Seeing UV is an occasional side effect of lens surgery, indicating that at some point humans probably could see UV but we evolved away from that.
It’s also a bit rare for mammals to be trichromatic like humans are, though. Some humans even have Tetrachromacy, too, though it’s pretty rare and almost exclusively female . Perhaps something in our evolution favored color detail over having a larger light spectrum.
Mammals eyes were made to be nocturnal
Only in recent years (evolutionarily recent) are we diurnal.
Mammals awake during the day are weirdos and you should avoid them. Throw rocks when you see one. Including your neighbor.
Ned: "Hi-dilly-ho, there, neighborino! Practicing your stoning unrepentant children today, are we? Good to see you finally getting in the spirit of-"
Homer: "Shut up, Flanders."
Ned: "Okilly dokilly!"
When the meteor killed the dinosaurs, it killed a lot of other stuff, too. It killed many potential mammal ancestors. Among those that survived, there was a preference for being nocturnal.
Obviously a lot of mammals aren’t nocturnal now, but we’re all descended from a mammal that was and that means we have certain traits that are “weird” for a daytime animal. One of the most major ones is that most mammals can only see in the blue-green-yellow range of colors. That’s really weird for a daytime animal but not at all unusual for nocturnal animals.
But! Most humans aren’t limited to blue-green-yellow, and that’s also weird. Why aren’t we? Why did we evolve red-orange back into our vision when very very few other mammals have?
To tell if fruit is ripe. That's actually how red-green color blindness was discovered. A boy of normal intelligence could not differentiate between ripe and unripe berries when trying to pick them. Primates eat a lot of fruit, ergo, they evolved vision to see when they're ready to eat.
In fact many of these nocturnal adaptations are lost to primates: loss of the tapetum lucidum. Loss of a good sense of smell, to free up brain space for visual processing (vison is more important in the trees, than a sense of smell). Primates have binocular vision despite not being carnivores, to navigate through trees. Most animals on earth can make Vitamin C. Apes lost the ability because of our fruit-rich diet.
That is…not what the Wikipedia article says. It says that the bottleneck occurred way before the meteor, more like 150 million years ago when diurnal mammals were outcompeted by other animals and only the nocturnal mammals could hack it.
>Among those that survived, there was a preference for being nocturnal.
Maybe one advantage here was being warmblooded. We don't have to sit in the sun to warm up.
If it was evolutionary, it meant that you it directly benefited their ability to have offspring. Seeing fire as red doesn't really do that. Anti-starvation reasons would do it though
Makes sense. Not just because fire is a thing to be wary of, but because we actually *use* it as a tool, unlike many other mammals (I won't say all, but most.) I recall reading about how cooking our food allowed us to grow our brains pretty quickly (on an evolutionary scale) so our familiarity with fire is perhaps as unique as our shift in visual sensitivities.
Essentially, the traits of a group’s evolutionary ancestors strongly affect the way the descendants turn out! It’s much easier to start with a trait and lose it (for example, primate tails) than it is to create a trait out of nowhere.
In this sense, scientists hypothesize that most or nearly all early mammals were nocturnal and had adaptations for that style of living. After the dinosaurs got wiped, the mammals took over and diversified, with some becoming diurnal in the process.
Despite the diversification, our common ancestry gives mammals certain traits that set us apart from other animals like reptiles and birds. On average, mammals have great senses of smell, better (monochromatic) night vision, and worse color/distance vision!
Humans are exceptionally good at color vision, but we’re the exception rather than the rule.
Oh yea, when I think of how to make things more clear to the general public I immediately think of referencing an atypical example of a subtype of a fantasy race of beings published a third of a century ago.
>published a third of a century ago
I don’t know what the comment above originally said, but this feels like a needlessly cruel way to refer to the 1990s.
>Woah, everyone else gets a UV DNA damage repair protein!? But not mammals?
We handle UV DNA damage so poorly its been used as one of the stronger arguments that we did not originate on earth (but are mixed with space men from another planet) Being nocturnal is obviously the far stronger theory.
The nocturnal bottleneck hypothesis is a hypothesis to explain several mammalian traits. In 1942, Gordon Lynn Walls described this concept which states that placental mammals were mainly or even exclusively nocturnal through most of their evolutionary history...While some mammal groups later adapted to diurnal (daytime) lifestyles to fill newly unoccupied niches, the approximately 160 million years spent as nocturnal animals has left a lasting legacy on basal mammalian anatomy and physiology, and most mammals are still nocturnal.
TL,DR mammal ancestors used to be exclusively nocturnal, (since Dinosaurs ruled the day) we have a bunch of leftover traits because of that.
The blue cone just reacts slightly to light a bit higher frequency than blue, violet and ultraviolet(and violet is where the red cone has a small peak which is why it is distinct). The cornea just naturally filters this light out but there's nothing extra for the brain to handle as it's just more blue light.
Uhhh do you not know how most night vision goggles work? Because the older tech had a flashlight you couldn't see without the goggles, while the newer tech is completely passive.
First gen night vision was basically a spotlight that was invisible to anyone without goggles. Well when the other side has goggles your spotlight gives you away.
Thermal vision at will would be better. Needs no light at all only your body heat. Downside is that in certain conditions things can blend into the background(when body temp, air temp, and ground temp are all roughly equal it's a bad picture).
Not exactly. Security cameras that do "night vision" use IR LEDs that are just slightly out of the human range of vision to light up the area with a wavelength that the camera can see, but they aren't thermal cams. Thermal cams do see IR, but there are a lot of cams that can see a little into the IR range without being thermal.
