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Tetrachromats: people who see colors invisible to most of us (2014)
- officemonkey 7y agoThere is always a relevant XKCD. In this case, I've had this blog post rattling around my head for over 9 years. https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/ https://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
- jakub_g 7y agoSummary: About 12% women have a mutation due to which they have 4 cones instead of 3 in their pupils. Most of the time the extra cone has an activation curve so close to another existing cone that it makes no practical difference. But in rare cases extra cone has a quite unique activation curve and allows to differentiate mixes of wavelengths that are perceived as the same color by most people. More in-depth explanations: 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...
- layoutIfNeeded 7y agoIn their pupils?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- willis936 7y agoRods and cones are in the retina, which is the inner lining in the back of the eye. You see the retina when looking into pupils.
- everybodyknows 7y agoSkip to the bottom of the neurosphere link to get to the scientific studies. This one is especially good: http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191517 http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2191517
- guenthert 7y agoFurther, I'd think the brain must value that extra information, lest it'll just ignore it. If a kid is told that oranges are orange and bananas are yellow, will it actually develop a sense that there are different shades? Otoh, the ability to pick the bananas which are just perfectly ripe or the sweetest strawberries might come in handy. Oranges, bananas and strawberries might be bad examples as to some degree trichromats can perform such feats, but there might be other fruits and vegetables for which this would be more difficult.
- hanniabu 7y agoIn curious, would you say she has a particularly unique clothing style? And would you say she has a better than average ability to match? Also curious if she has a profession or hobby that utilizes her extra abilities. Does anybody else in her family also have this condition?
- Waterluvian 7y agoDoes finding advantageous mutations like this give us a sort of blueprint if one day we wanted to artifically modify genes for these traits?
- Merrill 7y agoAdding genes for more opsins is interesting. However, the regulatory mechanisms for developing the retina and differentiating cone types appear to be quite complex.
- nkkollaw 7y agoDoes this make up for the pay gap..?
- zeristor 7y agoAt what point would it be worth accommodating to these tetrachromats? Sensors, displays, software. Unicode encompasses vast numbers of characters, wouldn’t an update to colour science and displays be in order?
- loopdoend 7y agoAt which point? Perhaps if you are a tetrachromat, then it would be worthwhile.
- OscarCunningham 7y agoSome screens have a yellow colour in addition to the usual RGB. For trichromats this just lets us see more intense yellows, but for tetrachromats it would let the screen display every hue they can see, rather than just a subset.
- kurthr 7y agoYes, but the software to drive those (4 color SPR) subpixel rendered screens is limited to an RGB color gamut at the compression and transport levels (DSC / DisplayPort, HDMI). Actually, I wouldn't be surprised if their weren't optimizations most of us can't see that could be jarring for a tetrachromat.
- mike_hock 7y agoWhen they're well into the double-digit percentage of the population, I guess. (Not just technically tetrachromats but actually able to discern a 4-dimensional color space). Since they can perceive more colors, it's never an accessibility issue, so it's far more important to accommodate dichromats, and that's already very hard because we can't tell how a person with a different set of cones would perceive a particular color just by looking at it. Also, we already have a color model that can't reproduce true cyan as perceived by "regular" trichromats, and so far that hasn't been a real issue.
- raxxorrax 7y agoWhat is the problem with cyan? That there is no adequate color space that can create more or less cyan? I would think it is just a mix of green and blue, no? Is the same true for magenta as well? Is it a problem to convert between RGB and CMYK?
- aloknnikhil 7y agoI have always found describing color shades interesting/mind-fuck. Does the "red" that you see "red" to me? I am red-green color blind and a lot of "red" looks "brown" to me.
- xwdv 7y agoColor doesn’t actually exist. We don’t see actual objects as they are, we see the light that bounces off of them. Brains will create their own way of mapping wavelengths to colors, so therefore we do not see the same thing, but we perceive it as the same. If I opened your brain and swapped your red with blue, you would not notice.
- gatherhunterer 7y agoColor does exist. The wavelength of light that is reflected by an object is its color. That wavelength can be measured objectively.
- kube-system 7y agoYou’re pointing out that wavelengths exist. The relationship between wavelength and color is not a universally shared experience.
- BurningFrog 7y agoYeah, but all real light is a mixture of a lot of wavelengths that our retinas filter down to three aggregates of "red", "blue", and "green".
