from the bird-in-hand-is-worth-4278190080-extra-colors dept.
Experiments show hummingbirds see colors you’ve never dreamed of:
The “V” in “ROYGBIV” stands for violet, sure, but that’s not actually the same thing as purple. There is no purple wavelength of light—it requires a mixture of both red and blue wavelengths. That makes it a “nonspectral color”—in fact, it's the only non spectral color humans see. It requires our brains to interpret signals from both red-sensitive and blue-sensitive cones in our eyes and to see that as a separate color.
[...] Working in Colorado over several summers, the researchers set up a pair of feeders for their experiments—one containing that delicious sugar water and one just containing boring old water. On top of each was a special LED light containing UV, blue, red, and green LEDs behind a diffuser, allowing the researchers to light up the feeder in a variety of nonspectral colors.
[...] The tests showed that the birds could see every nonspectral color that the researchers threw at them. Color pairs that were closer together in hue resulted in more mistaken visits but still beat the 50/50 odds of the control experiments.
Journal Reference:
Mary Caswell Stoddard, Harold N. Eyster, Benedict G. Hogan, et al. Wild hummingbirds discriminate nonspectral colors [$], Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1919377117)
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @03:46PM
It flies like insects, so maybe it can see like insects, like bees seeing UV.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Osamabobama on Monday June 22 2020, @03:52PM (10 children)
I can see a lot of colors that don't appear in the rainbow. The first one that comes to mind is brown (165,42,42). The same source lists purple as RGB code (128,0,128). Maybe it's the zero green that makes it interesting, but violet is coded at (143,0,255), and is decidedly a spectral hue.
Maybe I'll have to read the article to figure out what they mean. (Alas...)
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(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @04:07PM (9 children)
No you're right, and the article is wrong. Brown is indeed another non spectral color that humans can see. When orange becomes dark enough, our brain switches mode and sees it as brown. That is the only spectral color for which our brain does that. Our vision evolved this way probably because brown is so prevalent in nature.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @04:31PM
Specifically, "orange" that is dark relative to the overall brightness of the environment.
The exact same shade of orange may appear "orange" or "brown" depending on how bright the things around it are (you can experiment with this with a computer screen if you use it in a completely dark room by comparing the same colour drawn over either a black or a white background).
Colours are weird.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @04:36PM (2 children)
As I understand it, our brains only "switch modes" if they have been taught that brown is a separate color.
Several languages do not have a separate name for that color, and people that speak that language will not have their brains, "switch modes."
Color is an abstraction, while it can be described in its totality by a magnitude/frequency chart, that isn't what we see. We see some combination of RGB (or in some rare cases there are women that see 4 colors), however the R, G and B that we see aren't always the same frequency of R, G, and B (this is why some women can see 4 colors, as they inherit two different sensors for the same color, sort of a R, G1, G2, B thing, though I don't know if green is the color that they see two of).
What we see shapes what colors we name (can you name even one color in the UV spectrum?), but the colors we name also shape how we see the world.
TLDR: brains are weird and complicated.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:28AM
UV: Our corneas are opaque to UV. But there have been people whose corneas have been replaced with artificial corneas which happen to be UV-transparent. This happened to an astronomer, who noticed the night sky was different after his operation. He subsequently figured things out and published a paper called something like "Visual Astronomy in the Ultraviolet". A catchy title.
The Wikipedia article on tetrachromacy [wikipedia.org] has some information about human tetrachromats. But they stop short of saying what light frequencies the extra cones react to.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @04:30PM
This is another example of the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis. There is some truth to this, but also some reverse causation, and some falsehood.
How many names of colors do people not know? (Teal? Vermilion? Chartreuse? If the word exists but a person doesn't know it, how does that count?)
I think it's fairly clear that people can look at two different shades of yellow and call them yellow, but obviously tell them apart as well as well.
Personally I think as much as anything it is a matter of "there is a useful distinction to be made between these two things, so we'll create separate words as a short-hand." It's the same reason why in some languages, there is a word for "the object used to do XYZ" (such as to place a piece of paper which contains some writing which represents a person's political preferences) and other languages don't have it. You can still express the concept, but it's just not useful enough for the language to have developed the word for it.
Likewise, if a person works in a paint company or a clothing designer, they have a day-to-day use for subtle color differences others don't have, so they'll learn much more vocabulary for it. Others can tell the difference between Blue5 and Blue9, but don't have enough use to learn the specific word for them.
(Score: 3, Funny) by DannyB on Monday June 22 2020, @05:07PM (3 children)
I was going to bring that up. Brown is low brightness Orange.
What about Pink? Red at low saturation and high brightness.
As for Purple, Pink and Brown, aren't there examples of these "colors" in nature. Purple and Pink flowers? Brown animals, tree bark, dirt, etc.
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 22 2020, @07:00PM (1 child)
If I offended anyone by saying Pink, I apologize for my insensitivity. I should have said Fuschia. [wikipedia.org]
Soon to be Google Fuschia. [wikipedia.org]
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 2) by krishnoid on Monday June 22 2020, @08:11PM
That way they can trademark it too, since the color's spelled differently. Ingenious!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @03:15AM
So... orange man bad?
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday June 22 2020, @05:56PM
https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/06/09/1919377117
(Score: 5, Funny) by Kitsune008 on Monday June 22 2020, @04:54PM (1 child)
I'll bet I saw colors of sound in the 1970's after taking 4 tabs of Orange Sunshine at a concert, that I defy hummingbirds to imagine!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @11:54PM
I saw Orange Sunshine take hydroxychloroquine on the news.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @05:01PM
It always happens around red though. And my wife ignores me (yay!). Can't figure that out.
(Score: 3, Funny) by SomeGuy on Monday June 22 2020, @05:04PM (10 children)
And in an unexpected discovery, the researchers found that when only the blue LED was lit, birds started crashing in to things and buying cell phones.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 22 2020, @05:08PM (9 children)
If they included a UV LED, why not an IR LED?
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Monday June 22 2020, @06:05PM (8 children)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @06:26PM (1 child)
They also tried a Spyder III Pro Arctic led on the birds. It didn't go well.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 22 2020, @06:48PM
Did the birds have suitable eye protection?
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Monday June 22 2020, @06:50PM (5 children)
I assume then that they have established this as a fact, without testing it.
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @10:54PM
Millennial research... set your conclusions first, design experiment so data will match, discard data that still doesn't fit, publish.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday June 23 2020, @03:56PM (3 children)
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 23 2020, @05:18PM (2 children)
That makes sense. I didn't know whether the birds could see in IR, or whether the answer to that was even yet known. It makes sense that we would probably already know if birds can see IR -- and that the answer, from this series of messages, seems to be that they cannot.
Why is it so difficult to break a heroine addiction?
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday June 23 2020, @07:56PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @10:12PM
Snakes are the ones that "see" in infrared (but it's not really seeing, they have a special non-optical organ for it).
(Score: 3, Insightful) by krishnoid on Monday June 22 2020, @08:13PM
Consider how colorful hummingbirds are in the first place. Then consider how many more colors they can ... oh, this is probably a natural selection preference, huh?
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 22 2020, @11:51PM (1 child)
Insects and reptiles have been known to have (at least) 4 color receptor types that cover a wider spectrum than human eyes for a good while.
Our early mammal ancestors lost 2 of the receptors probably because they were nocturnal and relied mostly on sound and smell. Simians eventually gained a 3rd receptor, but it was never as good as the original, being spaced poorly in the spectrum. Human color vision is an evolutionary hack.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 23 2020, @03:19AM
Have you met many computer hackers?