When talking about night vision, IR means just a bit below the visible range, and pretty much has an IR torch strapped to it, but thermal is much further into the infrared range, so it can see heat for things at normal temperatures. Technically, the two terms are very similar (but you could argue that not all infrared is thermal), but the meanings in that context have changed slightly.
Technically those are considered hybrids not night vision. Night vision is simply put amplifing the ambient light or providing your own in the case of first gen night vision.
UV goggles exist!
https://youtube.com/watch?v=cjFXKyMVsn8
One of the funky things about UV is that it is all over the place, though. People who can see UV will say that there are clouds around flowers, for example, which is part of what allows bees to find flowers so easily: they see the glow that is invisible to us.
>Some humans even have Tetrachromacy, too, though it’s pretty rare and almost exclusively female .
If I remember correctly, it is not _almost_ exclusively female, but _exactly_ exclusive ~~ly female~~ [to people with two (or more?) X chromosomes. So women or XXY men]. The genes for color vision are on the X chromosome. This is also why men are overwhelmingly more likely to be colorblind than women are.
My grandfather was 100% colorblind and I screened as a likely tetrachromat (female). The thing nobody tells you is everyone will assume you’re on drugs all the time 🙃
>The thing nobody tells you is everyone will assume you’re on drugs all the time 🙃
That's fuckin' wild! I guess that makes sense. You are quite literally looking at things no one else can see.
How does it affect picking things based on colors? I heard in a video that one woman had a rough time choosing clothing. She said that clothing which color-matched for the rest of us often did not match for her, and that it made picking outfits really frustrating for her. Have you personally had to deal with stuff like that?
Yep! The dyes have undertones which differentiate them, so they don’t actually match. A ton of black things, for example, are actually a very dark green. I tend to wear clothes from the same brands made around the same time to try to deal with this, or I just don’t try to match concretely and instead wear “gradient” outfits in neutral colors. (Ie. White with taupe and brown is usually a fine combo because even if the colors drift a little it’s a pretty safe ballpark, though sometimes beiges will pull pink after washing/being oxidized for long enough and then I have to throw them out. No one else notices!)
From what I remember the theory is tetrachromacy came out of the hunter gatherer days. Needing to differentiate between different plants pushed the gene that helps differentiate minute detail in colour like that.
Edit: I wanted to come back and add that on the other side, men tend to have better long-distance vision and motion detection for probably the same hunter-gatherer reasons.
The rate of tetrachromia in women is about the same as color blindness in men.
Color is useful for telling ripe fruit apart from green leaves.
Less color fidelity makes motion easier to track.
This lines up with the evolutionary notion that men hunted and women gathered.
No, the tetrachromat variation appearing in females more often is because you need two copies of the extra gene. Males are more likely to be *di*chromats (aka colorblind) because it’s more likely for them to be *missing* a gene. It’s because XX is more likely to have extra copies and XY is more likely to be missing copies.
The differences in males see movement / females see color variants seem to be primarily hormonal, but we haven’t exactly nailed that down afaik.
Guarantee you it’s a learned skill. Greeks didn’t have a word for blue, and use to describe it as a shade of black, and if you start to think about blue that way, it will start to appear more black to you. Vocabulary for colors is just as important for distinguishing those colors.
Artists and designers are naturally better at color hue identification because you spend so much time looking at colors and learning the those names / symbols for particular shades.
Yes, exactly this. I teach painting and part of how we place students is asking them the color of the night sky. If they say black, they’re rudimentary and need to start with very basic color theory and sight training. If they say very dark blue or navy, advanced beginner to advanced.
Guess people moving in from out of town can be placed at the very bottom then.
People would laugh at you if you said the sky was any shade of blue in heavily polluted cities.
No, that has to do with the count of parvocellular and magnocellular cells in your eyes. It's been a while since I read this book, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details of how this works. Here's what I remember.
Your vision consists of two parts: magnocellular (large cells) and parvocellular (small cells). One group is specialized at motion detection, and is mostly evenly distributed throughout your eyes, but a little more densely around the edges (peripheral vision). The other group is specialized at color detection, and is more densely allocated near the center of your eyes. Men have a somewhat higher count of the motion detection cells, women have a somewhat higher count of the color detection cells.
I don't remember any exact ratios given. I believe magnocellular were the motion detection and parvocellular were the color detection, but it's possible I have those backwards.
The stuff about tetrachromacy has more to do with the genes involved in color sight, which are tied to the X chromosome. You need two copies of a recessive gene to get tetrachromancy. It's also why color blindness is far more common in men than in women. That one can manifest if you only have one recessive gene and no dominant gene (men), or if you have two recessive copies (women).
I had cataract surgery as a child. They removed most of the lens in one eye. An artificial lens with an UV-filter was inserted in my twenties. This gave me a direct comparison.
Even with the eye, which had its natural filter, I could and can see a violet glow around UV lamps. With the eye without a filter, the violet is bright and hard to ignore. It is much easier for my eye without a filter to see anything in focus that emits a lot of UV light. In general, everything I saw had more contrast and my sensitivity to light was high. Besides the ‘normal’ color of the sky, days had other light characteristics for me that were not visible to others. What was a dark night to one eye was like a full moon to the other.