- jbay808 7y agoYes, it's kind of like wondering "Does my computer store [R,G,B]? Or is it actually stored as [B,G,R] in memory? Are they represented in 2's complement form?", etc. Functionally our perception of colour is just how we mentally represent and compare vectors with 3 (or in this case 4!) components. That said, our shared physiology and biology as humans makes my default assumption that red looks about the same to me as to anyone else. Unless they're colourblind or tetrachromats, of course.
- kebbekaise 7y ago100x is sensationalist phrasing. ~7 more bits of color resolution better way to think about it.
- masklinn 7y agoIt's not, because higher resolution in the existing channels is completely different than additional channels. You can't replicate RGB with just R an B, even if you crank up the resolution.
- matthewmacleod 7y agoSo… 128x?
- jobigoud 7y ago100x or "resolution" doesn't convey it correctly in my opinion. It makes you think they can distinguish more shades of the colors we all know. As if it was a quantitative difference. But the difference is qualitative, they see colors we don't see. We are color blind to them.
- yarg 7y agoI don't know where they get the bit count from, it seems to be based upon an understanding of the cone's operation that I've never seen justified in any of these articles. Assuming that the cones of different frequency range have approximately the same degree of sensitivity, I'd be thinking that the number is about n^(4/3) where n is the number of colours perceivable by trichromats. But even if that's true - which I doubt - the additional colours are in unlikely to have a useful distribution, and will be centered around the frequency response curve of the fourth cone (I believe it's generally in the yellow spectrum; somewhere between red and green).
- OscarCunningham 7y agoIf you wanted to measure it in a principled way you could count how many colours they could distinguish. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAdam_ellipse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MacAdam_ellipse
- SEJeff 7y agoMaybe they're like the mantis shrimp, who can see 16x more spectrums of light than we can. https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
- dr_dshiv 7y agoBirds have 4 primary colours and six secondary colors...
- OscarCunningham 7y agoAre Antico's colourful paintings really a result of her tetrachromacy, rather than artistic flair? If she's painting such that the colours of the paint match what she sees, then trichromats should also think the paints match what they see, since they're less discriminating than she is.
- wizzard 7y agoIt sounds like she doesn’t necessarily see new colors, she just can distinguish far more colors in things that look monochromatic to the rest of us. It’s not that the rest of us can’t see lime green, but we don’t see it in a pebble or tree bark.
- cryptica 7y agoAgreed, if the artist saw more range of colors than a normal person, I would think that they would paint using a smaller range of colors because they would find it sufficiently stimulating. - It should be easier for them to paint highly photo-realistic scenes. - They should struggle to find the right colors to buy in the shop. - They should be frustrated with mixing colors because they could never get the color right as they see it.
- kaitai 7y agoDisagree -- paints are made from pigments that are real-world things, that show many colors. Why would it be hard to get the color right from paints if you can see more colors? Probably tetrachromats are overrepresented in the paint-color-creating world! In addition, painting photo-realistically is more about edges and angles than colors.
- OscarCunningham 7y agoI imagine paint mixing would be harder for a tetrachromat because they're trying to hit a target in a four dimensional space rather than just a three dimensional one.
- goto11 7y ago
- petewailes 7y agoOn a related note, when you see purple, your brain falls over, because it's actually seeing something it thinks should be green, but knows it isn't. https://toughcompetent.com/blog/purple-doesnt-exist/ https://toughcompetent.com/blog/purple-doesnt-exist/
- goto11 7y agoBy that logic, white, black, grey or brown or pink does not exist either. The article confuses human color perception with wavelengths. It is not that purple doesn't exist, it is just that a rainbow does not contain all perceptible colors because it only contains colors represented by a single wavelength. Just like our ears can perceive chords as different from a single "average" note, our eyes can perceive combination of multiple wavelengths. It doesn't require any pop-psychological explanation - you can easily make an electronic device which detect the color purple. It just needs to be sensitive to more than a single wavelength.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoNot a promising opening: > Whilst we can see violet and blue next to each other, there's no purple. Because purple doesn't exist. Back in reality, "purple" and "violet" are synonymous. The article also makes the completely unsupported assumption that the color you "should" be seeing when you look at a mixture of wavelengths is the color of the average wavelength of that mixture. That's how it decides that purple "should be" green. But that's nonsense. > When you see red and green for example, the L and M cones both fire, and your brain interprets the result as something near both. And what's near both is yellow. So even though there's no yellow light entering your eye, your brain imagines the result as yellow, because both cones are being stimulated in similar amounts. This gets the causality backwards. When you see red and green, your L and M cones both fire. And you interpret that as yellow, because yellow is what you perceive for that pattern of cone activation. To the brain, cone activation patterns are all there is. The question "what single wavelength would best approximate this activation pattern" is not even part of the model the brain is working with. But, obviously, if there is a single wavelength that approximates the activation pattern of a mixture, you'll perceive those two things as being similarly colored. Is it necessary for the single wavelength to be the arithmetic average of the wavelengths in the mixture? No.
