8 ms·

Scientists have found a woman whose eyes have a new type of color receptor

48 points by wolfgke 10y ago

schoen 10y ago
I thought the discovery of individual tetrachromats had been reported several times in recent years. This article seems to suggest that women who were anatomically capable of tetrachromatic vision were found before, but that none of them were successfully confirmed to be tetrachromats in practice until this new study. Is this really the case?
- dekhn 10y ago
  yes. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/326976 http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/326976 http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191517 http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191517
  - schoen 10y ago
    Hmmm, that shows that this research finding was published in 2010, which might be the timeframe I was thinking of. I first thought from the link that this article was newly published.
    - dekhn 10y ago
      yeah, me too.
saganus 10y ago
It's very exciting for me to dream of a future where we manage to tap into the visual cortex and maybe then we'll be able to see as if we had 4 or maybe more cones. I really hope this result is verified and confirmed. It's very interesting to think what would it mean to see like this. Could we liken it to jumping from 8 bit color to 32 bit color for example?
- schoen 10y ago
  Nope, the trichromatic vision is the reason we use color spaces like RGB -- it means that combinations of three colors can produce nearly all of the subjective hues that we experience. The idea of "three primary colors" comes from trichromatic vision; there's nothing about physics that implies that there should only be three primary colors, and machines can be built to distinguish an unlimited range of hue combinations that are not regarded as built up from any finite number of primary colors, whereas human vision simply can't make these distinctions. Tetrachromatic vision means a four-dimensional color space which will have to use four, not three, primary colors in order to represent all subjective hues through combinations. So you would need to add another channel on top of RGB. The bit depth in a color space is effectively about how many different intensities of each primary color can be distinguished (although you can have a system that measures or distinguishes colors in terms of other features instead). So if you have a greater color depth, you can make more fine-grained distinctions about the intensive of the primary colors, but having a new primary color (that reaches otherwise-unrepresentable colors!) is something else entirely.
  - gm-conspiracy 10y ago
    What about CMYK for tetrachromatic?
    - thaumasiotes 10y ago
      CMYK is three colors. K is just black. You could analogously call the RGB color space RGBW, but it wouldn't mean you were suddenly working with four colors.
    - quirkot 10y ago
      It would still be RGB with an extra. Like RGB+X
    - scardine 10y ago
      I think the primary difference between CMYK and RGB is that CMYK is a subtractive color space, while RGB is cumulative (I don't know if these are the correct terms in English). The first is used for reflective surfaces, while the other is used for light sources. On reflexive surfaces, you make colors by subtracting wave lengths (the paint has pigments that absorb specific wavelengths). On light sources, like our computer screens, we make color by combining primary wavelengths.
Roboprog 10y ago
Did anybody happen to see anything in the article about what wavelength the extra cone type was actually (most) sensitive to??? The article hyped the "millions of colors" aspect, but nothing about whether it was deeper reds, higher blues, or just more precise yellows (or whatever).
- chriskanan 10y ago
  cDa29 is a cone that is a deuteranomaly, which is a kind of altered sensitivity to green light. So, presumably she has better discrimination of yellows/greens/reds, and not blues. See this 2010 paper for details on this person: http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBostenMollonOnTetrachromacy.pdf http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBo...
  - Roboprog 10y ago
    Ah, thanks. So further improved primate detection of ripe fruit, then.
vanattab 10y ago
I was just reading the Wikipedia article on Tetrachromacy and saw this interesting fact. "Humans cannot see ultraviolet light directly because the lens of the eye blocks most light in the wavelength range of 300–400 nm; shorter wavelengths are blocked by the cornea.[27] The photoreceptor cells of the retina are sensitive to near ultraviolet light and people lacking a lens (a condition known as aphakia) see near ultraviolet light (down to 300 nm) as whitish blue, or for some wavelengths, whitish violet, probably because all three types of cones are roughly equally sensitive to ultraviolet light, but blue cones a bit more." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
- hatsunearu 10y ago
  Hmm, I see those "blacklight" CFL ultraviolet lamps as violet-white. I see the sameish color on ultraviolet lasers. Am I the only one who sees it that way? Can anyone describe how they perceive those lamps? Communicating color is extremely difficult!
  - jhayward 10y ago
