3 ms·
How do you know she's really seeing things others can't see and not just imagining them?
by bostonpete 7y ago
How 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.