- temptemptemp111 7y agoThen they should be reviewing display technology.
- neilwilson 7y agoMy daughter has something like this. She can see colours nobody else can, but pays for it a little by not being able to see as much out of the corner of her eyes than most people. One optician panicked so much at what she said they referred her to the hospital in case she was having a stroke! And that's when we discovered what she can do. I just thought she was good at picking clothes that went together well.
- goto11 7y ago> I just thought she was good at picking clothes that went together well. Good for her, but I doubt this is because she can "see colors nobody else can". If that was the case, she would most likely be worse at picking colors which (to the average eye) goes together well. Maybe she just have good taste?
- kaitai 7y agoHow do you justify the idea she'd be worse at picking colors that go together? If you pick points that are close together in four-dimensional space (to make a simplistic analogy) they'll continue to be "close" in a topological sense under any linear projection to three-dimensional space. Or for a different analogy, if objects group together under a filtration, they'll continue to group together under a coarsening of that filtration.
- goto11 7y ago"Go well together" is different than "close together" if we are talking about matching clothes. Color matching effects is based on distances in the color wheel. Closest together is boring, largest distance is jarring. If you imaging a new axis only visible to tetrachomats, the color matching effects appreciated to a tetrachomat will most likely not have the same effect or even be visible to regulars.
- Niyblinkz 7y agoI swear
- andrewl-hn 7y agoMy spouse is a tetrachromat, and it's fascinating. Sometimes she sees patterns on leafs or bird feathers that other people don't see. Sometimes she can detect a very minor difference in colors of clothing items that other people see as identical. If a person wears those two items of clothing together she finds it really irritating. She also sometimes see colors in her dreams that are outside of a pallet humans see in real life, but after she wakes up she can't describe them. It's not one color or one hue, there are several colors that she can only experience in her dreams.
- bostonpete 7y agoHow do you know she's really seeing things others can't see and not just imagining them?
- __MatrixMan__ 7y agoWhat is the difference?
- sandoooo 7y agospectrophotometer.
- jraph 7y agoYou could conduct a double blind experiment. Ah ah.
- trpc 7y agoif the results were in favor of men this story and even the paper itself wouldn't have been published and probably the researcher would have lost his/her job too but now my comment is the one that is going to be buried. That's the world we're living in right now. The truth is considered one only if it fits the liberals, otherwise it is everything from Nazism, racism to the Russians.
- amanaplanacanal 7y agoYou sound a little angry.
- trpc 7y agoI am not, that's just how things are these days. And if you're talking in a condescending way to me as if I am the angry white male, I assure you I am not white and not even a Western man and never been to the west.
- tasogare 7y agoHe's taking it too far but yes, in this sense there is "oddly" no sex egalitarianist asking for a way to compensate men for a so-called women privilege or to level everyone down.
- watwut 7y agoGenerally all common kinds of colorblindness are considered in accessibility. We are expected to accommodate to this mostly male problem. Using primary colors and strong color contrasts is the normal way of doing things, using subtle shades that color blind men dont see is considered bad thing. With exception of electrotechnic which is historically male dominated and uses ridiculous color system that ignores the issue entirely. Dunno why. I am all for changing that.
- blattimwind 7y ago> With exception of electrotechnic which is historically male dominated and uses ridiculous color system that ignores the issue entirely. What do you mean? Colors in EE documents are generally pretty irrelevant.
- bhauer 7y agoMaybe if this group grows over time we can finally move past the 24-bit color space that the mainstream has been stuck with for decades. I'm not a tetrachromat nor a woman, but I do routinely find myself bothered by the banding of gradients in the 24-bit color space. I went as far as asking Mozilla to consider adding a dithering algorithm to their gradients [1]. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=627771 (note the linked example is from 9 years ago and the -moz-linear-gradient CSS attributes no longer work.)
- BurningFrog 7y agoI think that is entirely separate. The 24 bits are 3x8. To accommodate tetrachromats, you'd go to 4x8, not 3x10.
