Mindscape 201 | Ed Yong on How Animals Sense the World
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- Опубліковано 19 чер 2022
- Patreon: / seanmcarroll
Blog post with audio player, show notes, and transcript: www.preposterousuniverse.com/...
All of us construct models of the world, and update them on the basis of evidence brought to us by our senses. Scientists try to be more rigorous about it, but we all do it. It’s natural that this process will depend on what form that sensory input takes. We know that animals, for example, are typically better or worse than humans at sight, hearing, and so on. And as Ed Yong points out in his new book, it goes far beyond that, as many animals use completely different sensory modalities, from echolocation to direct sensing of electric fields. We talk about what those different capabilities might mean for the animal’s-eye (and -ear, etc.) view of the world.
Ed Yong received Masters and Bachelors degrees in zoology from Cambridge University, and an M.Phil. in biochemistry from University College London. He is currently a staff writer for The Atlantic. His work has appeared in National Geographic, the New Yorker, Wired, the New York Times, and elsewhere. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in explanatory journalism for his coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic. Among his other awards are the George Polk award for science reporting and the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Award for in-depth reporting. His new book is An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.
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Having more types of colour receptors reduces the brainwork required to calculate the colours between the lowest and highest frequencies detected by the eye. Relying on our brain's image processing is how we can see more colours than the Mantis Shrimp despite only having 3 types of receptor vs 12.
The lowest frequency we can see is red and the highest is blue. Roughly in the middle of these 2 is green. These 3 colours are all our eyes can detect. All the other colours we see are created by our brain working on the relative input strengths from each type of receptor (cone). So, yellow for example, is what we see when we have a roughly equal input from our green and red cones - we don't actually see yellow - our brain creates it from those inputs.
I chose yellow because this is the colour that enabled me to experience this fact directly just by walking down the street. Where I used to live, the street was illuminated by low pressure sodium lamps. These lamps emit only yellow light - not a mixture of green and red - just yellow.
How does this look different from a red/green combination?
Well, the light itself looks no different - it is indistiguishable. The difference becomes apparent when you look at cars parked under such street lights - they are all the same colour - they are a monochrome yellow. One car could be red, and the next green, no matter, they are reflecting the same colour. As the lamps only emit yellow light, the cars can only reflect yellow.
A light source made from red and green can be balanced to appear to us exactly the same as the street light but when that light is shone on a red and a green car, you can clearly see those 2 colours.
If we had yellow receptors, we would be able see the difference between the true yellow light and the composite. Recalling that has left me wondering... did they take this into account when they evaluated the Mantis Shrimp's colour vision - I suspect not.
Our brain creates all the colors we see, including red, green, and blue.
fascinating!
@@rumidude Our brain gets direct inputs from those receptors, it does not need to create them. It cannot see any colour other than red, blue and green. All the other colours are calculated, not seen. Is that clear enough?
@@antonystringfellow5152 I totally understand that our eyes have only the three receptors corresponding to the three wavelengths which we see as red, green, and blue. But in each instance our brain still must calculate the color we sense. Remember the blue dress vs gold dress phenomenon several years back? The same kind of thing happens in the rubic's cube color illusion. This is because our brain calculates all the colors we experience from the electro/chemical inputs received from the eyes. Whether it is easier or requires less brain activity to calculate red verses say purple, I am not sure. What I do understand is that all the color happens in our brain.
Looking forward to buying Ed's book(s). I'd only known him as a reporter. What a wonderfully enthusiastic guy.
Lovely conversation!
Fascinating topic! To find a radically different umwelt, one need look no farther than humans. Some have systematically trained themselves to experience their senses without the filter of concepts, including 3-D vision, the perception that there are discreet things, the sense of having a body, and much more. Angelo Dilullo, an anesthesiologist, has a UA-cam channel, Simply Always Awake, where he teaches this.
first hearing about this, nociception sounds like how every other stimulus is processed when its intense enough
too hot, too loud, and too much pressure from sharp objects cause pain
Awesome subject
I’d like to see a categorical attempt at recreating visually what, or how we speculate some different animals “see”. Surely there is a way to approach this.
Covid really showed me how much of my taste is actually based on smell because when I lost my smell all food became boring 1 dimensional sweet, salty etc flavour
We have an Australian native fruit tree called a Davidson Plum in our yard, native to the rainforests of the north east coast of Australia. When they first fall from the tree they are covered is a white/grey dust which glows brightly in UV. This brings to mind that it’s bird food, but these fruit a big. Emus are open plane animals and not rainforest. But we do have a spectacular rainforest bird called a cassowary, which is a rainforest fruit eater, so it’s likely their food. Unfortunately cassowaries are endangered and only now found in the Daintree rainforest, and not in suburban Brisbane.
