What If You Could See Every Wavelength Of The Electromagnetic Spectrum? | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by brilliant org growing up you were probably taught that there were three primary colors red blue and green only that's not completely true there's actually three other primary colors one of which doesn't really exist let's talk color theory actually bear with me this is this is cooler than it sounds so anybody who's worked at a print shop can tell you that the primary print colors the primary inks and pigments are not red blue and green they're actually cyan magenta and yellow and then they had k4 black so CMYK color space why a k4 black because reasons CMYK is what they call subtractive color meaning that if you combine them all together you get black that's what pigments do RGB is additive meaning when you add them all together you actually get white this is what light does and this is the color scheme that's used in video screens any device you might have that you're looking at it's actually made up of pixels and those pixels are made up of three different components of red blue and green light and by altering the intensities of those different colors you can create any color on the spectrum the spectrum of visible light as you probably know is just a small sliver of the entire electromagnetic spectrum which goes from radio waves all the way up to gamma rays what we can see everything that we can see is only in one tiny sliver of wavelengths now if you blow that spectrum up you wind up with that rainbow pattern that we all are familiar with with red down at the end with the longest wavelengths at around 700 nanometers blue on the other end of the spectrum at around 450 and when those wavelengths enter our eyes they connect with cells at the back of our retinas called rods and cones now rods only measure the intensity of light they don't see color at all the cones on the other hand do see colors and we have three of them red ones blue ones and green ones that are all specifically attuned to those wavelengths this is known as trichromacy now obviously we see colors other than red green and blue so when a different wavelength of color enters the eye say yellow it activates the red and green cones and your brain split the difference and you see yellow same on the other side of the spectrum combined green and blue and you get cyan yellow and cyan you might remember are the subtractive primary colors magenta should be a combination of red and blue but the halfway point between red and blue on the spectrum is green but obviously we don't see green we see a color that is nowhere on the light spectrum our brain just makes it up so even though magenta is one of the primary pigment colors that you can combine with the other colors to make all the different colors that we experience out there in the world it doesn't have an actual wavelength associated to it it is completely made up in our brains and of course this is how a person with normal vision sees the world and there are people out there with different types of colorblindness the most common one is known as anomalous trichromacy so they do have all three of their cones but they kind of overlap in the wavelengths that they detect a less common type of colorblindness is called dichromacy which as you can imagine means you only have two different types of cones and then there's monochromacy meaning you don't have any cones at all it's just rods and you see the world only in whites blacks and grays but there are people whose color sensitivity goes in the other direction because instead of having three cones they've got four it's called tetrachromacy and the people who have it see the world in a different way with supersite people with tetrachromacy also known as tetrachromats has something in common with cats or at least a certain breed of cat and has nothing to do with their eyesight and it's not the uncontrollable urge to knock things off of tables or it's not only that calico cats you might be familiar with them are made up of orange and black patches that are made by a combination of one parent that's a black cat and one parent that's an orange cat instead of the cat just inheriting the genes for being a black cat or being an orange cats those black and orange genes kind of battle it out when it's just an embryo just a few hundred cells so some cells get the orange genes some cells get the black genes and then as those cells divide they become patches the thing is this patching can only occur with competing X chromosomes meaning that this is only possible when you have two X chromosomes or a female cat therefore all calicos are female cat facts but you know what you can also get from competing X genes tetrachromacy so all tetrachromats are females sorry guys some 12% of women are thought to be tetrachromats although most of them don't even know that they have it those that do know they have it however have a bit of a superpower on their hands a little bit of a superhuman ability they can't see ten times as many colors as we can despite what some clickbait titles might suggest but they can spot subtle differences in colors that look identical to the rest of us one study of 23 tetrachromats highlighted a woman named Conchita and Tico who had a fourth cone that could detect certain wavelengths that others couldn't Concetta was able to distinguish between two orange lights one of which was a pure orange light and the other was a