Enjoy your forbidden color, you earned it!
Not to say the laser is a waste, despite the above I'd argue it's very useful. It lets us test how effectively the above actually works, and has other applications.
The laser system results in a stronger perceptual effect than you get from the illusion alone. We didn't have the technology to build it until recently. I'm certain the people who built it knew about the illusion, and it's probably what inspired the experiment in the first place.
But try to maintain laser focus on the central dot, not letting your eyes move or blink if you can help it. Once the black bar depletes, the circle should start shrinking, and around its periphery (like an eclipse) should be some incredibly vivid, super saturated colors.
Yeah… it’s gonna be hard to distinguish those in the best of circumstances.
When the circle was around the halfway point of shrinking the color looked the most vivid for me, so be sure to wait the whole duration.
How do you describe the experience scientifically? Do you get a whole bunch of extra colors you'd want to give a distinct name since they're so clearly different from the standard trichromatic colors?
Is a computer screen annoying because it can only produce a subset of the colors you can see?
Do you notice that you have a fourth parameter or dimension in the colors you see, so would want a 4th component in RGB, HSV, etc... color sliders? E.g. for our HSL, would the fourth parameter be hue-like, saturation-like, lightness like or some completely novel other thing? If hue like, do the hues also form a 2D sphere or torus like topology similar to how our trichromatic hue forms a circle?
I'd expect at least twice or 3x as many named colors, since for every regular color (red, green, blue, yellow, orange, purple, pink, grey, brown, black, white, ...) , you'd have a fourth dimension altering it that can be low, medium or high in value ...
E.g. for our yellow, you'd have yellow with not the extra signal, a bit of the extra signal or lots of the extra signal. Is this the case or not? Perhaps the overlapping reduces it, but as said in the article trichromats also have overlap yet we definitely see a lot more distinct colors than dichromats.
If you are bored, try to get Gemini/claude to make a color wheel for birds or tetrachromats.
An aside: Recently I learned that birds are reptiles. That hurt my brain and I’m still recovering. Especially since the modern dinosaur exhibit claiming this fact contradicted the 1980s era reptiles exhibit down the hall (both at the British museum).
We see with good resolution only a small part of our visual field. Perhaps the brain starts to "invent" what's there it we don't give it information by constantly moving eyes.
As a more advanced version, they say that fire kasina practice may produce very interesting visual effects.
The reason is simple: genes coding the long wave opsins (light-sensitive proteins) in these cones have diverged from copies of the same original gene. The evolution of this is very interesting.
Mammals in general have only two types of cones: presumably they lost full color vision in the age of dinosaurs since they were primarily small nocturnal animals or lived in habitats with very limited light (subterranean, piles of leaves, etc.) Primates are the notable exception, and have evolved the third type of cone, enabling trichromatic color vision, as a result of their fruitarian specialization and co-evolution with the tropical fruit trees (same as birds, actually).
So, what's interesting is that New World and Old World primates evolved this cone independently. In Old World primates the third cone resulted from a gene duplication event on the X chromosome, giving rise to two distinct (but pretty similar) opsin genes, with sensitivity peaks at very close wavelengths. As a note, because these genes sit on the X chromosome, colorblindness (defects in one or both of these genes) is much more likely to happen in males.
New World primates have a single polymorphic opsin gene on the X chromosome, with different alleles coding for different sensitivities. So, only some (heterozygous) females in these species typically have full trichromatic vision, while males and the unlucky homozygous females remain dichromatic.
Decent wikipedia article on the subject: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolution_of_color_vision_in_p...
Types of opsins in vertebrates: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vertebrate_visual_opsin
Wow that's wild how heterozygousity can be that helpful. Makes you wonder if there are other genes like that.
It's almost as if there was some evolutionary pressure towards being very visible in sunlight which is more important than evolving ways to collect as much sun energy as possible. When I guess at this I end up with something along the lines of reflected green being used as a signal to a neighboring plant: "I'm already here, grow in some other direction instead." There is some evidence that plants do this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_shyness, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-3040.ep1160...) but it's not clear that the need to do so is so strong that it would overshadow the drive to collect as much energy as possible.
