I don't think of it as drama so much as docucomedy.
this post was submitted on 03 Apr 2025
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The way mantis shrimp see is nonetheless super cool and interesting. They likely have no conception of 2D color at all, and can only sense the 12 different colors in general. Furthermore, only the midband of their eyes see color, when the eyes are moving and scanning for prey, they don't see color at all, which probably helps offload mental load for their small brains. Once they do see something, they then stop moving their eyes to determine the color of what they're looking at.
Also, mantis shrimp have 6 more photoreceptors in addition to the 12 colored ones, to detect polarized light. They likely see them the same way that they see color, so they probably don't consider them anything different than wavelength which is what we interpret as color.
Ed Yong's An Immense World has a section on this and I'd highly recommend it. The ways animals sense and perceive the world are often so different for ours and it's so fascinating.
For anyone wondering why they would need to see polarized light: I actually looked into this a few months ago!
Other animals that are trying to blend in with the environment often use countershading appear less conspicuous. The problem with this is that this method can't replicate the polarization of the light behind them, making them stand out if you can see that sort of thing. ((Sunlight in the ocean is always polarized based on the direction of the sun (look up fresnel equations for s and p polarized light))). Even transparent creatures will interrupt the polarization in some way, so this is a very useful skill to have.
More specifically, polarization changes with the angle of reflection of the surface towards the detector / eye / camera, so every bump in the surface gets a color gradient different from the surroundings when seen by a polarization sensitive eye
"Spiders can detect danger coming their way with an early-warning system called eyes."
Really fantastic book. I did have some notes though. Firstly, if honeybees have such low dpi vision, how can they see each other dance? I assume it's because they're experiencing the dance some other way, but how? (Also it's hella dark in there, isn't it?)
He says many times that humanity's umwelt is dominated by sight, but I very much disagree. To lose my hearing or sense of touch would make me feel quite blind, as I use them to perceive things outside my cone of vision constantly. Being in deep water is unnerving for this reason, because I can't "see" what's around me, and I have this whole new area below that I can't hear either. So I have to wonder whether other people feel the way he does or whether my usage is more unique.
He really blew my mind when describing exafference and reafference because these things are reliant on a sense of self in the first place, which means that even the worm in his example must have some form of ego.
You show that you are dominated by sight even as you say you aren't.
Losing your hearing or touch would remove peripheral senses, yes, and certainly that would be unnerving, but think how much worse it would be to lose sight. Hearing wasn't even a factor for you beyond your peripheral, because what you can see is so much clearer, so much more comprehensive, than what you can hear, that hearing is negligible where you have sight.
Hearing is a backup sense. Something you lean on when you don't have sight, but its fidelity is poor enough in people that we rely nearly wholly on sight, when we can.
Losing that cone of vision impacts us far more than our hearing, although of course losing either is massively detrimental.
While sound is not nearly as dominant, it's absolutely not just a backup sense. It's the fastest perception we have (the best rhythm game players can play blind but not deaf), it covers all directions, and even in our sleep we still respond to loud sounds.
Sound perception is so fast that it's often what directs you to look in the right direction, even if what you're reacting to happened in your field of vision.
Funny enough, even our peripheral vision is faster than our central field of vision, to help us avoid predators coming from behind! Our forward directed vision is for tracking and understanding what's in front of us, sound and peripheral vision is in large part for environmental awareness. They're co-dependent!
Humans can even learn echolocation!
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how can they see each other dance? I assume it’s because they’re experiencing the dance some other way, but how? (Also it’s hella dark in there, isn’t it?)
By touch. This 50s video shows it well.
Oh, I see. I thought they communicated much more complex information than that, but it's very practical for simple directions with no further details.
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I need to use wherewithal more in my daily life
I wish I had the wherewithal to use it more often.
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How did they test if they could see color? Did they make little shrimp dioramas or something?
They asked them politely
The easiest way is to use the principles of conditioning. Pair a stimulus with a certain color light, then start flashing up different colored lights. If the organism is cued to the stimulus by multiple colors of lights, it means that they can't really distinguish between them.
That's how we tested when kids lose the ability to distinguish certain phonemes.
it makes me happy when people understand science.
They give them a miniature color blind print that has those numbers in them that are hidden if you are color blind.
The shrimp are holier than we are because they cannot see the devil's color (it's pink 🩷)
Reminds me a little of CD digital audio. The original Red Book audio standard hasn't really been improved upon because it's uncompressed audio which covers basically all of the range of human hearing within the capabilities of any speaker we could build. It's uncompressed because in the early 80's when the tech hit the market, it was completely unfeasible to include the CPU and RAM needed to decompress audio in real time.
Shrimp has more color receptors because he doesn't have enough neurons to run trichromacy, so he sees in EGA.
Shrimp has more color receptors because he doesn’t have enough neurons to run trichromacy, so he sees in EGA.
love this. nice job :)
I remember experiencing the EGA to VGA graphics evolution when I was growing up. I remember thinking the VGA almost seemed too real.
In my mind, this was a game that felt like it was pretend:
But this felt entirely too real:
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I think this speaks to a significant misunderstanding that most people hold of the way vision actually works.
Most people imagine that vision is a relatively simple process by which our eyes detect and transmit to us the nature of the world. Not so.
Eyes are complex and interesting organs in their own right but fundamentally what they do is relatively simple. They are able to detect and report to the brain certain qualities of the light that hits them. Primarily these are: intensity, direction, and proximity to three points on the frequency spectrum (what we perceive as red, green, and blue). But this data alone is not vision. Vision is a conscious experience our brains create by interpreting and processing this data into the visual field before us—basically, a full scale 3D model of the world in front of us, including the blended information on reflection and emission that color entails.
Quite amazing! Most of this takes place in the human brain, and not the eyes. From this perspective, it is not terribly surprising that an organism with more complex eyes but a much simpler brain might have worse vision than we do.
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My whole world is crumbling
Disappointed. But didn't the have receptors for differently polarized light? What about that?
Polarization filters on retinal photoreceptor won't make light wavelength (color) be perceived different, it just changes the conditions in which it's detected. If those polarized cells would cover unique colors compared to the rest, it would kinda resemble the highlight effect in Mirror's Edge, where something with a different angle than the surroundings stand out (sudden color gradient)
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