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My 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
by andrewl-hn 7y ago
My 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.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- mannykannot 7y agoI don't know about andrewl-hn's spouse, but in general, there is a way. From the article: But by 2010, [Jordan] had found a subject who perfectly acted the part of a tetrachromat. Jordan’s “acid test” involved coloured discs showing different mixtures of pigment, such as a green made of yellow and blue. The mixtures were too subtle for most people to notice: almost all people would see the same shade of olive green, but each combination should give out a subtly different spectrum of light that would be perceptible to someone with a fourth cone. Sure enough, Jordan’s subject was able to differentiate between the different mixtures each time. “When you ask them to discriminate between the two mixtures, a tetrachromat can do it very quickly. They don’t hesitate,” says Jordan. Science has a method for cutting through speculation - in this case, it is a variant of the Ishihara test.
- bostonpete 7y agoYeah, I don't doubt that there are scientific methods to confirm this, I was interested specifically in how the parent commenter knew (maybe she was tested). I mean there are people who see things that aren't there too... I guess HN didn't appreciate my question. :-/
- jraph 7y agoI did :-)
- mannykannot 7y agoI did not think it was an unreasonable question. The article also mentions that quite a few of the people who thought they had this ability were unable to demonstrate it through this sort of test. As a certain percentage of the population think they have a given disease when they do not, I would not be surprised if a certain percentage, on hearing about tetrachromacy, would think they have it for less than rigorously sound reasons.
- jsharf 7y agoIt seems like this one is really easy to test, like via the clothing example the top comment mentioned -- just see if the person can reliably differentiate between them
- klyrs 7y agoBefore asking this very dismissive question, did you pause to think about how you might design an experiment to determine a rough count of how many colors people can discriminate between? Because it took me all of 30 seconds to do so, and I'm just a graph theorist. I don't know shit about anatomy or color spaces. I'd use a 2-panel diagram. On each round, the panels are assigned random colors. The subject is asked "are the panels same, or different?" Some proportion of the time, they're identical. If they just mash "different" every time, you'll see that in the data and you'd reject those subjects -- or accumulate those false guesses into an uncertainty measure. If they hit 'same' on different colors... make a graph with edges between those colors. Some time after the graph is connected, try and find a minimum vertex cover. The order if that vertex cover should be a reasonable estimate of the number of colors a person can see.
- arketyp 7y agoI don't see why seeing an extended pallet in dreams would be a thing particular to tetrachromats. Unless trichromatic vision completely covers the gamut of naturally occuring wavelength combinations, which I doubt.
- eru 7y agoWhat do naturally occurring wavelength combinations have to do with what happens in your dreams?
- ajross 7y agoThat's not quite the right way to think about it. Obviously, existing vision "covers" the full spectrum, there aren't any wavelengths that we can't see. The trick to impossible colors is recognizing that our existing receptor spectra overlap. It's not possible to get "100% red" in the sense of only the "red" cone cells firing and none of the "blue" or "green" ones, because those other cells are going to fire at some small rate for the same frequencies. But our brain can certainly receive such a color even if our eyes don't produce it, so in some sense we "understand" it as a color even if we'll never see it outside a laboratory or hallucination.
- JimboOmega 7y agoI think you and the other person are referring to two different "spectrums". Our vision covers a tiny portion of the EM spectrum, for instance, we can't see infrared, microwave, gamma, x-ray, etc. There are separately colors which we are wired to hypothetically receive, as you point out (and I find interesting) - IE, if you replace the eye with some sort of artificial replacement, then such a signal could get received by the brain, but with the current sensors it is impossible (also, I suppose a colorblind person could receive such a signal as 100% red without the other colors). There's also the possibility during a dream of creating objects or sensations that are not physically possible. For instance, I've had dreams where I had a form of telekinesis, and obviously there's no sort of brain wiring to manipulate physical objects outside of the normal motor functions. Still, it made sense in the dream - and it's not like I could describe how I did it, and it's not because the hardware exists but the sensor doesn't. Although - you could argue that there's a layer of abstraction in the brain of such things in the brain - for instance, when I'm typing these words I don't actually ever have any conscious awareness of my finger motions. I don't even think about the act of typing at all; only the words. So, thinking about it, the brain does have an idea of manipulating objects outside of a need for muscles to do it. I would think for a tetrachromat the abstract sensation of seeing colors you can't describe to others is itself a familiar one, and that feeling itself is something you might encounter in dreams. My dreams tend to start with a feeling, and then build a context for it. Tl;dr - dreams are weird.
