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Sky-blue-pink. A colour never before seen?
- noonespecial 16y agoI like Dawkins quite a bit, but I like him most when he sets aside his "mission" and just thinks (and writes) interesting thoughts.
- rikthevik 16y agoHe's a smart guy with an intense passion for science and he writes very well. We need more scientists like him and Sagan. Their curiosity is infectious.
- abeppu 16y agoApparently there is a colorblind synesthete somewhere who 'sees' colors (triggered by numbers) in his mind that he cannot see in the real world. http://j.mp/9I6XwH http://j.mp/9I6XwH
- ars 16y agoDon't use URL shorteners here. That link points to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary%27s_room#Ramachandran_and_Hubbard http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary%27s_room#Ramachandran_and_...
- abeppu 16y agoMy bad. Initially I tried using the straight link, but HN automatically removed the apostrophe in "Mary's", breaking the link.
- ryandvm 16y agoI hate when I'm reading an article and become completely distracted with an irrelevant detail. In this case, his traffic violating cyclist was full of shit. Even the color blind know which light in the arrangement is the stop light, regardless of its apparent color. EDIT: Removed bonus apostrophe
- telemachos 16y agoAs a color blind human, I think I might resent "Even the color blind know," but you're completely right. I've never had trouble (even with overall poor vision) figuring out when to stop and when to go.
- RyanMcGreal 16y agoI had a sense, reading the piece, that Dawkins knew perfectly well the cyclist was full of shit but merely used the incident as a launchpad for the real question on his mind.
- vixen99 16y agoits apparent color
- getonit 16y agoEveryone's full of shit when they get caught cheating. Shit and - if attention is drawn to the shit - anger.
- stcredzero 16y agoSome people are honest afterwards even if they have a momentary lapse of judgement. If incorrect conclusions are made on the assumption that they are lying 100% of the time - anger.
- getonit 16y agoYou're assuming that I'm drawing attention to the shit, when actually I try not too because I'm not interested in it, let alone the almost inevitable anger. But, the shit it comes a-flowin' anyway. They do the whole thing by themselves; cheating to angry-at-someone-else in one smooth, well-practised motion.
- stcredzero 16y agoYou're claiming a certain sort of behavior in this situation, when actually I'm drawing attention to your incomplete conclusion. A similar situation to the one you described: I almost died when I was living on the west coast. I started to cross the street at an intersection with a stop sign, and a couple of teenagers in a pickup truck come barreling around the corner -- both of them with their heads cranked way around to look at something (I assume a hot woman.) The driver looks forward again and slams on the brakes. The truck stops about 3 feet from me. The teenager pokes his head out the window and starts angrily yelling at me! Anger is a defense when someone knows they are in the wrong, but it's not always the case!
- shadowsun7 16y agoAs a child I wondered what it would feel like to 'discover' a brand new colour. I'm was delighted to find that I'm not alone in that impossible quest. =)
- telemachos 16y agoIf you like this sort of thing, you should check out David Hume's thought experiment about a theoretical "missing" shade of blue. Wikipedia has a decent-looking article, as a start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Shade_of_Blue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Missing_Shade_of_Blue
- tbrownaw 16y agoSome people have seen that sort of "impossible" color: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seeing-forbidden-colors http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=seeing-forb... Basically if you have areas of different incompatible colors next to eachother, and they're the same subjective brightness, and you use fancy eye-tracking equipment to make the border stay in exactly the same place on your retina, then your brain gets confused and shows you some impossible combination around the boundary.
- tricky 16y agonice thoughts. Now, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but i imagine the brain of a red-blind person wouldn't have a fully developed pathway to "see" red. I'd guess that after being exposed to a new stimulus, the pathway would slowly develop, but I don't think the patient would immediately see a new color. Does anyone know what happens to a deaf-from-birth person gets a cochlear implant late in life?
- ars 16y agoThey can't make any sense of the sound. They can mange to hear sound, but not understand language. Those pathways close during childhood and don't open back up. There are no "unused tags" like he imagines. The brain is not pre-programmed. It gets programmed based on how it's used. You give it a sense that is distinct from other senses, and it finds a way to use it. If you don't then that sense simply doesn't exist in that brain - there are no unused spots. If you have ever used a tool, or played a game to the point that when you think "do this" the tool or game just does it, without you consciously thinking of the actions, then you have experienced this. The tool becomes a part of you. The brain simply opens another "channel" for that. Or the sounds a game makes. You don't think "this kind of beep means this", no, you just "know" that the game is doing something based on the sound. The brain is very flexible, and unlike a computer it does not have fixed input/outputs. Another example is someone who wore a belt that always vibrated on the side that pointed north. After a while he had a new sense! He just "knew" where north was. He did not feel "oh a buzz on my front left". No, he just knew north is there. He brain integrated this new sense with the visual sense, and he experienced that a particular street points in a particular direction. Just like you would tag a house with a color "red", he tagged it with a direction. What did this "northiness" look like? I don't know - I guess it looked like north.