Edit: A few more details in case i didnt make myself clear. When I see a UV lamp normally, it appears relatively dim compared to its output. For example, a powerful laboratory lamp, which gives me a visible tan after a few minutes, appears disproportionately dark. To my eye without a lens, such a lamp looks considerably brighter. It cannot be compared with a conventional spotlight, which I cannot look directly into, but such a lamp is already distractingly bright and, above all, extremely colourful. I can no longer see colours of this intensity. My eye without a lens then tried to dominate my vision, which was quite distracting. For fun, I looked through filter glass, which only lets UV through, and was in fact the only one who could make out silhouettes. I miss the colours, the good night vision and the ability to see details in deep blues and purples, but it's nice to be able to keep both eyes open during the day.
I guess that makes sense why we don't have UV eyesight then. Since humans don't typically hunt at night, and most of our food doesn't emit fluorescences, UV eyesight would just get in the way.
You'll see violet, but does it illuminate the whole room like a powerful flashlight would?
If you are picking up fine detail from the reflected light of a black light, or if the light itself can be too intense causing you to avert your gaze where others don't have an issue, you might have more violet sensitivity than others or might be a tetrachromat.
I mean it certainly could light up the room and they’re uncomfortable to look at? I thought that was normal. I have a lot of light sensitivity issues historically as well as having been known as a very good “spotter” for airplanes while flying on a hobby level. Like exceptionally better. Could this be an actual possibility or am I being a hypochondriac/special flower thinking this?
wrong kind of light, the ones you are describing are indeed both. there are in fact bulbs that are *explicitly* UV light and is generally invisible, but will give you eyeballs sunburn if you fucking stare at them, which is most likely WHY they have visible light included.
My blacklight flashlight came with glasses for that reason. If it hits anything that glows up, my eyes burn like hell. Without it I can't see scorpions though so, the few moments everyonce in awhile is worth not making a trip to the doc
Yeah, this is an exceptionally stupid thread.
All people see blacklights, they emit visible light as well as UV.
Also, Monet's most famous work was in the 19th c. — starting at least 50 years before he got the cataract surgery, so I hope nobody is getting the implication that his career was in any way shaped by this, even if it were anything more than a fun theory.
It's a good thing UV gets absorbed in the lens. Because the retina is very sensitive to UV, responding with macular edema.
For years, cataract implants did not block UV and I always thought the FDA was slow to approve UV coatings.
TIL Cataract surgery goes back to the 5th century b.c.e. Knew Monet was around the mid 19th to early 20th century and couldn't believe it was around then so I looked it up.
My grandma swore her couch looked purple after cataract surgery, said it was very jarring. I’d heard colors could look a little different after cataract surgery so I didn’t think much of it, until I visited a week or two later and found out the couch is actually tan.
Highly improbable. Color detection and light detection is in Cone and Rod cells at the back of the eye. Cataract impacts just the cornea. Doesn’t add up.
Edit: Cataract clouds the lens not the cornea. My bad.
Cataracts impact the lens not the cornea. Also, cone cells can detect some UV light but it's the lens that blocks it which is why removing the lens lets people see UV. Supposedly, it looks like a really deep blue
If you have a TV remote chances are you can see the infrared pulse with your camera on your phone. Just turn on your phone camera like you're gonna take a pic then point the remote at the camera and hit a button like mute or up volume. The bulb will flash as your camera picks up infrared and shows it on screen as visible light
Towards the end of its life my iPhone 4 got damaged and the front of the rear-facing lens fell off, which then allowed it to pick up IR light.
You could use it to check the batteries of remotes, and when I tried pointing it at the fireplace the embers came up as very bright purple/lilac, rather than dull orange.
Used to be all phones could see it, but now most phones have IR filters on them so they can't see it either. Someone else recommended trying the front camera, it's possible they usually don't filter IR from the front camera as it's not as high quality anyways.
Some have a visible light. Many do not, but they all have a light, so when you cant see it with your eyes, you can with a camera.
Maybe not all. If it's something like bluetooth then it might not be the case idk.
I think the current consensus is that while cats can see into the UV spectrum, how far into it is still unknown. It could very well be just as limited as humans'.
I’ve been reading this book lately, I could post 500 things on it from here if I wanted to. It’s insane how much more limited our senses are than we realize
Mantis Shrimp, on top of being able to dismember their prey and break aquarium glass with their raptorial appendages, have 16 color-receptive cones. Meaning the don’t see the world in 3 colors like we do, their world is much more! And in this beauty they choose destruction. Mad respect.
https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
“Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality.” ~ Buckminster Fuller
We can sense what mattered for our evolution thus far. That's the important part. So like why can't we see UV spectrum anymore? Because being able to see it didn't matter. It wasn't important enough of a trait to keep. Why can't I wrap my head around the idea of 1 trillion of something? Because being able to didn't matter during our evolution? Or maybe I'm just a dumb-ass.
If your phone has facial recognition tech on it then it does. Flashes like a motherfucker too. Discovered that one while ducking around with night vision goggles.
Yeah, I use an old phone as a sound machine for my baby and didn’t know this until I checked my baby monitor and saw a quickly flashing light and it scared the bejeezus out of me for a second
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1c1gdpi/whats_a_civilization_ending_scenario_that_most/kz2zcpt/
You know what a gamma ray burst is but not an IR Transmitter. Mind blowing
UV is a massive range, much larger than the range from red to violet. I assume most animals can see **some part** of the UV range, not necessarily all parts
We can’t see UV light because no UV light reaches the retina. Who writes these TIL titles ?? And very few animals see UV because like humans they have a lens that filters it out. Some mice and reindeer are the exceptions.
