Psychedelic Dinosaurs, Four-Dimensional Hummingbirds, and How We Got Our Vision: Color, Consciousness, and the Dazzling Universe of Tetrachromacy – The Marginalian

CREATED: [2022-12-14 Wed 15:38]
ID: 6da6b0ba-d675-4460-88ca-4e5802e73030
ROAM_REFS: https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/08/10/ed-yong-an-immense-world-color/
MTIME: [2024-12-25 Wed 16:06]

Earth teems with sights and textures, sounds and vibrations, smells and tastes, electric and magnetic fields. But every animal can only tap into a small fraction of reality’s fullness. Each is enclosed within its own unique sensory bubble, perceiving but a tiny sliver of an immense world.

But then, in a mere century of science — a blink of evolutionary time — numerous birds, fish, reptiles, and insects were reluctantly admitted into the UV-sighted ranks. Still, we excluded mammals from the realm of possibility — this is the history of our species — until, in a humbling testament to Richard Feynman’s insistence that the imagination of nature will always exceed that of the human animal, a team of scientists discovered a short cone tuned to UV light in three species of rodents. Within half a human generation, many mammals — including dogs, cats, reindeer, cows, and ferrets — were discovered to detect UV light with their short blue cones.

Now we know that most animals can perceive ultraviolet, and we are the unfortunate flukes.

Even some human animals — those who have had their lenses damaged in some way — can perceive the UV end of the spectrum as a pale blue, none more famous than Claude Monet and his water lilies, the dazzling product of his refusal to have his cataracts — a progressive clouding of the lens that filters color — surgically removed; instead, he went on painting the world as he saw it, increasingly warping the electromagnetic spectrum into otherworldly colors.

Fuckin Tetrachromacy ugh

Related: Line of purples - Wikipedia