combination of red and green light without her extra cone those lights would have been indistinguishable although her training as an artist probably helped as well the fact that she's an artist shouldn't be surprising in fact by the time the study was over they found two more artists that also were tetrachromats that seems unfair like a singer with two vocal cords being extra sensitive to color does have its downsides though there's a journalist named Maureen C Burke who's a tetrachromats she talked about how she has a lot of trouble finding clothes that match because even though the top and the bottom might look perfectly matched to the rest of us to her they look wildly different and Conchata actually told the people in the study that sometimes she feels really overwhelmed in grocery stores because of all the colors coming off of the signage and the packaging on one night now another thing that's interesting is that a lot of tetrachromats have children who are ironically colorblind it's like they just used up all the cones and other kids can't get any in fact this condition was first discovered in a study of colorblind men's mothers the author's hypothesis was that if a man has colorblindness because he has abnormal vision coding and his X chromosome it must be because his mother has at least four varieties of cones and her x chromosomes this is an image from the original paper it illustrates the cone coding X genes of one mother see the a-29 and her three sons as you can see son in 29 inherited a normal set of cones shown here as solid blocks of red and green while it's brothers both got an abnormal red green mix mom has both sets which caused her eyes to develop a mosaic of normal and abnormal cone cells similar to how a calico cat develops mosaic fur so this extra cone this this superpower obviously it has some advantages and feels like art but really humans see color better than most animals do already dogs for example are dichromatic they only have two types of cell so they see the world in mostly yellows blues and grays although they do have more lights in seeing rods than we do and they also obviously rely a lot more on smell and other senses and other animals especially insects can see in all kinds of wavelengths that we can't see but the mantis shrimp is what really takes the cake it has 16 different types of photoreceptors in its eyes there's just so much in the electromagnetic spectrum that we just can't see it kind of seems like a waste but what if we could see in those wavelengths let's start with the infrared which surprisingly we actually might be able to see more of it than we think we can a 2014 study concluded that we might actually be able to see at least a little bit of infrared light they came to this conclusion with participants in their study reported seeing flashes of light when they shined an infrared laser at a certain part of the eye which what don't shine lasers in your eyes that does not sound safe of course this could be a similar bright flash effect that astronauts have been reporting for decades although it's thought that those are caused by cosmic rays nobody knows exactly how the astronauts are seeing these flashes they don't know if it's actually you know hitting the back of the eye or affecting the optic nerve or maybe just penetrating the skull and going right into the vision center of the brain directly where the flashes could even be the Cherenkov radiation which is the light speed equivalent of a sonic boom happening right inside their eyeball sonic booms in the eye nothing to worry about there if you really could see infrared light that would be really interesting everything that has heat gives off infrared so like the human body at 98.6 degrees that basically just glows which is why police use it to catch criminals they've also used it to just scan people's homes to see if they're growing marijuana because if you have a lot of lights growing marijuana that gives off a lot of heat so from the outside the house would kind of glow in that one room clever sure but it was actually declared unconstitutional because it violates Fourth Amendment rights but the point is you'd be able to see temperature variations and probably you know people inside their homes stuff you probably shouldn't be able to see now on the other side of the visible spectrum is ultraviolet light which it turns out you could actually see that as well if you get your lenses removed the painter Claude Monet had to have a lens removed from one of due to cataracts and apparently he saw white flowers as sort of a pale blue from that point forward and that's reflected in his paintings now if you could actually see UV light it would be kind of everywhere UV light is especially in the daytime that's why we have to wear sunscreen that's what penetrates our skin and causes problems there but at night the stars would be like super lit up and bright it being a fantastic looking scene you would probably also see ultraviolet light coming out of most light bulbs but what if you could see the entire electromagnetic spectrum now that kind of depends on what you mean by see are you actually creating an image or you just sort of detecting different wavelengths your brain would have a lot of adjusting to do presuming it could even do so it would need to be able to parse out different kinds of the spectrum because otherwise it would just be completely overwhelming high-energy gamma rays wouldn't be too hard to deal with