- gsich 7y agoClose enough.
- crazygringo 7y agoThis. Banding and tetrachromacy have absolutely nothing to do with each other. Something between 30- and 48-bit color will fix banding beyond anyone's perception. The idea of accomodating tetrachromats is certainly quite interesting, but it doesn't appear they all have a fourth rod that responds to the same frequency distribution, so 4x8 would only work for individual people, not tetrachromats at large? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#Deep_color_(30/36/48-bit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth#Deep_color_(30/36/...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- pedrocr 7y agoI don't think there's any need to go to four primaries. If you keep just RGB but have more bits per channel you can widen the color space without getting banding while also representing many more colors. You just move the RGB primaries out to cover more space. Doing 3x32bit float is common to get you all the color resolution you'll ever need for calculations in image pipelines.
- DanielleMolloy 7y agoIs there a reliable online test for tetrachromacy?
- gatherhunterer 7y agoThe display monitor would make a considerable difference in the reliability of the test. As the article and the name of the condition state, there is a physical difference in the optic system that causes this condition. No subjective analysis is needed.
- BurningFrog 7y agoSince all screens I know only displays the regular "trichromat", I don't think that is even possible.
- masklinn 7y agoProbably not: colors are pretty much always expressed in terms of RGB (at the "standard" trichromatic peaks"), and displays work in those terms. So you couldn't express the colors in questions, nor could you have the display show them.
- guenthert 7y agoOutside the on-line/web sphere, there are quite a few other ways to express (or specify) colours, but alas, they all seem to have been made by and for trichromats ;-}
- anon946 7y agoHm...with a single screen, probably not. With two screens with different output curves for each of R, G, and B; it may be possible to display a color that looks the same across the screens trichromats, but different to tetrachromats.
- pilooch 7y agoWhat would be a good source of tetrachromat images ? Would love to train a model and "see" what these women see !
- OscarCunningham 7y agohttps://www.dpreview.com/articles/1471104084/sonyrgbeccd https://www.dpreview.com/articles/1471104084/sonyrgbeccd Alternatively take photos with a normal camera and then with the same camera with a coloured filter. Choose the filter so that it only partially interferes with each colour of sensor (magenta should work well). Then the two images have six independent colour channels between them.
- goto11 7y agoI wonder how such people experience pictures, movies etc.? All color reproducing technology is based on the the three-color system. I'm skeptical of the articles claim that the painting gives us any insight in how a tetrachromat perceive the world. This is just like claiming a color blind person would be able to perceive full-color vision by looking at a painting. Never mind that tetrachromat painters would have real difficulty finding the necessary color pigments to reproduce what they see.
- BurningFrog 7y agoYeah, image reproduction tech that reduces pictures to the three colors us "normals" see, will not contain anything extra for tetrachromats. Only the real world does.
- OscarCunningham 7y ago>I wonder how such people experience pictures, movies etc.? All color reproducing technology is based on the the three-color system. Presumably like trichromats experience Kinemacolor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinemacolor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinemacolor).
- gatherhunterer 7y agoThe title is misleading. The extra cone allows tetrachromats to appreciate individual colors that the normal optic system would “average” into a single hue. The visible spectrum is the same for tetrachromats: they cannot see infrared or ultraviolet wavelengths. These individuals see more color detail, not more colors.
- goto11 7y agoDisagree. They are not be able to perceive a larger spectrum of wavelengths but they may perceive more colors. Just like a person without green cones would be able to perceive fewer colors.
- sugerman 7y agoIf colorblindness is due to a lack of cones it seems the title isn't all that misleading.
- masklinn 7y ago> If colorblindness is due to a lack of cones Some are, some aren't. Anomalous trichromacy (where one cone type is shifted) is still considered color blindness.
- BurningFrog 7y agoBy that logic, color blind people can see as many colors as us three-color seers, just in less "detail".
- zachrose 7y agoCan dogs just not distinguish between colors that we can, or are they actually missing out on parts of our visual spectrum?
- A_Parr 7y agoBoth. They can't differentiate between red/orange/yellow, can't differentiate greens from grays, but can see further into UV at the cost of not being able to see as deeply into red as you can.
- kingkawn 7y agoIf men were the ones who had this the tenor of dismissiveness sprinkled across our comments would be transformed into the desperate attempt to convince that we all had this
- raphlinus 7y agoThere's actually a way for us to experience something similar: wear eyeglasses where the two lenses have different spectra. Then these "extra colors" show up as a shimmering sensation. I have such a pair, but have to say it's not very exciting; there's not that much metamerism in the real world.