    > Communicating color is extremely difficult! Odd personal anecdote: In first grade art class the teacher held up a piece of art paper and said "This is red". Being the curious student I was, I raised my hand and asked "how do you know?" I was looking for something that would answer both "how do you know I perceive red the same way you do" and also "what defines it to be red". Something about wavelengths and color spectrum etc. would have been a great answer. I was sent to the principal's office as a troublemaker. Never did like art class after that.
ryao 10y ago
Why would only women be capable of tetrachromacy? I am a man, but if the test is made public, I would be interested in testing myself. I am not color blind according to color blindness tests, but there have been instances where I disagreed on the color something was with others and while I could consistently use the name that they used for it, I felt it really ought to have been named something else. One involves "green" status LEDs on electronics, which seem more in common with yellow than green to me. They look different from yellow, but they seem closer to yellow than green to me and for lack of a better word, I would rather call them yellow. If I could use a different name for the color, mapping it to green when interacting with others would seem less weird. Another involved the paint of a house when I was young, whose color seemed to poorly resemble what my parents said it was when it was dark. The house has since been repainted. Having three primary colors never made much sense to me either, but that could just be my own ignorance. Anyway, I am sure that there are many more variations in human vision than we realize. The dress incident brought that to light: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress_(viral_phenomenon) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress_(viral_phenomenon) It would be nice to have ways of categorizing them.
- rarec 10y ago
  http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-women-see-differently-science-health-vision-sex/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-w... Men and women seeing slightly differently is in line with our biology. Just how it is, really. Men are more prone to color blindness too. https://nei.nih.gov/health/color_blindness/facts_about https://nei.nih.gov/health/color_blindness/facts_about
  - ryao 10y ago
    That explains the LED thing. Thanks.
- ChuckMcM 10y ago
  Simplified version: X chromosome can express 1 or 2 color receptors, Y only expresses 1. Women (XX) can get up to 4, but the X occasionally only produces 1, since women have two X they mostly have 3, sometimes 4 and very very rarely only get 2 (both X only express only one) Men (XY) can get 3 but when the X chromosome only gives 1 they only have 2 and are color blind. Depending on which one they didn't get, that determines their color blindness. [1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/211193-perfect-yellow/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/211193-perfect-yellow/
vanderZwan 10y ago
There's also the story of Concetta Antico, who is also supposedly a tetrachromat and a painter.She claims to add hues to her paintings that she sees but we do not. Researchers are looking into her abilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concetta_Antico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concetta_Antico http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-seaberg/worlds-first-tetrachromat_b_5832242.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-seaberg/worlds-first-t... https://concettaantico.com/oil-paintings/ https://concettaantico.com/oil-paintings/ (watching her paintings through what is likely an LCD screen that isn't even wide gamut is a bit ironic, of course)
tvon 10y ago
Reminds me of this bit from BSG (a conversation between two "artificial" humans): Cavil: In all your travels, have you ever seen a star supernova? Ellen: No. Cavil: No. Well, I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the universe, other stars, other planets, and eventually other life, a supernova, creation itself. I was there. I wanted to see it, and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull. With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum, with ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. Ellen: The five of us designed you to be as human as possible. Cavil: I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to — I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more, I could experience so much more, but I’m trapped in this absurd body. And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way.
amai 10y ago
This is not news. This article is based on another article from 2012 (http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-super-human-vision http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-supe...).
- amai 10y ago
  And actually the whole story is based on a paper from 2010: http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBostenMollonOnTetrachromacy.pdf http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBo...
amai 10y ago
See also 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/ https://theneurosphere.com/2015/12/17/the-mystery-of-tetrach...

