color blindness

As you will pick up from future posts, I find avian coloration and color perception very engaging. Dr. Geoff Hill of Auburn is what you might call an expert in the area, and he inspired my interest along with many other students’ that came through his ornithology class.

Take a look at your surroundings right now. You see a mix of colors, all formed from a combination of different frequencies of electromagnetic radiation that fall within the visible light range. I know you’ve seen this before:

 

Our eyes, however, cannot detect all of these frequencies. Our color sensors- called cones- can actually only pick up three little ranges of color (red, green, and blue). Your cones tell your brain how much of those three colors, and in which combination, that they sense. Your brain does the rest. That’s right- purple is actually a figment of your imagination- your eye knows not what purple is.

But what if our eyes could pick up a fourth frequency with which our brains could then mix up colors? What would those colors look like? Maybe a really bright red. Or a rich blue. Electric green. No no no. We’re still thinking within our human color box. These new colors would be completely outside of what we know as visual experience. We cannot visualize them. Even if we built a special machine to project images with these new frequencies of radiation, our eyes simply do not have the machinery with which to see it. It is invisible to human eyes, and we will never know.

Perhaps our resources would be better directed towards breeding super-intelligent and literate birds so that they can describe the experience to us. That’s right- birds have a fourth cone from which to generate colors. They see ultra-violet light: that same elusive and abstract energy that we know to cause melanoma and plants to grow. They can see it. They see the designs on flowers that are invisible to us. They also see designs on each other that are invisible to us.

You see a brown bird with simple white streaks on its breast. Big deal. But if a third bird party views our brown and white friend, it may see flecks of the most unimaginable color dancing across its feathers in intricate patterns. And we will never know what it looks like.

It seems silly that we as a species can be so innovative, but we simply cannot find a way around our ignorance of this vivid color world that exists around us.

For exploration: 

http://shop.nationalgeographic.com/ngs/product/books/animals-and-nature/animals-and-wildlife/national-geographic-bird-coloration