- nooneelse 16y agoThe extendability of our sensory modes does not disprove that we and other animals come pre-programmed in various ways in both our input and output. I went into a developmental neuro-biology course thinking much as you seem to be, trying to tear all the "it's inborn" B.S. away from the functionally super-flexible neurons. But the experiments and scientific observations just don't support that project in all cases. To name two: brain regions fully formed for spatial management/processing of visual signals in the absence of any signals from an eye being allowed to ever reach them, transplanting the song/chirp patterns from one species of bird to another by splicing neurons from a developing embryo of the first to the developing embryo of the second. How are these to be explained if not by something that clearly qualifies as some form of "pre-programming" of the neural substrate for sensation and behavior? Extendability and plasticity are not necessarily defeaters to innateness. They can coexist.
- po 16y agoWell, he's not a Tetrachromat so he can still volunteer for a study: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
- stcredzero 16y agoYes, and if only a small minority of the population has this mutation, then words for the other colors they perceive would never become part of the language. In fact, it would be almost impossible for Tetrachromats to discover others like themselves.
- po 16y agoI think the standard way a tetrachromatic person would discover they are that way is they walk around all day wondering why everyone is wearing mismatched colors and nobody seems to notice or agree with them.
- stcredzero 16y agoDon't a lot of women already wonder about a lot of men in this way? (Tetrachromacy gene is on the X chromosome, and seems to express more often in women.)
- spearson 16y agoLike so, so many arguments in philosophy of mind, the argument requires there to be a distinction between subject and object. Without this distinction, the argument is not disproven, but its semantics completely break down; i.e., not "Without this presupposition, Dawkins is false when he says X" but rather "Without this presupposition, Dawkins has said nothing at all when he says X; he may have said 'blippity bloo blah bleem bam' instead." Without a strongly reasoned argument for subject-object distinction, one may as well be proving things with the presupposition that God exists.
- 10ren 16y agoThe 'label' would have likely atrophied. Kittens raised in an environment without vertical lines don't develop the ability to perceive vertical lines. These sensing cells would have developed in the retina, but it seems reasonable for the same effect to occur on any cells that are tightly connected with vision - such as colour qualia. Though I doubt that many neurobiologists take that philosophical term very seriously.
- rada 16y agoI am surprised Dawkins did not touch on the connection of language and color. Aside from physical ability, people "see" colors simply based on the language they speak. As someone who grew up speaking Russian where light blue and dark blue are 2 separate colors as different as green and yellow, I've often been surprised by English speakers' inability to distinguish between those colors. Similarly, some languages do not distinguish between blue and green, or blue and black, or have no purple, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Universality_and_Evolution http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_Color_Terms:_Their_Univer... So the question is, even before physical ability, what part of the difficulty in recognizing a color can be attributed solely to lack of prior experience? In other words, if you subject a color-blind patient to brain stimulation, might they still not see a color simply because they haven't been acculturated to it? Incidentally, I have seen sky-blue-pink, at sunrise on the Haleakala volcano on Maui.
- Gormo 16y agoThere must be a psychological component of processing color that can be influenced by language. But is there an actual psychosomatic effect to the extent that the actual neurological processing of color is influenced by the mind, whether consciously or subconsciously? I remember as an infant perceiving blue and green as being two "shades" of the same color, and being surprised that no one else thought of them that way. My early intuitive understanding succumbed to habit, and I no longer make that association, but my physical perception of the colors has never changed.
- stcredzero 16y agoThis is precisely why L and R are hard to distinguish for Asians, or why Americans are confused by the Korean distinction of more than 2 phonemes in the D to T spectrum and G to K.
- gojomo 16y agoMy American-English ears also can't hear certain distinctions along a S-Sh-Sch-Tsh spectrum that at different times Hebrew and Japanese speakers have tried to highlight for me. So I don't buy Dawkins' conjecture there are unused 'qualia' waiting to be stimulated; the brain adapts itself to the sensory ranges available from its body and environment, discarding those distinctions rarely needed. Perhaps years of exposure would slowly grow back the sensitivity -- but there'd be no surprise moment of new experience.
- 10ren 16y agoSome people can see infrared, due to their cornea being replaced by an artificial plastic one which does not block infrared as the natural one does. However, this isn't an entirely new colour, but just a more red red.
- sliverstorm 16y agoYou're kidding me. I want...
- jacobolus 16y agoEvidence?
- chronomex 16y agoI've heard that some patients with artificial lenses in their eyes can see slightly into the UV range, as the natural lens filters it out. The drawback to this is increased possibility of damage to the retina, so I wouldn't be surprised if most artificial lenses were designed to filter as well.
- mquander 16y agoThere's an easy way to experience a small range of colors you haven't seen before. http://www.skytopia.com/project/illusion/illusions.html#Eclipse%20of%20Titan http://www.skytopia.com/project/illusion/illusions.html#Ecli... Documentation on the physical phenomenon behind this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_color#Perception_of_imaginary_colors http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imaginary_color#Perception_of_i...
- olefoo 16y agoThe assumption being made here is that the labels are fixed categories, immutable and the same from person to person; and yet we know that's not always the case. It seems to me that we have the capability of deriving labels from experience, but don't (especially in the case of the colour-blind) all have the same experiences. I know there has been a fair amount of research on colour names in cross-cultural contexts and that for the most part there is a pretty clear similarity between the colour names employed in different cultures, but that not all cultures distinguish between blue and green for instance.
- naner 16y agoThis reminded me of the incredible feeling of epiphany from reading The Giver in elementary school. http://www.amazon.com/Giver-Lois-Lowry/dp/0385732554/ http://www.amazon.com/Giver-Lois-Lowry/dp/0385732554/