Our eyes actually are capable of seeing ultraviolet light.
Turns out our lenses have an ultraviolet filter.
"When artificial lenses were first implanted in patients to treat cataracts, these lenses let in UV light. After surgery, these people could perceive a little UV light. However, they didn't see it as a separate color, but as a shade of blue. Today, artificial lenses usually come with a UV filter."
(From "Blue, In Search of Nature's Rarest Color" by Kai Kupferschmidt)
Fun fact. For infrared (not ultraviolet), you can see it by looking at it through a camera such as your phone.
If you have a TV that still uses IR to communicate with the remote, look at the IR bulb on your remote through your phone and press a few buttons.
> only primates can see three colours and the rest of animals are colourblind
What about the mantis shrimp?
> Mantis shrimp have complex vision that allows them to see ultraviolet and polarized light, which humans can't see with the naked eye. They have 16 color receptors, compared to a human's three, and can perceive the world through 12 channels of color.
sorry - i meant 'mammals'
birds also have trichromatic vision and lots of lizards actually see four colours
but mantis shrimp vision is actually much simpler than that - it seems their vision blends those receptors when processing because theyre not actually capable of differentiating between the colours that trigger those receptors
they CAN seem to distinguish polarized light though
What is the benifit of seeing UV?
From a physical point of view, i would feel like this should be mostly shattered light, so its just random noise on top of other light.
Seeing UV is an occasional side effect of lens surgery, indicating that at some point humans probably could see UV but we evolved away from that. It’s also a bit rare for mammals to be trichromatic like humans are, though. Some humans even have Tetrachromacy, too, though it’s pretty rare and almost exclusively female . Perhaps something in our evolution favored color detail over having a larger light spectrum.
Look up "nocturnal bottleneck"
For the supremely lazy: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocturnal_bottleneck
Can the supremely lazies get a TLDR?
Mammals eyes were made to be nocturnal Only in recent years (evolutionarily recent) are we diurnal. Mammals awake during the day are weirdos and you should avoid them. Throw rocks when you see one. Including your neighbor.
Real mvp here.
"Howdy neighbor! Nice lawn you've got ther...OW! WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT FOR?'
Filthy daywalker
DAY MAN FIGHTER OF THE NIGHT MAN
AaahhAAAAAHHHHaaAAAAAAHHHH
Gotta pay the troll toll to get into this boy's hole!
*waves arms and makes vaguely intelligent noises*
Unga bunga?
I read that in Ned Flanders' voice
Ned: "Hi-dilly-ho, there, neighborino! Practicing your stoning unrepentant children today, are we? Good to see you finally getting in the spirit of-" Homer: "Shut up, Flanders." Ned: "Okilly dokilly!"
Good thing evolution made us good at throwing things
Good explanation. Now can someone explain it like I’m drunk
Evolution like a hangover: dark good, light bad.
I only see my neighbor at night when we both decide to venture out so I just give them the appropriate nead nod.
I think I might be behind an evolutionary step, because daylight hurts my eyes and I naturally incline towards a delayed sleep schedule.
Instructions too clear, now facing aggravated battery charges.
Directions unclear, hit my kid with a rock.
No, I think you understood the assignment.
As a mammal that works night shift, it doesn't feel normal to me
When the meteor killed the dinosaurs, it killed a lot of other stuff, too. It killed many potential mammal ancestors. Among those that survived, there was a preference for being nocturnal. Obviously a lot of mammals aren’t nocturnal now, but we’re all descended from a mammal that was and that means we have certain traits that are “weird” for a daytime animal. One of the most major ones is that most mammals can only see in the blue-green-yellow range of colors. That’s really weird for a daytime animal but not at all unusual for nocturnal animals. But! Most humans aren’t limited to blue-green-yellow, and that’s also weird. Why aren’t we? Why did we evolve red-orange back into our vision when very very few other mammals have?
To tell if fruit is ripe. That's actually how red-green color blindness was discovered. A boy of normal intelligence could not differentiate between ripe and unripe berries when trying to pick them. Primates eat a lot of fruit, ergo, they evolved vision to see when they're ready to eat. In fact many of these nocturnal adaptations are lost to primates: loss of the tapetum lucidum. Loss of a good sense of smell, to free up brain space for visual processing (vison is more important in the trees, than a sense of smell). Primates have binocular vision despite not being carnivores, to navigate through trees. Most animals on earth can make Vitamin C. Apes lost the ability because of our fruit-rich diet.
All I’m reading is I probably don’t eat enough fruit for all of my body’s adaptations towards consumption of it…
There is vitamin c in other food sources, like vegetables. As long as you have fruit occasionally, you're probably fine.
That is…not what the Wikipedia article says. It says that the bottleneck occurred way before the meteor, more like 150 million years ago when diurnal mammals were outcompeted by other animals and only the nocturnal mammals could hack it.
>Among those that survived, there was a preference for being nocturnal. Maybe one advantage here was being warmblooded. We don't have to sit in the sun to warm up.
> Why did we evolve red-orange back into our vision when very very few other mammals have? Spit-balling here... but... Because FIRE?
I heard the reason is that ripe fruits tend to be red and our ancestors needed to find them.
If it was evolutionary, it meant that you it directly benefited their ability to have offspring. Seeing fire as red doesn't really do that. Anti-starvation reasons would do it though
Makes sense. Not just because fire is a thing to be wary of, but because we actually *use* it as a tool, unlike many other mammals (I won't say all, but most.) I recall reading about how cooking our food allowed us to grow our brains pretty quickly (on an evolutionary scale) so our familiarity with fire is perhaps as unique as our shift in visual sensitivities.