- Rerarom 7y agoHow are you not envious of her? I'm asking seriously.
- kempbellt 7y agoBeing colorblind myself, I used to be envious of people who could see more colors than me. I still am, to some extent. Though, over the years I picked up on an upside to it. Since I'm unable to see as many colors when viewing the world, I tend to pick up changes in motion much more quickly than people around me. It makes me fairly proficient at driving, dodging moving obstacles while doing any physical activiy, and fast-paced games (like FPS) - even if the trade off is that I occasionally killed teammates because I couldn't see the color differences between players at times. Everything has it's pros and cones (pun :D)
- acjohnson55 7y agoI'm also colorblind, and other than the occasional mixup, I don't feel like I'm missing out on much. There's still plenty of color, perhaps just with less vibrant difference in the red-green area.
- Mirioron 7y agoI wonder if it would be possible to replace a specific color with a pattern instead on a driver level.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kevinmchugh 7y agoIf it were I'd expect cheaters to have already done so, since texture hacking is a well known, old cheat
- kempbellt 7y agoI was referring to driving a vehicle IRL - just in case that wasn't clear. Some gimmes: brake lights are usually horizontal to one another, and red. If you're driving towards bright white lights, or they are vertically aligned, something has probably gone wrong... This type of pattern matching is frequently how I go about navigating the world.
- hx2a 7y ago> 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. Sounds like she is describing imaginary or impossible colors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impossible_color
- guenthert 7y agoThat whole article is flawed in defining 'color' as 'color perception of average human'. I don't think one gets anywhere unless one strictly separates the physical properties (of a light source) from the perception (of a (human or otherwise) sensor).
- codebolt 7y agoThe term quale/qualia is useful in this discussion. It seems his wife is experiencing color-qualia in her dream that doesn't correspond to any qualia that is produced in response to light hitting her eyes, whatever the wavelength. To me it only highlights our gaping lack of scientific understanding as to what qualia is and how it is produced.
- dredmorbius 7y agoDefinitions vary, but the first for "color" is "A property depending on the relations of light to the eye". http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=color http://www.dict.org/bin/Dict?Form=Dict2&Database=*&Query=col... Freedict gives: That aspect of things that is caused by differing qualities of the light reflected or emitted by them, definable in terms of the observer or of the light https://www.thefreedictionary.com/color https://www.thefreedictionary.com/color That is, colour is a perception, dependent on the observer. Agreed-on colours being those on which typical observers share common experience, is correct. Wavelengths, pigmentation, and diffraction effects (which give rise to colour in observers) are phenomena. The terms quale and qualia suggested by @codebolt are indeed quite useful. (Language itself is shared agreement among symbolic references, given context.)
- 7y ago
- agumonkey 7y agocould have made a very nice spy communication channel
- cerberusss 7y agoSomething like "invisible ink"!
- lostmyoldone 7y agoIt's quite possible she could see some of those colors in real life if you had access to a light-source with "adjustable spectrum". Think something like an RGB lamp but with more colors/wavelengths, and adapted to her particular spectral response. Having built a similar kind of lamp myself, I have to say it was quite wild even for a boring old trichromat as me!
- crucialfelix 7y agoI sometimes slip into a kind of lucid state with intense unnatural colors and extreme fractal geometries. It's quite fun, and fades away in less than a minute. It is definitely related to psychedelic vision and the colors in tibettan art. I have in rare cases been able to access it with sober meditation.
- pgreenwood 7y agoSounds like she might be seeing the new forth primary colour squant. https://www.negativland.com/archives/015squant/story.html https://www.negativland.com/archives/015squant/story.html
- ralphc 7y agoReading this, first thing I thought of was "did she see 'the dress' as blue and black, white and gold, or something else entirely?
- SuoDuanDao 7y agoI'm reminded of Lovecraft's 'the color out of space'. It's fascinating to try and imagine what that's like.
- cameronh90 7y agoWhen I take psychedelic drugs, I can see colours that are not part of my normal tritanomolous vision, and are impossible to adequately describe. I understand this is quite a common experience. Maybe those colours are what I would see if I had properly functioning cones, or even a fourth cone variant. Or maybe they're just a symptom of wider brain dysfunction due to the psychedelic drugs. Hard to know...
- james_s_tayler 7y agoI have the opposite thing. Where I can only perceive 1/10th the colours most people can. Mostly that results in people recoiling in shock when I candidly describe something as blue when it is in fact purple. Or orange when it's yellow. Or something else that's very, very bordeline in-between two colours. Strange to think there are people who can perceive two orders of magnitude more colour than me. Damn.