48 points by wolfgke 10y ago

I thought the discovery of individual tetrachromats had been reported several times in recent years. This article seems to suggest that women who were anatomically capable of tetrachromatic vision were found before, but that none of them were successfully confirmed to be tetrachromats in practice until this new study. Is this really the case?

dekhn 10y ago
yes. http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/326976 http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/326976 http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191517 http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191517
- schoen 10y ago
  Hmmm, that shows that this research finding was published in 2010, which might be the timeframe I was thinking of. I first thought from the link that this article was newly published.
  - dekhn 10y ago
    yeah, me too.

saganus 10y ago

It's very exciting for me to dream of a future where we manage to tap into the visual cortex and maybe then we'll be able to see as if we had 4 or maybe more cones. I really hope this result is verified and confirmed. It's very interesting to think what would it mean to see like this. Could we liken it to jumping from 8 bit color to 32 bit color for example?

schoen 10y ago
Nope, the trichromatic vision is the reason we use color spaces like RGB -- it means that combinations of three colors can produce nearly all of the subjective hues that we experience. The idea of "three primary colors" comes from trichromatic vision; there's nothing about physics that implies that there should only be three primary colors, and machines can be built to distinguish an unlimited range of hue combinations that are not regarded as built up from any finite number of primary colors, whereas human vision simply can't make these distinctions. Tetrachromatic vision means a four-dimensional color space which will have to use four, not three, primary colors in order to represent all subjective hues through combinations. So you would need to add another channel on top of RGB. The bit depth in a color space is effectively about how many different intensities of each primary color can be distinguished (although you can have a system that measures or distinguishes colors in terms of other features instead). So if you have a greater color depth, you can make more fine-grained distinctions about the intensive of the primary colors, but having a new primary color (that reaches otherwise-unrepresentable colors!) is something else entirely.
- gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  What about CMYK for tetrachromatic?
  - thaumasiotes 10y ago
    CMYK is three colors. K is just black. You could analogously call the RGB color space RGBW, but it wouldn't mean you were suddenly working with four colors.
  - quirkot 10y ago
    It would still be RGB with an extra. Like RGB+X
  - scardine 10y ago
    I think the primary difference between CMYK and RGB is that CMYK is a subtractive color space, while RGB is cumulative (I don't know if these are the correct terms in English). The first is used for reflective surfaces, while the other is used for light sources. On reflexive surfaces, you make colors by subtracting wave lengths (the paint has pigments that absorb specific wavelengths). On light sources, like our computer screens, we make color by combining primary wavelengths.

Roboprog 10y ago

Did anybody happen to see anything in the article about what wavelength the extra cone type was actually (most) sensitive to??? The article hyped the "millions of colors" aspect, but nothing about whether it was deeper reds, higher blues, or just more precise yellows (or whatever).

chriskanan 10y ago
cDa29 is a cone that is a deuteranomaly, which is a kind of altered sensitivity to green light. So, presumably she has better discrimination of yellows/greens/reds, and not blues. See this 2010 paper for details on this person: http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBostenMollonOnTetrachromacy.pdf http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBo...
- Roboprog 10y ago
  Ah, thanks. So further improved primate detection of ripe fruit, then.

vanattab 10y ago

I was just reading the Wikipedia article on Tetrachromacy and saw this interesting fact. "Humans cannot see ultraviolet light directly because the lens of the eye blocks most light in the wavelength range of 300–400 nm; shorter wavelengths are blocked by the cornea.[27] The photoreceptor cells of the retina are sensitive to near ultraviolet light and people lacking a lens (a condition known as aphakia) see near ultraviolet light (down to 300 nm) as whitish blue, or for some wavelengths, whitish violet, probably because all three types of cones are roughly equally sensitive to ultraviolet light, but blue cones a bit more." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy

hatsunearu 10y ago
Hmm, I see those "blacklight" CFL ultraviolet lamps as violet-white. I see the sameish color on ultraviolet lasers. Am I the only one who sees it that way? Can anyone describe how they perceive those lamps? Communicating color is extremely difficult!
- jhayward 10y ago
  > Communicating color is extremely difficult! Odd personal anecdote: In first grade art class the teacher held up a piece of art paper and said "This is red". Being the curious student I was, I raised my hand and asked "how do you know?" I was looking for something that would answer both "how do you know I perceive red the same way you do" and also "what defines it to be red". Something about wavelengths and color spectrum etc. would have been a great answer. I was sent to the principal's office as a troublemaker. Never did like art class after that.

