I live in rural northern New Mexico with hardly any artificial light at night. When I step outside in the dark, I always see better with my peripheral vision, and I thought it was a defect of my eyes -- getting old or something. Thanks for letting me know that there's a scientific reason for it, nothing to do with me.
Absolutely normal for billions of people, yes! And possibly scientifically undervalued - as this paper says, "peripheral vision is both more capable and more complex than commonly believed": https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-022-00097-1 (It could be that peripheral vision is better at picking up movement as well?)
This is such ab "eye-opener" 😀. Because I thought it was a defect, I tried to fight it, which was futile. Now I will encourage it, train it, and see what happens 😉
Okay, Mike. I'm kind of in love with you right now. Like, not in a creepy, stalker-ish way, but in a THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME ALL OF THIS TO THINK ABOUT WAY. Seriously, thank you. So fascinating.
so fascinating to think of worlds beyond our ken and what meaning might lie there, all around us, we just can't see it. And am now insanely envious of the anomaly that allows some to see one million colors--what a world that would be. Wonderful stuff.
So, so interesting. Science writer (and Pulitzer winner) Ed Yong has a new book out on how animals perceive the world - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/616914/an-immense-world-by-ed-yong/ - and it's exactly in this same wheelhouse of Wow. I have it as an Audible book and I can't wait to reach it. (Gnnn. Too - many - books...)
(I'd love to know how they landed on this number...)
Just a guess... there seems to be an assumption of 100 shades per primary colour. Trichromatic is 100 to the power of 3 and tetra chromatic is 100 times more i.e. 100 to the power of 4.
Conversely, I am skeptic on that 1 million for “normal” sight. It seems low to me. RGB Computer screens have 256 shades of colour for each of the 3 colours, totalling over 16 million combinations. And technology has gone much farther to show colour shades that were impossible with the standard RGB tech. Which means that we can spot a colour which is not represented by RGB. So I would assume we can see at least all RGB spectrum and then some (unless there are groups of RGB colours that we cannot distinguish among)
Enough! My head is spinning!
Anyways I love the colour shades of a sunset, the changing colour of the sea, and the bright , saturated colours of these earth autumn days!
This is so wonderful ... I keep wanting to highlight some of your fresh phrases. Your voice is so irreverently reverent. I'm new to your newsletter and delighted to have found you!
It is! The background reading is proving to be a whole pile of everyday things I've spent 50 years knowing basically NOTHING about. Researching these things before I write them is such a gift of an opportunity...
What an incredibly interesting fount of research and insight this is. I'd vaguely heard that some people might be able to see more colors but had never really thought about it or what it might mean. And I had no idea that it takes 40 minutes for eyes to adjust after exposure to light! That makes me rethink my recent early-morning stargazing interludes. I'm going to have to (get to) give them a bit more time.
Thank you. :) And - me neither, frankly! I thought the reason was, I don't know, muscular? Being able to focus better? But then last year my friend Zak of https://prismatext.com/ (hi Zak!) pointed me towards the famous Radiolab episode on colours, which somehow I'd missed - and that mentioned tetrachromats. Whole new world. (And I guess the lesson is: if a smart friend says, "you should read x and y", then that's a wise thing to go do...)
An average of 40 mins was the scientific paper I read! But I also saw a fair few different suggestions - including that it takes the eye *hours* to become fully adjusted. Not sure what work has been done to nail down the average time it takes most of us. But this is a good trick:
"When I get up at night, dark adapted over many hours, there is just enough light for me to make my way around but too little to allow me to find small objects. By cupping a hand lightly over one eye before turning on the lights this nuisance can be avoided, because when the lights are turned off again dark adaption is fully preserved in the covered eye, though the other eye is temporarily completely blind."
And of course this is allegedly the basis for the famous eye-patch of pirates. Allegedly. Definitely in the "that is so cool it MUST be true" realm of facts...
That is all so interesting. I think I'll try just stepping outside before doing anything else or turning on a light, but of course there's all the exasperating little lights in a modern house, like the clock on the stove, the timer on the coffee maker. Maybe I can tape them over the night before or something.
I first thought you were going to tell us that Concetta Antico's first quote had earned her a place in Private Eye's Pseuds' Corner. 😂 That she literally is different and sees differently is fascinating. I've always known I can't see like visual artists do, and this confirms it.
Right? As you might be able to tell, I am on the...questioning side of things when it comes to looking at the mechanics of creativity & artistic perception (not closed-minded, hopefully, but just...I have a lot of questions!). But the *fairly* rock-solid basis of all this is astonishing to me - and no doubt it'll get wilder as the research goes on, because if *this* amount of alteration is possible - what else?
