Tetrachromacy...

So occasionally, when I'm bored, I'll leaf through some old blogs and examine my life and how little I've accomplished in it since I started this blog a few years ago (if you take it all the way back to my friendster-blog days). Sometimes I'll see something I've written and wonder why I'm such an idiot or why I thought anyone would care about the topic, but, more often than not, I just compile more evidence proving how much I rule. Sometimes though, I'll look back at comments and find links to people that have made comments that also have blogs that I wasn't aware of. Today I found one such blog. A friend of mine has apparently been blogging since last October, unbeknownst to me. So I decided I would read all of his posts. Luckily there was only 7. And they were pretty short. But one of them was great. I imagine that's the ratio for most blogs. 1:6. For every 1 awesome blog, there are 6 not so awesome ones. Not necessarily lame ones, but just ones that don't inspire thought. I try and evoke some sort of break in monotonous cognition, but I'm pretty sure a lot of my blogs are fairly inane. My point is, my boy had a blog that opened my eyes to something I had never thought of before and probably never would have if not for his post.

It was about Tetrachromacy and how we see things. How we actually interpret what our retinas relay to our brain. He is in dental school so I'm not actually sure if this is the right terminology or anything since my spellcheck is yelling a red squiggly at me. But essentially he says that our eyes aren't truly seeing what is out there in nature. We as humans are Trichromatic. Wikipedia says that, "Trichromacy is the condition of possessing three independent channels for conveying color information, derived from the three different cone types... The normal explanation of trichromacy is that the organism's retina contains three types of color receptors (called cone cells in vertebrates) with different absorption spectra." My friend essentially wonders if perhaps things aren't as they appear. He talks about the possibility of colors not being what we see them as but as completely different. He doesn't mention this, but I would imagine that it's comparable to the way dog's see things. Dogs are dichromats. It's the equivalent of having a red-for-green color blindness. Now what if we, as humans, are only seeing what we can with three color receptors. What if we could see things with 10 color receptors. What would Fall look like? Would people still match? Would everything change? Would anything change?
















I don't think I've ever even thought about this possibility. On the contrary, I've always secretly felt superior to people that are color blind (despite my obvious lack of eyesight (my contacts are like 3 inches thick)). It's assumed that there are species out there that have more than three color receptors, but what do they see? Could our brain process it if we were ever able to isolate the receptor and harness it into our own vision? Could we make polychromatic glasses? Would they be as lame as 3-D glasses? I'm kind of blown away right now. I've never thought of this before and it makes me wonder what else I'm not thinking about.

Anyways, go big.

-M, p, z & shredder

oh ps - HS - blog more. the more you do it, the better you get at it. I suck at getting my thoughts across as well but over time, people get used to it. Everyone should blog. It might have been a passing thought to my boy, but it blew my mind. If all of you do that we can all blow each other's mind (that's what she said). Gross.