
How Animals See the World - yread
http://nautil.us/issue/11/light/how-animals-see-the-world
======
yk
The problem is of course, that we still map these different effects to the
human perceptible colors, and then use a human brain and a ontology shaped by
human perception to understand the resulting picture. So this needs a footnote
in the form of Nagel's _What is it like to be a bat?_ [1]

[1]
[http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf](http://organizations.utep.edu/Portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf)

~~~
te_platt
Hacker News is a funny place. I saw the story and thought "Ha! That is only a
small part of it. They should read Nagel's 'What is it like to be a bat?'". Of
course the top rated comment would already say that - obvious really. Also
sometimes sentences here end with ?'". and make perfect (I think) sense.

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devindotcom
Ahh - this stuff always disappoints me. It's so simplistic to suggest that
animals like bees see just like us, but with a different color scale or
something. The different wavelength sensitivity is one thing, but the entire
experience of vision would be fundamentally different for an insect - from the
basic optics of ommatidia to the faster perception of time and a dozen other
things. Nautilus is a good site but this type of article I can simply never
take seriously - like right-brain/left-brain stuff, for me it feels too
transformative of the facts to be really informative.

~~~
derefr
I would think the most direct approach to exploring other animals' "experience
of vision", would be to use the machine-learning algorithms we've trained to
extract sense data from the human optic-nerve/neocortex, run them on
recordings of other animal-brains, and see what we get.

~~~
devindotcom
unfortunately, the raw data coming from the eye is very much just that, raw.
the experience of vision is only completed after much processing in the
sensory cortex. There's a huge amount of metadata that gets mixed in with the
stream - things like edge detection, attention, motion prediction, and so on.
And even that's going to differ from person to person.

Although it would be very interesting if we could hijack an optic nerve
stream, calibrate it using a test image, and then attempt to recreate the
visual processing units. Unfortunately this falls prey to the same fundamental
problems in some ways - we will only be able to interpret the signal of a
mouse or cat in a way that we understand. That is, we would attempt to
recreate a signal that is coherent to us and makes sense to our visual system,
but that isn't really representative of their actual visual experience.

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rthomas6
They forgot Mantis Shrimp! Mantis shrimps see pretty much everything.
Polarization, colors, ultraviolet, you name it.

~~~
gbaygon
Thanks for the good read! ref:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis_shrimp#Eyes)

~~~
chestervonwinch
A good one from the oatmeal:
[http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp](http://theoatmeal.com/comics/mantis_shrimp)

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melvinmt
"That vision mechanism comes at a price — bees’ eyes have extremely low
resolution, so their vision is very blurred. Nilsson calls this design “the
most stupid way of using the space available for an eye.”"

The article forgets that the compound eye allows bees to have a much higher
"frame rate" per "pixel" than a human eye ever could have.

~~~
TheZenPsycho
there's also the whole thing where a compound eye enables the capture of a
full light field, e.g. like the Lytro camera which uses a "plenoptic" system
to capture image data that can be re-focused or used to create 3D images after
being taken.

Which rather implies that a bee has a full 360 degree constant 3D model of its
environment, but without the heavy memory and processing requirements needed
in human vision to get that.

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pavel_lishin
Kind of relevant: [http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/power-lines-look-
li...](http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/nature/power-lines-look-like-
terrifying-bursts-of-light-to-animals/)

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ableal
Interesting bit near the end:

 _" And even though they have incredible color-changing skills — going from
beige to blood-red or striped in the blink of an eye — cuttlefish are totally
colorblind."_

Which raises the question of how cuttlefish mimicry works - how can it imitate
what it does not perceive? There must be some feedback mechanism, what signals
does it use?

I found little in a quick search: "Camouflage is one of the least studied
subjects in biology" (
[http://reefbuilders.com/2011/06/06/cuttlefish/](http://reefbuilders.com/2011/06/06/cuttlefish/)
).

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elnate
Are there cameras capable of taking pictures in a broader spectrum of colours
available for less than a small fortune? I'd like to see photos taken infrared
- ultraviolet 'compressed' into our red-blue range.

~~~
salmonellaeater
Although cameras have built-in filters that block UV and IR light, the IR
portion is often weak and allows some light through. By adding a filter[1]
that blocks visible light, there is often enough IR left to expose a photo[2].
With some caveats[3], it can be a cheap way to see the world in a different
part of the spectrum.

[1] Hoya R72 for example

[2] A tripod is usually necessary since only a fraction of the light makes it
through the filters. Even in bright sunlight a long exposure time may be
required.

[3] Not all lenses work well in IR. Some have internal reflections that lead
to "hot spots" or white patches, and some have bad optics for IR that causes
blur. Similarly, some cameras' IR cut filters are too strong to be useable.

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contulluipeste
I'm surprised to find out that human vision is among the sharpest. I didn't
knew humans outperform over other animals with something else other than brain
and long-distance running.

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lightblade
> But what sets rattlesnakes apart is their ability to sense infrared light.

Ah, this starts to sound like snakes are dinosaurs evolved to prey on mammals.

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gulbrandr
It's sad to see that this animation
[http://interactive.nautil.us/inter_13/](http://interactive.nautil.us/inter_13/)
requires 312KB of JavaScript.

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protopete
So when will these filters be available on WolframAlpha?

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slazaro
Some of them will be impossible because digital images are already limited to
human visible ranges, so you don't have infrared or ultraviolet values. But
there could be filters for transformations within our ranges.

~~~
3rd3
So as soon WolframAlpha has strong AI which can interpret and simulate the
scene (maybe in 10-200 years?).

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joerich
I think it is an interesting and cool piece of news but not impressive. I
think it is more impressive to think that human beings have the same eyes but
we see a different World..