(This is also the realm of transhumanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhuman - which until recently had looked like scifi. Maybe not so much, within our own lifetimes - with all the mighty ethical dilemmas that such advancements would bring...)
In some ways, we're already doing it - teaching ourselves to tolerate lactose, for example. Or using smartphones, which are arguably an early non-biological form...
Yeah, I see your point now. 🤣
But really, it's what humans do. We change ourselves. And we're often desperate to. Sometimes in smart ways, other times less carefully thought-out.
The problems start (scifi says) when we forget *why* we're changing ourselves, or when everyone forgets the reason. THAT stuff is the hard yikes here.
Yeah, I think my horror starts with inserting bits of machinery that don't have a clear medical reason into flesh (not least because surgery is still a risky thing) (and I speak as a partly bionic person) But also because so much of this stuff doesn't bear close examination as a path to human fulfillment (did you say smartphones? :) )
Funny, just this morning I was thinking about how incredible our eyes are and how our camera lenses haven’t actually been able to come close to what our eyes can do. Like I can see things close and far in focus at the same time in a way my camera lens really can’t. The contrast of light at sunrise is so dramatic that I pretty much always have to edit Sunrise photos to make them come out anywhere near the way my I see them, but my eyes can handle that contrast without any issue. Really interesting to think about people that could see more colors!
I was also thinking about how we see what we expect to see. Earlier this week I thought I saw a crow chasing an osprey, but it turned out to be a peregrine falcon chasing an osprey. I just don’t expect to see a peregrine falcon. Then later I thought I had a crow chasing a peregrine falcon, and I actually had a peregrine falcon chasing another peregrine falcon. Again my eyes just didn’t expect to see that, and in that case my camera didn’t see it. 
I so enjoyed this post. When my mother contracted Macular Degeneration it taught me how much I needed to value my sight as we all became her eyes. You mentioned neuroplasticity and I wondered at that when Mum was going blind. She developed a syndrome called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, where her brain would try and fill in the gaps with anything from her 'brain library'. So she might look at a river and see the rippling of a man's silk tie. At first she thought she was going mad but once the condition was explained, she bravely would laugh about it and tell us what she had 'seen' that day. When you look at it clinically, you can only marvel at the brain's efforts to remedy a situation. Thank you again for an interesting post.
How we found out my roommate is a tetrachromat, while we were looking for a chunk of land to buy:
roommate: I just really do better when I live where things grow the right shade of green. *shows me some pictures*
me: *glances at pictures* Okay, I'll take pictures of each plot when I go look, so you can tell me which looks good to you!
roommate: Cool! Although *points to one picture* it just needs to be closer to this one *shows another picture* than that one, & I'll be good.
me: *stares back & forth for A Period of Time* ... I literally cannot see a difference between the greens. They look the same to me. These bushes look like those bushes.
me & also roommate: ... huh
& then there was researching, & it turns out our OTHER roommate is also a tetrachromat, they can both see colors in the sunset that I can't, but they also see somewhat different colors from each other!
I clicked on the link to Concetta's blog and as I looked at her paintings I got a reaction like a occular migraine ...and the colors came actively alive .... a first for me. Very interesting post Mike and thanks to a link from Katherine May for sending me here !!!
Really interesting! Have you read Jasper Fforde's book "Shades of Grey"? It takes place in Chromatacia, a world like ours but where your ability to see color determines your place in society. Reds outrank Yellows, and only Greys can see at night (but they're the bottom of the totem pole). I thought of this book as I read your piece.
I grew up knowing about rods and cones because my dad taught us to see with our peripheral vision while camping. It's the easiest way to spot the first stars at night, and to know when dawn finally starts to lighten the horizon.
Thanks for the thought-provoking piece, as usual! Can't wait to see what this season on color brings
I live in rural northern New Mexico with hardly any artificial light at night. When I step outside in the dark, I always see better with my peripheral vision, and I thought it was a defect of my eyes -- getting old or something. Thanks for letting me know that there's a scientific reason for it, nothing to do with me.
Absolutely normal for billions of people, yes! And possibly scientifically undervalued - as this paper says, "peripheral vision is both more capable and more complex than commonly believed": https://www.nature.com/articles/s44159-022-00097-1 (It could be that peripheral vision is better at picking up movement as well?)
This is such ab "eye-opener" 😀. Because I thought it was a defect, I tried to fight it, which was futile. Now I will encourage it, train it, and see what happens 😉
Okay, Mike. I'm kind of in love with you right now. Like, not in a creepy, stalker-ish way, but in a THANK YOU FOR GIVING ME ALL OF THIS TO THINK ABOUT WAY. Seriously, thank you. So fascinating.
