah, here it is.
HER: No, dear, that's the magenta one. I wanted the red one.
HIM: Is this it?
HER: No, that's burgundy. Forget it. Just give me my cream sweater instead.
HIM: Cream? Is that white?
HER: It's almost white but has a little yellow in it.
HIM: Here it is!
HER: You moron! That's a khaki colored sweater. I wanted the cream one! MEN!
>they just have extra reception
Er, I don't thinks so. They have a different *distribution* of receptors - four kinds (instead of three) with relatively tight color-bands, and one type which responds to the full visible light spectrum. This is why you can see B/W in very low light - still enough to trigger enough of the broad-spectrum receptors, but not enough for the tight-spectrum color recievers. This is why animals with very good night vision usually can't see color - they punt the color entirely for extra broad-spectrum receptors.
The space for those extra receptors in a tetrachromat came from somewhere, presumably other color receptors. I would *guess* that means they need more light to see in color than we do, but see finer color gradients....??
Pigeons have tetrachromat vision as well. My question though, is do they see a fourth and different color?, OR are the colors we see spread out a larger spectrum for them?? I know the frequencies are higher (or lower), Im talking about what shade it looks like in their brain, the whole how do you know when I look at grass I dont see red and call it green? According to a theory, this is similar as the difference between the vision of a dichromat (a color-blind) and a normal trichromat, like most of us. It means that a tetrachromat can have a novel pair of colors similar to our yellow-blue and red-green pairs. I would really really like to have the sensory output from her eyes fed into my brain, dont you think they could hook that up? Does that mean that there are an infinite amount of colors, because a pentachromat (some animals have five color receptors) would see even more colors.
Roses are red,
violets are blue,
trichromats can't see
the other amazing hues
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