- OscarCunningham 7y agoThis is a really good idea. In fact it should be able to promote trichromats to hexachromats, since we have two eyes. I wonder if we could calculate optimal filters, sort of like EnChroma (enchroma.com) for trichromats. Where did you get your pair? What filters did they have?
- raphlinus 7y agoIt was many many years ago, so I unfortunately don't have the details. But yes, the process should be quite similar to EnChroma.
- triclops200 7y agoWhat are they called? I'm interested in buying a pair.
- raphlinus 7y agoOh, they're not commercially available. My dad negotiated with an optical filter manufacturing company to make prototypes because I was interested in commercializing the idea. If you were going to do something similar today, very likely your best bet would be to get one side as EnChroma and the other as a neutral density filter (or a tint matching the EnChroma).
- gameguy43 7y agoSuper interesting. My notes as a colorblind man (might be misunderstanding some stuff though): (Being a little sloppy with sex stuff here. Not all women have two x’s, women can be colorblind too, etc.) • Two of our usually-three cones are specified on the X chromosome • When one of a woman’s X’s specifies an anomalous cone she ends up with a 4th, anomalous type of cone. • This happens ~14% of the time for women. • That’s about the same percent as color blindness in men. • That’s not a coincidence. Because color blindness comes from one of these women’s sons getting that anomalous 4th come instead of a typical 3rd cone. This anomalous cone tends to overlap more with one of the other cones in its range of perceived frequencies, which is what causes color blindness. • But only a small percentage (not sure what percent yet?) of these women with 4 different cones actually seem to be able to perceive more colors • that’s because the 4th, anomalous cone might basically fully overlap with one of the typical ones in its perceived frequency range, so it doesn’t really give the brain any additional info • one question I have: so it seems like not all these anomalous cones are the same. Is there a fixed number of types? Or is it more of a spectrum? Further, are /all/ cones on a variable spectrum? Or is almost everyone’s blue cone exactly the same? • this was interesting: colorblind men actually have a set of colors they can distinguish that people with normal color vision can’t (the article explains why) • in this study they found colorblind men (but by looking at unusual things they /could/ see, not things they couldn’t? Not sure) and then tested their mothers to see if they could see extra colors. • Most of them couldn’t. One of them could. The study was only like 9 people? Safe to say /all/ of these women had 4 types of cones, even though only one of them had a sufficiently non-overlapping fourth one to get some benefit? • As a colorblind man, I’ve never noticed an ability to distinguish colors others can’t. Only the opposite. • it’s intellectually neat to know that’s possible, even if it doesn’t tend to “come up” in everyday life. • It souuuunnndssss like the amount of extra color vision that these tetrachromats get is only the same as the extra color vision /I/ get—that same “theoretically there, but doesn’t seem to come up in everyday life” thing. That’s a little disappointing—I though tetrachromacy was more kooky.
- azth 7y ago> Not all women have two x’s That's not correct.
- crazygringo 7y agoI find tetrachromaticity fascinating -- particularly, I wish there were a way to scientifically prove whether tetrachromatics actually perceive colors as qualia that the rest of us don't, because that is absolutely not clear. Let me explain: our eyes perceive RGB, but we don't in consciousness -- the RGB is mapped somewhere, long before consciousness, further in the brain to more of a perceptual RYGB -- a two-dimensional space of warm/cold (RY/GB) against "lighter/darker" for lack of a better term (YG/RB). See [1] for more info. Psychologically yellow functions as a primary color even though we don't have a rod for it. (In reality it's much more complicated than this, since we perceive saturation, brightness, etc. but this is a valid simplification for current purposes.) So it's entirely possible that tetrachromats map their four rods to the same RYGB box the rest of us perceive as qualia, only with a different mapping. Then, they can still distinguish between colors everyone else sees as the same (because different spectra), but they'll still perceive them as the same color qualia the rest of us perceive -- colors in the world will just be mapped slightly differently. The closest (but imperfect) analogy I can think of is wearing polarized glasses -- same color gamut, but certain things "compare" differently now. Or, does tetrachromacy somehow also change the perceived-qualia RYGB model itself? So there's, say, a 3rd axis beyond warm/cold and "lighter/darker"? Or the span of the two axes somehow becomes wider to accomodate more information? Or something else? Hope this is clear. Perhaps it could be tested psychologically, though -- simply by asking participants to describe the colors they see qualitatively, to see if the words they use in color comparisons (e.g. warmer/colder) are the same as those used by the rest of us... or if there's any new "feeling" component involved. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opponent_process - "...the cells were widely called opponent colour cells, Red-Green and Yellow-Blue. Over the next three decades, spectrally opposed cells continued to be reported in primate retina and LGN."