Absolutely my pleasure. And praise from the likes of you meant a lot. Thank you, Asha!
Oh, goodness. That's surprising and delightful. Thank you! Excited to read more of your work and be captivated by your curiosity.
Same!
so fascinating to think of worlds beyond our ken and what meaning might lie there, all around us, we just can't see it. And am now insanely envious of the anomaly that allows some to see one million colors--what a world that would be. Wonderful stuff.
So, so interesting. Science writer (and Pulitzer winner) Ed Yong has a new book out on how animals perceive the world - https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/616914/an-immense-world-by-ed-yong/ - and it's exactly in this same wheelhouse of Wow. I have it as an Audible book and I can't wait to reach it. (Gnnn. Too - many - books...)
Also - you probably can see a million! https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150727-what-are-the-limits-of-human-vision#:~:text=How%20many%20colours%20can%20we,distinguish%20at%20around%20a%20million. For the average human eye, the three cones give us an estimated perceivable range of around a million colours. (I'd love to know how they landed on this number...)
But tetrachromats might beat that by a factor of 100.
*One hundred million colours.*
Which is...unimaginable to the rest of us.
I can't wait to read that book, it's on my list! And yes--a hundred milliion! :) 'Twould be fascinating to understand the visual world that way....
(I'd love to know how they landed on this number...)
Just a guess... there seems to be an assumption of 100 shades per primary colour. Trichromatic is 100 to the power of 3 and tetra chromatic is 100 times more i.e. 100 to the power of 4.
Conversely, I am skeptic on that 1 million for “normal” sight. It seems low to me. RGB Computer screens have 256 shades of colour for each of the 3 colours, totalling over 16 million combinations. And technology has gone much farther to show colour shades that were impossible with the standard RGB tech. Which means that we can spot a colour which is not represented by RGB. So I would assume we can see at least all RGB spectrum and then some (unless there are groups of RGB colours that we cannot distinguish among)
Enough! My head is spinning!
Anyways I love the colour shades of a sunset, the changing colour of the sea, and the bright , saturated colours of these earth autumn days!
This is so wonderful ... I keep wanting to highlight some of your fresh phrases. Your voice is so irreverently reverent. I'm new to your newsletter and delighted to have found you!
Thank you so much, Joyce. And thank you for the kind mention in the Substack shoutout thread! Really made my day. :) I'm delighted you found me too.
This new season opener was well worth the wait and then some, Mike! Fascinating stuff and I loved your telling of it.
Hooray! Thank you, Jolene - all this stuff is 95% new to me, so if it reads a bit like I'm nerding out hard...it's because I'm nerding out hard.
Truly fascinating!
It is! The background reading is proving to be a whole pile of everyday things I've spent 50 years knowing basically NOTHING about. Researching these things before I write them is such a gift of an opportunity...
What an incredibly interesting fount of research and insight this is. I'd vaguely heard that some people might be able to see more colors but had never really thought about it or what it might mean. And I had no idea that it takes 40 minutes for eyes to adjust after exposure to light! That makes me rethink my recent early-morning stargazing interludes. I'm going to have to (get to) give them a bit more time.
Thank you. :) And - me neither, frankly! I thought the reason was, I don't know, muscular? Being able to focus better? But then last year my friend Zak of https://prismatext.com/ (hi Zak!) pointed me towards the famous Radiolab episode on colours, which somehow I'd missed - and that mentioned tetrachromats. Whole new world. (And I guess the lesson is: if a smart friend says, "you should read x and y", then that's a wise thing to go do...)
An average of 40 mins was the scientific paper I read! But I also saw a fair few different suggestions - including that it takes the eye *hours* to become fully adjusted. Not sure what work has been done to nail down the average time it takes most of us. But this is a good trick:
"When I get up at night, dark adapted over many hours, there is just enough light for me to make my way around but too little to allow me to find small objects. By cupping a hand lightly over one eye before turning on the lights this nuisance can be avoided, because when the lights are turned off again dark adaption is fully preserved in the covered eye, though the other eye is temporarily completely blind."
https://www.nature.com/articles/40308
And of course this is allegedly the basis for the famous eye-patch of pirates. Allegedly. Definitely in the "that is so cool it MUST be true" realm of facts...
Ooh, pirates. Season 7 ... ?
That is all so interesting. I think I'll try just stepping outside before doing anything else or turning on a light, but of course there's all the exasperating little lights in a modern house, like the clock on the stove, the timer on the coffee maker. Maybe I can tape them over the night before or something.