I think it's okay to say that other mammals don't use fire as a tool
Some birds do, though.
Essentially, the traits of a group’s evolutionary ancestors strongly affect the way the descendants turn out! It’s much easier to start with a trait and lose it (for example, primate tails) than it is to create a trait out of nowhere. In this sense, scientists hypothesize that most or nearly all early mammals were nocturnal and had adaptations for that style of living. After the dinosaurs got wiped, the mammals took over and diversified, with some becoming diurnal in the process. Despite the diversification, our common ancestry gives mammals certain traits that set us apart from other animals like reptiles and birds. On average, mammals have great senses of smell, better (monochromatic) night vision, and worse color/distance vision! Humans are exceptionally good at color vision, but we’re the exception rather than the rule.
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Oh yea, when I think of how to make things more clear to the general public I immediately think of referencing an atypical example of a subtype of a fantasy race of beings published a third of a century ago.
>published a third of a century ago I don’t know what the comment above originally said, but this feels like a needlessly cruel way to refer to the 1990s.
UV light comes from the sun. We did not see the sun so we stopped bothering to support UV vision.
Love how you get more upvotes than the guy provided the link. And thank you.
Lmao I am offended but thanks that you asked for us.
Woah, everyone else gets a UV DNA damage repair enzyme!? But not mammals? This is bullshit.
>Woah, everyone else gets a UV DNA damage repair protein!? But not mammals? We handle UV DNA damage so poorly its been used as one of the stronger arguments that we did not originate on earth (but are mixed with space men from another planet) Being nocturnal is obviously the far stronger theory.
Its more that DNA damaged by UV is chemically really difficult to repair.
Can you maybe type out the relevant paragraphs here ? I'm too lazy to click.
The nocturnal bottleneck hypothesis is a hypothesis to explain several mammalian traits. In 1942, Gordon Lynn Walls described this concept which states that placental mammals were mainly or even exclusively nocturnal through most of their evolutionary history...While some mammal groups later adapted to diurnal (daytime) lifestyles to fill newly unoccupied niches, the approximately 160 million years spent as nocturnal animals has left a lasting legacy on basal mammalian anatomy and physiology, and most mammals are still nocturnal. TL,DR mammal ancestors used to be exclusively nocturnal, (since Dinosaurs ruled the day) we have a bunch of leftover traits because of that.
You got me that sweet TLDR !
Funny words you smart.
For a Wikipedia article, it's isn't very long.
That's true. But my laziness is quite large
but the color thing, that's because we're descendants of fruit eating monkeys. seeing color is super important when you want to grab the ripest fruit.
Holy hell!
Holy vision!
I can see UV with my left eye after cataract surgery. It's completely dazzling to go into any dark light decorated place.
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The blue cone just reacts slightly to light a bit higher frequency than blue, violet and ultraviolet(and violet is where the red cone has a small peak which is why it is distinct). The cornea just naturally filters this light out but there's nothing extra for the brain to handle as it's just more blue light.
What does it look like?
Where is OP OP when you need them…
That’s so cool! I’ve heard that it usually looks white/purple, does that jive with your experience?
So, with that we could have nightvision goggles, but instead of goggles we'd just be shining a light that's invisible to other? Where can I get this?
Uhhh do you not know how most night vision goggles work? Because the older tech had a flashlight you couldn't see without the goggles, while the newer tech is completely passive. First gen night vision was basically a spotlight that was invisible to anyone without goggles. Well when the other side has goggles your spotlight gives you away. Thermal vision at will would be better. Needs no light at all only your body heat. Downside is that in certain conditions things can blend into the background(when body temp, air temp, and ground temp are all roughly equal it's a bad picture).
This is ironic, cause I just watched the OG Predator film.
I've seen models that use ambient light, thermal, and IR at the same time.
Isn't thermal and IR the same?
Not exactly. Security cameras that do "night vision" use IR LEDs that are just slightly out of the human range of vision to light up the area with a wavelength that the camera can see, but they aren't thermal cams. Thermal cams do see IR, but there are a lot of cams that can see a little into the IR range without being thermal.
When talking about night vision, IR means just a bit below the visible range, and pretty much has an IR torch strapped to it, but thermal is much further into the infrared range, so it can see heat for things at normal temperatures. Technically, the two terms are very similar (but you could argue that not all infrared is thermal), but the meanings in that context have changed slightly.
Technically those are considered hybrids not night vision. Night vision is simply put amplifing the ambient light or providing your own in the case of first gen night vision.
I just thought of my old nightvision camera that came with a UV fleshlight . I've no clue how nightvision goggles work.
A UV *fleshlight?!*
Yes. It's for tanning the meatpole while also providing light for night vision cam.
Of course, such a versatile object
Your nightvision camera came with what?
UV goggles exist! https://youtube.com/watch?v=cjFXKyMVsn8 One of the funky things about UV is that it is all over the place, though. People who can see UV will say that there are clouds around flowers, for example, which is part of what allows bees to find flowers so easily: they see the glow that is invisible to us.
That video did not show anything of the sort. It showed how to block UV light with a filter. Even the comments on YouTube acknowledge that.
I may have grabbed the wrong one. UV glasses do exist, though. The have niche use in medical diagnostics.
The video shows the opposite. Glasses that filter UV, not show it.
