6 ms·
How do other animals see the world?
- gizajob 4y agoWhat is it like to be a bat?
- h0l0cube 4y agoA Nagel-ing question
- ggm 4y agoIn Dennett "the minds eye" along with other like essays
- doctor_eval 4y agoWhat is it like to be a bat?
- gizajob 4y agoWhat is it like to be a cricket bat?
- akomtu 4y agoThat's a simplification, I think. Many animals have good nightsight, meaning they see in infrared. That's probably also why they avoid approaching fires - those are too bright for them.
- ben_w 4y agoNatural night isn't brighter in the near infrared than in the human visual range, and IIRC not much can see in the far-infrared where body heat becomes relevant. Fires have a lot of reasons to be avoided.
- bmitc 4y agoVery interesting stuff. What I think I find mind blowing is that this is just the tip of the iceberg. This is only treating the eye as if it was a standalone imaging sensor. I wish there was a way that we could understand how other humans and animals actually view and perceive the world in an embodied way. I would imagine that each one of these animals processes their visual information in unique ways, perhaps more unique than their eyes.
- MontyCarloHall 4y agoThis is very far from understanding how cats actually perceive the world, but it's possible to extract crude images [0] from a cat's lateral geniculate nucleus (the part of the visual pathway between the eye and the visual cortex). The LGN likely does not perform much (if any) role in high level visual cognition (that's reserved for the visual cortex), but it does perform a lot of image preprocessing. It might just be pareidolia, but IMO that preprocessing results in the human face looking strikingly catlike. [0] https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/10-15-1999.html https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/99legacy/10-15-...
- MaxLeiter 4y agoI found the link incredible, and the fact its from 1999 is even cooler. Thanks for sharing
- okasaki 4y agoThe part where they torture and kill animals is less cool, I guess.
- HFguy 4y agoVery cool
- gpvos 4y ago> It might just be pareidolia, but IMO that preprocessing results in the human face looking strikingly catlike. That's mostly because of the low resolution I think; the cat will see more detail.
- ggm 4y agowouldn't the animal do the same thing humans do with Saccade eye movement, and integrate a "higher" Q image inside the brain, from the low res visual input? I mean sure, you can't resolve finer than you see, but you can scan-and-pan and the brain does a wonderful job of faking out. Really, really good model, from really really tiny receptors.
- jasonpeacock 4y agoThere is also variation within a species, like humans, where you get not just the different forms of color-blindness, but also tetrachromacy where you can see more colors: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy https://www.thecut.com/2015/02/what-like-see-a-hundred-million-colors.html https://www.thecut.com/2015/02/what-like-see-a-hundred-milli...
- zoomablemind 4y agoFascinating! Though, I doubt that the jumping spider's view would have such a blowing DOF, as in the picture. I guess, all vision systems (sensors and processing) would be optimized for primary needs, should these be food search, mating, shelter, and predator evasion? As for dogs, I wonder if for them the "vision" is more than just optical pathway. It may be augmented with olfactory detail to "color" the visuals as needed for their priority. After all, colors is very notional concept, even to humans it's more than just wavelengths.
- SEJeff 4y agoIt’s hard to discuss animal vision without bringing up the mantis shrimp, which is somewhat unique in this regard and also very bada*: https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
- Traubenfuchs 4y agoHave an -ass.
- rramadass 4y agoDang; I never knew this!
- kubanczyk 4y agoSite's certificate expired a few minutes ago (at noon, UTC), I've emailed them about it. Also, the content is far more badass than expected.
- 1270018080 4y agoI wish there were 100 more of them
- zellix 4y agoIf you're interested in stuff like this, I highly, highly recommend Ed Yong's new book, An Immense World. There are huge parts of animals' sensory landscapes that we don't perceive, and he does a good job of letting you see the world through their eyes/smell it through their noses/etc. He also writes about the sometimes-wacky experiments scientists have done to tease out how animals use their senses. https://edyong.me/an-immense-world https://edyong.me/an-immense-world
- yazzku 4y agoFairly grim given the Holocene extinction I would say. Back on topic though: > The range of colours an animal sees depends on the combination of colour-sensitive pigments in their eye and the processing by the brain. I take it the images here account mostly for the colour as it is detected and not so much the image that the animal brain perceives. Is that correct?
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- Heleana 4y agoIt's all really interesting. The fact that this is only the top of the iceberg astounds me. Using the eye as if it were a separate imaging sensor is not what this is about. My heart aches for a method to grasp how other people and animals see and perceive the world. Every animal's visual input is processed in a unique way, maybe even more so than the eyes themselves.
- peanut_worm 4y agoIts amazing to me that something as small a jumping spider has the hardware in its head to process vision as well as humans.
- dhosek 4y agoI’ve found it interesting that the range of visible light for humans has the highest frequency roughly double that of the lowest frequency. Working by analogy to sound, we essentially see one “octave” of light and if we perceived frequencies into infrared or ultraviolet, they would perceptually look like variants of the color at 2× or ½× the frequency (which suddenly makes the adjacency of violet and red on the color wheel make sense). I kind of wonder whether anyone has ever made a camera that doubles or halves as appropriate light frequencies beyond the visible spectrum to make them visible. It would be interesting to see what the world looks like extending the range in either direction.
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- kmlx 4y agoi saw a good demonstration of this at Russia's Expo 2020 pavilion in Dubai: https://www.expo2020dubai.com/en/understanding-expo/participants/country-pavilions/russia https://www.expo2020dubai.com/en/understanding-expo/particip... they basically set up cameras where the various animals' eyes would be. they also added some filters in order to mimic animal sight. you would then get to see the feed via a display. here's a video i've found on youtube that shows what i mean: https://youtu.be/t20_RmU3rLU?t=449 https://youtu.be/t20_RmU3rLU?t=449 it was actually quite interesting, especially for the kids.
- vagab0nd 4y agoVery interesting. But I wish they also talked about the position/angle of the eyes and how it affects the perception.