Do fruit bats go for these?
@@NessieJapan not that we’ve seen. We have fruit bats taking nectar from our 20m high Alexander palms, but never seem to touch the Davidson Plum.
OK, gotta digest much of this later. Brain overflow on my part. I mean I kinda get what he says, but trying to fit into my worldview is where I need more time. Obviously I should get his book.
I'm surprised that they didn't discuss how animals are aware of natural disasters before they occur, especially tsunamis...
Very interesting...
Ian M. Banks could have used this book as a source of inspiration for his aliens. He'd have invented water-word aliens talking about the world as an electric eel would if it could.
Great watch!
For electrical fish, as other smaller animals are alive, have a metabolism, and assume electrolytes, then these would manipulate the electric field in a different way from a plant or a stick. Metallic ore rocks would appear interesting but as they don’t move should be discenable from food….. fascinating, would be brilliant to study, model and test.
knowing that electric fish use electric fields to communicate as well as perceive, is it possible for us to create an electronic device to communicate with the fishes directly?
Ed's opinions on the incompatibility of other sense modalities with the human brain sort of flies in the face of David Eagleman (and others') research on sensory substitution, doesn't it?
This overlaps with the concept of varying ontologies. Computer scientists have to consider the ontology necessary for a program to work. Daniel Dennett has a good description of the elevator ontology when the human operators were replaced. It’s no surprise animals evolve different ontologies to attend to what’s relevant to their survival.
I suspect that humans may rather quickly adapt to a ducks hemispherical visual field.
In experiments where our visual filed is inverted the brain very quickly adjust to that, to the point where removing the device causes uncorrected vision to appear inverted for a short time. The neuroplasticity of our visual cortex seems very rapidly adaptive.
Would be an interesting experiment to run.
do you remember how quickly the timescale was? hours?
THe movie Avatar keeps entering my mind as I listen to this...
I've always wondered if they ever did, or already did a visualization of different animal senses. Like tracking a scent by a canine, or magnification of certain birds vision or how they sense the direction via magnetic fields. Or any other of the thousands of animals.
I remember somebody making a color wheel for the color vision of pigeons, which have 5 primary colors, two more than our 3 (and then there were like a dozen extra secondary colors, one for each combination). What was funny is the wheel was just filled in black for the colors we couldn't see.
4:40
are there animals out there that can distinguish different polarizations of light? i don't know how that can be used to forage food or avoid predators, but still...
Mantis shrimp infact they can even see circularly polarized light. They are out of the world!!
Human vision isn't quite as simple as you described. The Action Lab explained the topic really well a while ago: ua-cam.com/video/cQCsDfEqr9o/v-deo.html
or radio wave? maybe there's a WiFi-detecting insect out there that we don't know about
1D, 2D and 3D are (spatial)
1D: (L)
2D: (L+W)
3D: (L+W+H)
4D, 5D and 6D are 'temporal'
4D: 'length' of (3D)
》one-way flow of time 》
- the illusion of free-will comes to mind.
5D:
'length/breadth' of
(3D) 《space-time》
6D:
'length/breadth/depth' of (3D)
《》atemporal?《》
do we know why, of all animals, a shrimp developed that many photoreceptors?
Hey Master Sean Caroll. Please do a podcast with Donald Hoffman about consciousness
Ex. Marvel's "Electro" and "The Living Laser".
Of course, all senses in all animals are electric at the lowest level.
I would like to have heard how different animals sense and experience time.
The size of the brain certainly matter for how different animals process information. A bird with a small brain can transfer data to the entire brain much faster since its small. I think that is also why birds react very fast when they fly around. Most likely they also have more experiences pr time unit than a human or an elephant.
I suspect the answer to how different animals sense and experience time is "we dont know exactly".
@@3dlabs99 I have seen a science show where they show how a snail experiences time because they only see frames, like a Kodak carousel. So they get snapshots of time.
Furries are Friends! ^.^
i can imagine an alien species out there being able to sense neutrinos passing through matter. that would be so cool
Not sure how that'd ever evolve....but I guess thats the point
@@ethan7353 how humans detect neutrino now is by converting its interaction with matter into electric currents, which we know can be sensed by some animals
deeep scifi, but still...
This man could hear a pin drop on Mars