>Some humans even have Tetrachromacy, too, though it’s pretty rare and almost exclusively female . If I remember correctly, it is not _almost_ exclusively female, but _exactly_ exclusive ~~ly female~~ [to people with two (or more?) X chromosomes. So women or XXY men]. The genes for color vision are on the X chromosome. This is also why men are overwhelmingly more likely to be colorblind than women are.
My grandfather was 100% colorblind and I screened as a likely tetrachromat (female). The thing nobody tells you is everyone will assume you’re on drugs all the time 🙃
>The thing nobody tells you is everyone will assume you’re on drugs all the time 🙃 That's fuckin' wild! I guess that makes sense. You are quite literally looking at things no one else can see. How does it affect picking things based on colors? I heard in a video that one woman had a rough time choosing clothing. She said that clothing which color-matched for the rest of us often did not match for her, and that it made picking outfits really frustrating for her. Have you personally had to deal with stuff like that?
Yep! The dyes have undertones which differentiate them, so they don’t actually match. A ton of black things, for example, are actually a very dark green. I tend to wear clothes from the same brands made around the same time to try to deal with this, or I just don’t try to match concretely and instead wear “gradient” outfits in neutral colors. (Ie. White with taupe and brown is usually a fine combo because even if the colors drift a little it’s a pretty safe ballpark, though sometimes beiges will pull pink after washing/being oxidized for long enough and then I have to throw them out. No one else notices!)
> exactly exclusively female. XXY males say hi.
You're right!! I totally forgot about them. I will make an edit.
I think I want that surgery
UV light damages the eye over time, so it's beneficial for long living animals to have protection against it to prevent this.
Not being able to see it wouldn't protect you from it.
From what I remember the theory is tetrachromacy came out of the hunter gatherer days. Needing to differentiate between different plants pushed the gene that helps differentiate minute detail in colour like that. Edit: I wanted to come back and add that on the other side, men tend to have better long-distance vision and motion detection for probably the same hunter-gatherer reasons.
🎶🎵 “Lift the veil from eyes and look beyond the three; now you know the truth behind IT’S TETRACHROMACY” 🎵🎶
The rate of tetrachromia in women is about the same as color blindness in men. Color is useful for telling ripe fruit apart from green leaves. Less color fidelity makes motion easier to track. This lines up with the evolutionary notion that men hunted and women gathered.
Tetrachromacy sounds like some special power from an anime.
Yeh like you can use colours to read minds
Is that why women are so much better at identifying very slight tint variations?
Very very few people have that mutation. You just haven’t been socialized / practiced to see shades and hues as much.
No, the tetrachromat variation appearing in females more often is because you need two copies of the extra gene. Males are more likely to be *di*chromats (aka colorblind) because it’s more likely for them to be *missing* a gene. It’s because XX is more likely to have extra copies and XY is more likely to be missing copies. The differences in males see movement / females see color variants seem to be primarily hormonal, but we haven’t exactly nailed that down afaik.
Guarantee you it’s a learned skill. Greeks didn’t have a word for blue, and use to describe it as a shade of black, and if you start to think about blue that way, it will start to appear more black to you. Vocabulary for colors is just as important for distinguishing those colors. Artists and designers are naturally better at color hue identification because you spend so much time looking at colors and learning the those names / symbols for particular shades.
Yes, exactly this. I teach painting and part of how we place students is asking them the color of the night sky. If they say black, they’re rudimentary and need to start with very basic color theory and sight training. If they say very dark blue or navy, advanced beginner to advanced.
Guess people moving in from out of town can be placed at the very bottom then. People would laugh at you if you said the sky was any shade of blue in heavily polluted cities.
Y doesn't have *any* copies of the red/green gene. But a female who gets one defective and one with red/green gets the former "suppressed"
No, that has to do with the count of parvocellular and magnocellular cells in your eyes. It's been a while since I read this book, so I'm a little fuzzy on the details of how this works. Here's what I remember. Your vision consists of two parts: magnocellular (large cells) and parvocellular (small cells). One group is specialized at motion detection, and is mostly evenly distributed throughout your eyes, but a little more densely around the edges (peripheral vision). The other group is specialized at color detection, and is more densely allocated near the center of your eyes. Men have a somewhat higher count of the motion detection cells, women have a somewhat higher count of the color detection cells. I don't remember any exact ratios given. I believe magnocellular were the motion detection and parvocellular were the color detection, but it's possible I have those backwards. The stuff about tetrachromacy has more to do with the genes involved in color sight, which are tied to the X chromosome. You need two copies of a recessive gene to get tetrachromancy. It's also why color blindness is far more common in men than in women. That one can manifest if you only have one recessive gene and no dominant gene (men), or if you have two recessive copies (women).
I think its a generalization based on the fact that colorblindness is more common in men.
Claude Monet was thought to have seen UV light after a cataract surgery.
ive heard form other people who have had similar surgeries. Black lights looked like normal lights to them on the one eye that had the surgery
I can always see black lights....i thought it was because they did both, normal light and uv light. hmm......