I first thought you were going to tell us that Concetta Antico's first quote had earned her a place in Private Eye's Pseuds' Corner. 😂 That she literally is different and sees differently is fascinating. I've always known I can't see like visual artists do, and this confirms it.
Right? As you might be able to tell, I am on the...questioning side of things when it comes to looking at the mechanics of creativity & artistic perception (not closed-minded, hopefully, but just...I have a lot of questions!). But the *fairly* rock-solid basis of all this is astonishing to me - and no doubt it'll get wilder as the research goes on, because if *this* amount of alteration is possible - what else?
(This is also the realm of transhumanism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transhuman - which until recently had looked like scifi. Maybe not so much, within our own lifetimes - with all the mighty ethical dilemmas that such advancements would bring...)
"Transhumanism" sounds horrific, honestly. I can certainly see people being drawn into it, but....
In some ways, we're already doing it - teaching ourselves to tolerate lactose, for example. Or using smartphones, which are arguably an early non-biological form...
Yeah, I see your point now. 🤣
But really, it's what humans do. We change ourselves. And we're often desperate to. Sometimes in smart ways, other times less carefully thought-out.
The problems start (scifi says) when we forget *why* we're changing ourselves, or when everyone forgets the reason. THAT stuff is the hard yikes here.
Yeah, I think my horror starts with inserting bits of machinery that don't have a clear medical reason into flesh (not least because surgery is still a risky thing) (and I speak as a partly bionic person) But also because so much of this stuff doesn't bear close examination as a path to human fulfillment (did you say smartphones? :) )
Funny, just this morning I was thinking about how incredible our eyes are and how our camera lenses haven’t actually been able to come close to what our eyes can do. Like I can see things close and far in focus at the same time in a way my camera lens really can’t. The contrast of light at sunrise is so dramatic that I pretty much always have to edit Sunrise photos to make them come out anywhere near the way my I see them, but my eyes can handle that contrast without any issue. Really interesting to think about people that could see more colors!
I was also thinking about how we see what we expect to see. Earlier this week I thought I saw a crow chasing an osprey, but it turned out to be a peregrine falcon chasing an osprey. I just don’t expect to see a peregrine falcon. Then later I thought I had a crow chasing a peregrine falcon, and I actually had a peregrine falcon chasing another peregrine falcon. Again my eyes just didn’t expect to see that, and in that case my camera didn’t see it. 
I so enjoyed this post. When my mother contracted Macular Degeneration it taught me how much I needed to value my sight as we all became her eyes. You mentioned neuroplasticity and I wondered at that when Mum was going blind. She developed a syndrome called Charles Bonnet Syndrome, where her brain would try and fill in the gaps with anything from her 'brain library'. So she might look at a river and see the rippling of a man's silk tie. At first she thought she was going mad but once the condition was explained, she bravely would laugh about it and tell us what she had 'seen' that day. When you look at it clinically, you can only marvel at the brain's efforts to remedy a situation. Thank you again for an interesting post.
How we found out my roommate is a tetrachromat, while we were looking for a chunk of land to buy:
roommate: I just really do better when I live where things grow the right shade of green. *shows me some pictures*
me: *glances at pictures* Okay, I'll take pictures of each plot when I go look, so you can tell me which looks good to you!
roommate: Cool! Although *points to one picture* it just needs to be closer to this one *shows another picture* than that one, & I'll be good.
me: *stares back & forth for A Period of Time* ... I literally cannot see a difference between the greens. They look the same to me. These bushes look like those bushes.
me & also roommate: ... huh
& then there was researching, & it turns out our OTHER roommate is also a tetrachromat, they can both see colors in the sunset that I can't, but they also see somewhat different colors from each other!
But more importantly, what are you playing on that rig? ;)
I clicked on the link to Concetta's blog and as I looked at her paintings I got a reaction like a occular migraine ...and the colors came actively alive .... a first for me. Very interesting post Mike and thanks to a link from Katherine May for sending me here !!!
Really interesting! Have you read Jasper Fforde's book "Shades of Grey"? It takes place in Chromatacia, a world like ours but where your ability to see color determines your place in society. Reds outrank Yellows, and only Greys can see at night (but they're the bottom of the totem pole). I thought of this book as I read your piece.
I grew up knowing about rods and cones because my dad taught us to see with our peripheral vision while camping. It's the easiest way to spot the first stars at night, and to know when dawn finally starts to lighten the horizon.
Thanks for the thought-provoking piece, as usual! Can't wait to see what this season on color brings
I remember wondering as a child if what I called green was what other people saw (as in green grass or trees). I love this topic!
Excellent start to the new season, Mike!