Or perhaps there's something to do with the physics of absorbing light to drive a chemical reaction that makes it better to absorb at red and blue while passing on green (450nm and 680nm are not harmonics--so if this is the case it's more complex than which sorts of standing waves would fit in some chemical gap or other).
Just kidding of course, it is an interesting question.
Also remember that these are random processes with selection pressure keeping those who survive to reproduce. Assigning a will to such processes makes them and the results harder to understand- imho.
Theres probably something more efficient at converting light into simple sugars.
TLDR: Plants are running an energy-harvesting system that can only respond so quickly to changes in light input. Making use of green would cause variance to be large enough that the gains would not offset the losses. So, avoid green and have lower variance --> higher energy capture on average.
For the site operator: the domain is present in the Spamhaus DBL (Domain Block List), which is presumably why these lovely gents are having issues, might wanna check that out.
Should work for anomalous trichromats (by far the majority of people with color deficiencies) but probably with less intensity.
"Folks with deuteranomaly have M cones, but they’re shifted to respond more like L cones."
I don't think this is true. What would the difference between deutan and protan then be?
"Why do you hallucinate that crazy color? I think the red circle saturates the hell out of your red-sensitive L cones. Ordinarily, the green frequencies in the background would stimulate both your green-sensitive M cones and your red-sensitive L cones, due to their overlapping spectra. But the red circle has desensitized your red cones, so you get to experience your M cones firing without your L cones firing as much, and voilà—insane color."
I think only people with missing L cone (Protanopia) or M cone (Deiteranopia) would not experience the phenomenon at all.
Maybe this could be used as a new type of color deficiency test?
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/Chemical/imgche/w...
It’s interesting (kinda optimal) that different cones explore near both edges.
I do not believe I have any kind or amount of colorblindness, so imagine my surprise when extremely confused I pulled the image into MS Paint, used the Color Picker tool, and found that indeed, the background has quite a bit of blue in it.
Anyhow, I cannot reproduce the illusion cited. For me the circle just blurs out and I start seeing orange.
You mean this, right? https://dynomight.net/img/colors/generate.html?inside=ff0000...
The background turns green (???) eventually, kind of like as if ink started to spread across it.
Or you meant full yellow (255r, 255g, 0b) and full red (255r, 0g, 0b)?
> Or if you make the outer circle yellow and the inner circle green, do you see a red halo?
I used the controls this time and made the background full yellow (255r, 255g, 0b) and the inner circle full green (0r, 255g, 0b). Also adjusted the countdown speed, I realized I wasn't patient enough to wait out the 60s before ever (but that also it didn't need to be so long).
During countdown the entire image turned green. Whenever my eyes would move a bit, I'd see either a 3D shadow depth effect or a yellow aura around the circle. When the circle started getting smaller I just saw the yellow aura. Whenever I'd drastically move my eyes, the entire background would revert to yellow, but would quickly go back to seeing green.
I don't really see them being unusually saturated though, but maybe I just don't have a good grasp on what to expect. Maxed out R/G/B or C/M/Y all strike me as super saturated from the get-go.
I have a slight deuteranomaly. I did see the illusion. Pretty!
I didn't expect a strong effect, because the overlap between blue and red/green is so much less than the overlap between red and green, but bright purple is close to the opposite of what I expected. I'm genuinely puzzled.
kadoban•6h ago
Would it be possible to generate ones that _would_ work for specific kinds of colorblindness? Or is the entire concept doomed due to the specific way(s) that colorblind eyes are messed up?
kookamamie•6h ago
qayxc•5h ago
dentemple•5h ago
I suspect, however, that those of us with deuteranomaly probably see a different blue-green than normal-sighted folks due to the bent color cones.
The real question is, what about the folks with Deuteranopia (no working green cones at all)?
Deuteranomaly, though, is still probably the best place to start since that's the big one that affects (some say) up to 10% of all males. Every other form of colorblindness affects a much slimmer percentage of the population.
tricolon•3h ago