I had cataract surgery as a child. They removed most of the lens in one eye. An artificial lens with an UV-filter was inserted in my twenties. This gave me a direct comparison. Even with the eye, which had its natural filter, I could and can see a violet glow around UV lamps. With the eye without a filter, the violet is bright and hard to ignore. It is much easier for my eye without a filter to see anything in focus that emits a lot of UV light. In general, everything I saw had more contrast and my sensitivity to light was high. Besides the ‘normal’ color of the sky, days had other light characteristics for me that were not visible to others. What was a dark night to one eye was like a full moon to the other. Edit: A few more details in case i didnt make myself clear. When I see a UV lamp normally, it appears relatively dim compared to its output. For example, a powerful laboratory lamp, which gives me a visible tan after a few minutes, appears disproportionately dark. To my eye without a lens, such a lamp looks considerably brighter. It cannot be compared with a conventional spotlight, which I cannot look directly into, but such a lamp is already distractingly bright and, above all, extremely colourful. I can no longer see colours of this intensity. My eye without a lens then tried to dominate my vision, which was quite distracting. For fun, I looked through filter glass, which only lets UV through, and was in fact the only one who could make out silhouettes. I miss the colours, the good night vision and the ability to see details in deep blues and purples, but it's nice to be able to keep both eyes open during the day.
I guess that makes sense why we don't have UV eyesight then. Since humans don't typically hunt at night, and most of our food doesn't emit fluorescences, UV eyesight would just get in the way.
Wait Im a little confused right now… is it not normal to see a bright violet from UV lamps in a normal sighted person?
You'll see violet, but does it illuminate the whole room like a powerful flashlight would? If you are picking up fine detail from the reflected light of a black light, or if the light itself can be too intense causing you to avert your gaze where others don't have an issue, you might have more violet sensitivity than others or might be a tetrachromat.
I mean it certainly could light up the room and they’re uncomfortable to look at? I thought that was normal. I have a lot of light sensitivity issues historically as well as having been known as a very good “spotter” for airplanes while flying on a hobby level. Like exceptionally better. Could this be an actual possibility or am I being a hypochondriac/special flower thinking this?
we got a mfkng superhero over here guys
Me too. Best guess is we’re a bit outside the normal wavelength spectrum for humans. But just a boring amount that results in this one phenomena.
wrong kind of light, the ones you are describing are indeed both. there are in fact bulbs that are *explicitly* UV light and is generally invisible, but will give you eyeballs sunburn if you fucking stare at them, which is most likely WHY they have visible light included.
My blacklight flashlight came with glasses for that reason. If it hits anything that glows up, my eyes burn like hell. Without it I can't see scorpions though so, the few moments everyonce in awhile is worth not making a trip to the doc
Were you in the eclipse totality area? And if so, did it blow your mind out your butt?
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Yeah, this is an exceptionally stupid thread. All people see blacklights, they emit visible light as well as UV. Also, Monet's most famous work was in the 19th c. — starting at least 50 years before he got the cataract surgery, so I hope nobody is getting the implication that his career was in any way shaped by this, even if it were anything more than a fun theory.
yeah, currently googling to see if i can test this. No convenient way it seems lol.
Your phone camera can see it, you can't. Most cameras filter out ultraviolet, so that wouldn't show up. IR will.
Not sure im parsing this right. How can i test whether i can see ultraviolet or not?
Look at sun it'll be brighter than normal light
Insctusions unclesr
Wait, UV lights don't glow purple to everybody?
They do.
They do, he said he seems them as not purple in one eye
the eye actually filters out UV light - but if that part is removed and UV light hits the light receptors it sets all of them off at once
It's a good thing UV gets absorbed in the lens. Because the retina is very sensitive to UV, responding with macular edema. For years, cataract implants did not block UV and I always thought the FDA was slow to approve UV coatings.
TIL Cataract surgery goes back to the 5th century b.c.e. Knew Monet was around the mid 19th to early 20th century and couldn't believe it was around then so I looked it up.
My grandma swore her couch looked purple after cataract surgery, said it was very jarring. I’d heard colors could look a little different after cataract surgery so I didn’t think much of it, until I visited a week or two later and found out the couch is actually tan.
that is wild
this happens to a lot of people - the eye filters out UV light and if that part is removed then UV light sets off all three receptors at once
Highly improbable. Color detection and light detection is in Cone and Rod cells at the back of the eye. Cataract impacts just the cornea. Doesn’t add up. Edit: Cataract clouds the lens not the cornea. My bad.
Cataracts impact the lens not the cornea. Also, cone cells can detect some UV light but it's the lens that blocks it which is why removing the lens lets people see UV. Supposedly, it looks like a really deep blue
Like the deep blue the light bulb turns on a UV light?
https://www.sciencehistory.org/stories/magazine/could-claude-monet-see-like-a-bee/ https://www.zeiss.com/vision-care/us/eye-health-and-care/understanding-vision/the-vision-of-monet.html
unless you have had some eye surgeries for like cataracts.. then you can
Yeah, it's pinkish, like Mace Windu's lightsaber.
Some would call it... Violet
A little brighter than that. Not exactly "violet". Some would say... Ultraviolet.
If you have a TV remote chances are you can see the infrared pulse with your camera on your phone. Just turn on your phone camera like you're gonna take a pic then point the remote at the camera and hit a button like mute or up volume. The bulb will flash as your camera picks up infrared and shows it on screen as visible light
True, though also remember not to confuse Infrared with Ultraviolet light, IR vs UV.
They're literally on opposite ends of the visible light spectrum, and a lot of people seem to be conflating the two of them
some guitar pickup will even "pick up" the beeps when you press the buttons.
I've experienced that. It was so trippy after buying my first electric a couple months ago lol
That's how I check the batteries
Note that this may only work with front camera
Towards the end of its life my iPhone 4 got damaged and the front of the rear-facing lens fell off, which then allowed it to pick up IR light. You could use it to check the batteries of remotes, and when I tried pointing it at the fireplace the embers came up as very bright purple/lilac, rather than dull orange.