ryao 10y ago

Why would only women be capable of tetrachromacy? I am a man, but if the test is made public, I would be interested in testing myself. I am not color blind according to color blindness tests, but there have been instances where I disagreed on the color something was with others and while I could consistently use the name that they used for it, I felt it really ought to have been named something else. One involves "green" status LEDs on electronics, which seem more in common with yellow than green to me. They look different from yellow, but they seem closer to yellow than green to me and for lack of a better word, I would rather call them yellow. If I could use a different name for the color, mapping it to green when interacting with others would seem less weird. Another involved the paint of a house when I was young, whose color seemed to poorly resemble what my parents said it was when it was dark. The house has since been repainted. Having three primary colors never made much sense to me either, but that could just be my own ignorance. Anyway, I am sure that there are many more variations in human vision than we realize. The dress incident brought that to light: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress_(viral_phenomenon) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_dress_(viral_phenomenon) It would be nice to have ways of categorizing them.

rarec 10y ago
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-women-see-differently-science-health-vision-sex/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/09/120907-men-w... Men and women seeing slightly differently is in line with our biology. Just how it is, really. Men are more prone to color blindness too. https://nei.nih.gov/health/color_blindness/facts_about https://nei.nih.gov/health/color_blindness/facts_about
- ryao 10y ago
  That explains the LED thing. Thanks.
ChuckMcM 10y ago
Simplified version: X chromosome can express 1 or 2 color receptors, Y only expresses 1. Women (XX) can get up to 4, but the X occasionally only produces 1, since women have two X they mostly have 3, sometimes 4 and very very rarely only get 2 (both X only express only one) Men (XY) can get 3 but when the X chromosome only gives 1 they only have 2 and are color blind. Depending on which one they didn't get, that determines their color blindness. [1] http://www.radiolab.org/story/211193-perfect-yellow/ http://www.radiolab.org/story/211193-perfect-yellow/

vanderZwan 10y ago

There's also the story of Concetta Antico, who is also supposedly a tetrachromat and a painter.She claims to add hues to her paintings that she sees but we do not. Researchers are looking into her abilities. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concetta_Antico https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concetta_Antico http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-seaberg/worlds-first-tetrachromat_b_5832242.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-seaberg/worlds-first-t... https://concettaantico.com/oil-paintings/ https://concettaantico.com/oil-paintings/ (watching her paintings through what is likely an LCD screen that isn't even wide gamut is a bit ironic, of course)

tvon 10y ago

Reminds me of this bit from BSG (a conversation between two "artificial" humans): Cavil: In all your travels, have you ever seen a star supernova? Ellen: No. Cavil: No. Well, I have. I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the universe, other stars, other planets, and eventually other life, a supernova, creation itself. I was there. I wanted to see it, and be part of the moment. And you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull. With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum, with ears designed only to hear vibrations in the air. Ellen: The five of us designed you to be as human as possible. Cavil: I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to — I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more, I could experience so much more, but I’m trapped in this absurd body. And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way.

amai 10y ago

This is not news. This article is based on another article from 2012 (http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-super-human-vision http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-supe...).

amai 10y ago
And actually the whole story is based on a paper from 2010: http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBostenMollonOnTetrachromacy.pdf http://vision.psychol.cam.ac.uk/jdmollon/papers/JordanDeebBo...

amai 10y ago

See also 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/ https://theneurosphere.com/2015/12/17/the-mystery-of-tetrach...