Seeing Red, or, The Superpower You May Not Even Know You Have


I don’t need to tell you that sight is important for most people. It is estimated that the brain devotes 50% of its activity to processing our visual sensory experience.

As a child, it’s likely you contemplated an idea that went something like this: “I wonder if the color red I’m seeing is the exact same color red my friend sees?” That question, framed in scientific terms, asks, “Is there strict commonality in the way any two brains process the same visual representation?”

Interestingly, it’s only very recently that neuroscientists have begun to shed some light on this issue. In fact, light plays a key part in the story. But before we get to the answer, it’s important to understand that some people, and by that I mean some women, have been shown to have visual super powers.

The retinas in our eyes process light through conical structures made up of neurons. Most of us have three types of cones. Sounds pretty basic, yet various permutations of those three cone types let us perceive about a million different color shades.  If you have all three types of cones, you’re considered to be a trichromat. If you’re born with only two kinds of cones, you’re dichromatic—also known as colorblind.

However, it appears that a relatively small percentage of women have a fourth color cone. If you won the four-cone lottery, you’re called a tetrachromat. Unfortunately, most of those tetrachomats don’t use their fourth cone, so they wind up seeing the same colors as the rest of us.

After a twenty year quest, armed with very sophisticated equipment for visual color diagnostics, neuroscientist Gabriela Jordan and her team had a breakthrough in 2010. They discovered a woman living in England who was a functional tetrachomatic.

Jordan explained it to Discover Magazine like this, “We now know tetrachromacy exists. But we don't know what allows someone to become functionally tetrachromatic, when most four-coned women aren't.'” 

How much difference can one extra cone make? Tetrachromats can see a hundred million more color shades than the rest of us.

And yet if you’re a functioning tetrachromat, it’s likely you’re unaware of it because you have no way of understanding on how much deeper your color shading is by comparison.

So if by chance you are both a woman and a functional tetrachromat, you were born with a real super power. You may not exactly be Superman or Superwoman, but compared to other humans, you’ve got a secret ability all the same.

One that presents a world so extraordinary that it boggles most minds. One that, from your vantage point, is simply, you know, Tuesday.

In the end, we both may see the exact same red; it’s just that if you’re a tetrachromat, you see a hundred million more shades of it than I do. 


Check out Robb’s new book and more 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Robert Frost Quandary, or How Irrational Thinking Might Save Your Life

Image
You stumble out of the wilderness, having had no contact with humans for at least ten days. You’re weak from hunger and fatigue and you find yourself at a crossroads, power lines stretching out along each of the separate roadways. It’s decision time. You think about Robert Frost’s poem, and wonder if his advice to take the road less traveled might not just lead to your demise. What do you do, or more importantly, which brain system should you use to make this crucial decision? Daniel Kahneman, famed psychologist, winner of the Nobel prize for prospect theory and author of Thinking Fast and Thinking Slow might be the one guy to call, assuming your existential crossroads gets cellphone reception. Kahneman explains that we have two systems for making decisions. He refers to them simply as System 1 and System 2. System 1 is reflexive, automatic, and impulsive. It takes a constant reading of your surroundings and generates short-term predictions, all operating on a level beneath yo
Read more

Who Are You: Does Personality Change as We Age?

Image
Are you the same “you” that you were twenty years ago? Thirty? Forty? What about fifty years ago? While science still struggles to quantify, measure, and categorize personality, some have a different question: how stable is personality in the first place? Do the high school version of yourself and the retiree version of yourself still have some common immutable core? It depends how you look at it , says a paper by lead author Rodica Damian of University of Houston and her co-authors Marion Spengler of the University of Tuebingen in Germany, Brent W. Roberts of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and UH grad student Andreea Sutu. The paper in question goes by the catchy title “Sixteen going on sixty-six: A longitudinal study of personality stability and change across 50 years.” Damian and her colleagues compared the results for 1,795 U.S. adults who had taken a personality test as teenagers and then again, five decades years later. The team found that yes, there is a
Read more

The Best Painkiller Isn't What You Think It Is

Image
When we say that listening to the right song makes us feel better, usually we mean it in terms of emotions. However, a new study from the University of Utah Health suggests that combining certain painkillers with certain music boosts the pain-fighting effect of the medication a measurable amount. This recent bit of research was conducted specifically on models recreating two types of pain: inflammatory and post-surgical. (Nerve pain, or neuropathic pain, was not addressed.) Low doses of four medications were explored: ibuprofen, cannabidiol, levetiracetam, and NAX 5055. As for music, the researchers went with one artist only, while the control groups were given one of the four drugs and subjected to white noise. What music would you choose for optimal painkilling effect? The experimenters went with Mozart. (Interestingly, the phrase “Mozart therapy” already exists, referring to the beneficial effect ol’ Amadeus can have on patients with epilepsy. For instance, a 2018 st
Read more