3 ms·
"Children see more colours as well." I'd be interested in hearing more about this. I understand the mechanism whereby audio sensitivity is progressively lost b
by jerf 7y ago
"Children see more colours as well."
I'd be interested in hearing more about this. I understand the mechanism whereby audio sensitivity is progressively lost but I don't see why getting older would result in seeing fewer colors. Is this perhaps instead that we are less sensitive to color, requiring more photons to have the same color experience, but not actually seeing "fewer colors" in the sense that there are colors that fall off our gamut entirely? That would make sense to me.
- papln 7y agodiscrimation (horizontal) vs sensitivity (vertical) As we age, we lose some hearing power and visual acuity, for physical reasons on the organs. As our brains mature, they learn to not discrimate among certain "unimportant" sounds and colors. Adults can't lose the ability to disambiguate among novel language phonemes from foreign languages (as perfectly as kids can), and similarly they lose ability to distinguish similar colors that they learned are irrelevant. This isa tradeoff adaptation, so you can see a shadow gradient as single color instead of a complex spectrum, understand that traffic lights are showing the same signal despite variation in frequency, etc. On another level, very small children (babies) have poor color vision, because their eyes and brains are still missing basic development. So it's a curve: newborns have poor hearing and vision tha rapidly improves for a few years and then decays slowly, for both physical breakdown and for mental "optimization"