Science behind "The dress", mantis shrimp and the human mind
Umwelt - The world as it is experienced by a particular organism.
When a dogs looks at a rainbow, it sees red and yellow with a tiny shade of green. Dogs have only two colour receptors. Humans are endowed with three light detecting receptors in our retinas. This enables us to see the seven majestic rainbow colours. We are not the only species that are blessed with multiple colour receptors. Some birds and reptiles have four receptors; while certain species of butterflies have five know colour receptors. The umwelt of this rainbow for humans can only be described as a vivid hallucinogenic experience.
Listen to the podcast episode by RaidoLabs - Colors
If that isn’t enough to make the rainbow experience of humans and our closest companions feel limiting, imagine the mantis shrimps rainbow. They have twelve colour receptors! Our best mathematic models tell us that one only needs four receptors to effectively encode all the colours within the wavelength of light. Hanne Theon from University of Queensland designed a test to see how many distinct colours the mantis shrimp can perceive, and much to everyone’s surprise she found that these bizarre animals detect fewer colours than butterflies, most birds and even humans. So, why has the mantis shrimp evolved twelve colour receptors when they barely use three?
A compelling working theory suggests that mantis shrimps use their twelve receptors all together. Most animals, including humans ‘discriminate’ between colours and can see through a process of elimination. On the other hand, mantis shrimps truly ‘recognise’ colours and can see them instantaneously which helps in their survival. They’re known to use their big muscle arms, pounding their prey with punches faster than Mohammed Ali’s jab. These wicked blows clock in around 50 miles per hour, or fifty times faster than humans blink, making this the fastest punch in the animal kingdom. The mantis needs quick colour recognition from their vision to compliment these high-speed actions. All this needs to get encoded into their small brains, which has created a novel solution to efficiently download colour inputs quickly through instant recognition.
A few years ago, "the dress" had divided the world on social media. When this dress randomly appeared on social media, it sparked fury and even vision scientists were challenged on their views of how we see the world. Research on the dress shows that the colours that we observe depend on our implicit assumptions about illumination. Some people assume that the dress was illuminated by natural or artificial light, and some assume it was in a shadow. These assumption leads us to make different inferences about the colour of the dress.
Do you see the dress as white-gold? Or do you see blue-black?
Since we trust what we see with our own eyes, we assume that any other way of perceiving it is either wrong, foolish or simply delusional. We often tend to forget that our perceptions of the world are far more unconscious than we realise. This phenomenon with the dress illustrates the power of unconscious and implicit assumptions in our own perceptions. This often translates into polarised debates since we don’t yield a lens on the other perspective and their assumptions of the world.
(The dress is blue-black incase you were still wondering. Try scrolling up slowly)
We are innately limited with our own senses and perspectives, and it may truly be impossible to see the world through the eyes of a mantis shrimp. Nevertheless, we can open our eyes to the possibility of the unknown. We can even stretch our minds to envision that there are perhaps some unknowns that we will never know of. From this, we can start to unlock new doors of perception.
-This article pairs well with The Undivided Five’s album titled 'A Winged Victory for the Sullen'. There is a deftly constructed melody waiting behind every door you open with this beautiful ambient record.