the atmosphere kind of filters most of those out from the outside probably most of what you would see would come from radioactive sources which again hopefully you're not around very much there's an experiment called the Peltier cloud that allows you to see neutrons firing out of uranium or other radioactive elements being able to see gamma radiation might be kind of like this you just see plumes of energy firing out of radioactive sources seeing x-rays would be pretty trippy you know it travels through clothes and skin so like as you're talking to somebody you might see little flashes of their their bone structure while you're talking that might be like kind of weird luckily x-rays aren't that common out in the normal world except for you know in doctors offices why don't we be able to see through your eyelids radio waves traveling huge wavelengths that can actually go all the way around buildings so seeing radio waves might be like giant ribbons kind of blowing through cities but radio actually might be kind of overwhelming because there's a whole lot of it that comes out of the Sun not to mention TV signals audio GPS and Wi-Fi it would just it would just be everywhere now microwaves that might actually be kind of a nightmare because you would be constantly bombarded from light from the big bang light from the early universe has been stretching throughout all this time so we actually perceive it now as the cosmic microwave background radiation which means at night the entire sky would be lit up with microwave radiation like it would be as bright as in the daytime except would be coming from all directions of course every organism evolves sensitivity to different wavelengths of light they're advantageous to them you know the ability to see everything on the spectrum probably wouldn't really be helpful because you wouldn't be able to discern anything it's thought that we humans developed trichromatic vision because earlier in our days and we were foragers and gatherers you know it kind of helped to be able to pick out the different types of fruits and berries and that kind of thing of course in a way we've kind of evolved beyond our trichromatic vision already you know we can manipulate x-rays to see inside the human body we can make cameras that can detect UV and infrared and we can use microwave to heat up our Jimmy Dean sausage so tetrachromats might not have super sight per se unless you consider not being able to find match clothing superpower but it's always interesting when you find out that somebody else can perceive something that you can't our conscious experience is just so singular and so subjective it's just it's just hard to imagine that somebody else can look at the same thing or taste or touch or smell the same thing and get a completely different experience than we have from it but as we talked about many times on here our senses are simply the information gatherers that collect information and they send that information of the brain the brain is what interprets it and gives us the sensations that we feel so really when you think about it it's kind of amazing that we're on the same page as much as we are all the way down to collectively seeing a color that doesn't exist but what about you do you have tetrachromacy are you color blind you have any other kind of visual weirdness that is worth talking about just cuts down the comments I won't hear about it and if this whole different wavelengths of light things got too curious and you want to learn more about how that works guess what there's an entire course called waves and light on brilliant doughnut org this course helps break down not just visible light waves but sound waves as well and helps explain all the ways in which they're similar and different so that you can have a better understanding of both by understanding how waves work you'll walk away from this course with a deeper knowledge of earthquakes noise cancelling headphones musical instruments and the Doppler effect this of course is just one of dozens of interactive courses on brilliant from basic science fundamentals to advanced calculus that walk you through a series of puzzles so you can learn it in a way that makes the most sense to you and you can apply that to other areas of you can sign up for free at brilliant darks last answers with Joe and get access to their free weekly brain teasers and puzzles and if you want to sign up for the premium subscription that gives you access to other courses you can the first 200 people have signed up for it can get 20% off your subscription for life britain's been an awesome supporter of this channel so I am happy to show them some brilliant org slice answers with Joe link is down the description big thanks to brilliant for sponsoring this video and a huge shout out to the answer files on patreon that are starting an awesome community and interacting with me I'm getting to know you guys it's really awesome there's some new people I got a murder their names real quick we got Dylan hi you tin yours enzmann I'm 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care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 990,171

Keywords: answers with joe, electromagnetic spectrum, trichromacy, tetrachromacy, dichromate, color blindness, anomalous trichromacy, color theory, magenta, infrared light, ultraviolet light, calico cats, super sight, mantis shrimp

Id: Dq9SU5dUj48

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 09 2019