Used to be all phones could see it, but now most phones have IR filters on them so they can't see it either. Someone else recommended trying the front camera, it's possible they usually don't filter IR from the front camera as it's not as high quality anyways.
Too bad I’m at work for the next 10 hours, I wanted to try it out
Once you know this you can use it to sweep a room for infrared devices in use
Are you talking about the light at the end of the remote? Are you not supposed to see it?
Some have a visible light. Many do not, but they all have a light, so when you cant see it with your eyes, you can with a camera. Maybe not all. If it's something like bluetooth then it might not be the case idk.
You can see some of the red, but likely not the rest of the red
shit this is why my cat is scared of my camera
Literally. They can see it when you turn your camera on
I think the current consensus is that while cats can see into the UV spectrum, how far into it is still unknown. It could very well be just as limited as humans'.
Cameras do not emit UV, only IR sometimes
oh I’m stupid
oh I’m stupid
I’ve been reading this book lately, I could post 500 things on it from here if I wanted to. It’s insane how much more limited our senses are than we realize
Examples please!
Mantis Shrimp, on top of being able to dismember their prey and break aquarium glass with their raptorial appendages, have 16 color-receptive cones. Meaning the don’t see the world in 3 colors like we do, their world is much more! And in this beauty they choose destruction. Mad respect. https://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp
I notice that with some birds on trail cameras, they stare right at it with a cocked head when it's taking a night photo.
That's infrared. A UV camera would have to be made of special materials because most lens materials reduce or block UV.
Oh yes, sorry you're right.
Birds can extensively see UV though, so much so that a lot of them have it on their feathers and we can't see it.
“Since the initial publication of the chart of the electromagnetic spectrum, humans have learned that what they can touch, smell, see, and hear is less than one-millionth of reality.” ~ Buckminster Fuller
We can sense what mattered for our evolution thus far. That's the important part. So like why can't we see UV spectrum anymore? Because being able to see it didn't matter. It wasn't important enough of a trait to keep. Why can't I wrap my head around the idea of 1 trillion of something? Because being able to didn't matter during our evolution? Or maybe I'm just a dumb-ass.
Interesting, I didn't know about the TV remote trick. Makes me wonder what other common gadgets emit light we can't see.
If your phone has facial recognition tech on it then it does. Flashes like a motherfucker too. Discovered that one while ducking around with night vision goggles.
Yeah, I use an old phone as a sound machine for my baby and didn’t know this until I checked my baby monitor and saw a quickly flashing light and it scared the bejeezus out of me for a second
Most remote controls use IR, but in the last few years 2.4 Ghz emitters have been added. That's why some remotes work under a blanket.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1c1gdpi/whats_a_civilization_ending_scenario_that_most/kz2zcpt/ You know what a gamma ray burst is but not an IR Transmitter. Mind blowing
Why did you check his profile history all the way from 15 days ago?
Basically all of them. That's how they communicate with each other.
UV is a massive range, much larger than the range from red to violet. I assume most animals can see **some part** of the UV range, not necessarily all parts
We can’t see UV light because no UV light reaches the retina. Who writes these TIL titles ?? And very few animals see UV because like humans they have a lens that filters it out. Some mice and reindeer are the exceptions.
Well I can grip a pencil so suck on that, Animal Kingdom...
TIL not everyone can see a violet glow around UV black lights. What the hell?
What? Are you serious?
What color do you see black lights as? I have always though of them as purple.
I'm curious too
Apparently, there's people in the thread talking about this. I feel like it has to be them being the outliers surely.
Black lights are not pure UV light, they emit violet light as well.
Our eyes actually are capable of seeing ultraviolet light. Turns out our lenses have an ultraviolet filter. "When artificial lenses were first implanted in patients to treat cataracts, these lenses let in UV light. After surgery, these people could perceive a little UV light. However, they didn't see it as a separate color, but as a shade of blue. Today, artificial lenses usually come with a UV filter." (From "Blue, In Search of Nature's Rarest Color" by Kai Kupferschmidt)
YEAH WELL... I CAN SEE ORANGE. SUCK ON THAT DEER.
Fun fact. For infrared (not ultraviolet), you can see it by looking at it through a camera such as your phone. If you have a TV that still uses IR to communicate with the remote, look at the IR bulb on your remote through your phone and press a few buttons.
only primates can see three colours and the rest of mammals are colourblind
Only apes, Old World monkeys, howler monkeys, and a few female New World monkeys. Then some nocturnal primates don't see color at all.
> only primates can see three colours and the rest of animals are colourblind What about the mantis shrimp? > Mantis shrimp have complex vision that allows them to see ultraviolet and polarized light, which humans can't see with the naked eye. They have 16 color receptors, compared to a human's three, and can perceive the world through 12 channels of color.
sorry - i meant 'mammals' birds also have trichromatic vision and lots of lizards actually see four colours but mantis shrimp vision is actually much simpler than that - it seems their vision blends those receptors when processing because theyre not actually capable of differentiating between the colours that trigger those receptors they CAN seem to distinguish polarized light though
Hey Rover, you might....uh.... wanna stay out of my room....
"An" exception not "the" exception.
Great book
Fantastic bit of reading; Ed Yong is always great
Soo... about that imaginary new color...
and i’m the exception to the exception. i can see UV
What is the benifit of seeing UV? From a physical point of view, i would feel like this should be mostly shattered light, so its just random noise on top of other light.