- OscarCunningham 7y ago> So it's entirely possible that tetrachromats map their four rods to the same RYGB box the rest of us perceive as qualia, only with a different mapping. If they did this then wouldn't they necessarily also confuse some colours that trichromats can distinguish?
- peter303 7y agoI saw a six color channel video system at SIGGRAPH some years ago in their emerging technology exhibition. I believe the developer may have been Sony, but could not find an online reference. The additional colors were approximately midway the R-B-G colors conventional used. They claim they could display more of the color that people normally are sensitive to. And they had a 6-color monitor side-by-side with conventional showing how nature scenes were more vivid in their system. Of course every part of the system had to double up: video camera, transmission, storage, display. I do not know if subsequent technologies like OLED, Quantum dots, HDF capture much of the color increase of the six channel system. I do not know if the six color system could be used to quantify tetrachromacy.
- nitrogen 7y agoSharp had a four primary display on the market (added yellow), not sure if it's still around. They hired George Takei to do some of the marketing at the time.
- WrtCdEvrydy 7y agoQuattron TVs tried this with a dedicated yellow pixel and weren't that good... I highly doubt we'll see something beyond RGB (unless it's a first class citizen from camera to TV)
- tzs 7y agoI wonder if commonly available color changing smart bulbs, such as Philips Hue bulbs, have fine enough color control to be able to produce color changes that only a tetrachromat can see? If so, that would be an interesting way for a tetrachomatic magician with a mentalism act to have their assistant pass them information. In particular, it would almost certainly work to fool Penn & Teller on their show "Fool Us" [1], where it often comes down to whether or not the mentalist can find a way to pass information that Penn & Teller can't spot. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller:_Fool_Us https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller:_Fool_Us
- BurningFrog 7y agoI'd be really surprised if the Hue internally doesn't just have three lights (R, G & B) that combines to produce all colors a human "trichromat" can distinguish. To my mild surprise, 10 minutes googling did not find any description of how it works.
- eeZah7Ux 7y ago12% of women is not exactly "rare"! The fact that it did not come out before is telling. It's interesting to notice how designing screens to use the RGB colors is very limiting for those people. Imagine living in a world where 94% of people have the same form of color blindness and you don't. People would randomly mix e.g. blue and green in every place and ignore your comments with a smirk.
- zozbot234 7y ago12% per cent of women is roughly 6% overall, that's quite rare. 94% of the population can't perceive this.
- fwip 7y agoI don't think 1 in 16 is "quite rare." If you've got 100 people you know by name (and you likely have more), 6 of them have got this.
- OscarCunningham 7y agoMost of that 6% don't have the useful form of tetrachromacy. Their response curve of their extra cone is almost identical to one of their existing ones. This is like deuteranomaly (the most common form of colourblindness), in which people can't distinguish red and green because their L and M cones are too similar.
- 7y ago
- exabrial 7y agoOne on my buddies wives can see ultraviolet. It's sort of incredible, she describes it as a very dark blue to white with brighter sources
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- IshKebab 7y ago100x more colours is just nonsense. Trichromacy is already sufficient to see all the colours. The only difference is that some things may look like they are a different colour (which means they might be able to distinguish two objects where tetrachromats can't).
- Aardwolf 7y agoI'd love to see a tetrachromat who also knows about scientific color theory (tristimulus curves, CIE XYZ color, chromaticity and whitepoints, ...) explain how the color science would looks for them (do they have 2-dimensional hue, and 3-dimensional chromaticity diagram?)
- mirimir 7y agoPersonally, I'd rather see further into the IR.
- mirimir 7y agoI vaguely recall an SF short story about a genetic or nanotech hack for becoming a tetrochromat. Either by Greg Egan or Hannu Rajaniemi.
- k_sze 7y agoIs it possible that tetrachromat people may have a lot of trouble shopping for painting supplies? Since the dye or pigment used on the packaging may not be the same as the dye or pigment in the actual pastel/watercolour/whatever. Wouldn't it be really confusing? Are there lines of painting and art supplies specifically for tetrachromats?