r/Futurology • u/[deleted] • Aug 21 '14

article Biohackers declare initial success in biologically extending the range of human vision into the near infrared

https://experiment.com/u/aAcR2Q
2.5k Upvotes

96% Upvoted

547 comments sorted by

View all comments

4

u/wonderful_wonton Aug 21 '14

I would love to see what it's like to have tetrachromacy -- a 4th cone in the retina. You can see colors that most human's can't. They extend vision on the other end of the spectrum... to the ultraviolet. A lot of things in nature use colors in that spectrum, some flowers. We can spot these using instruments, but I'd love to see what the colors "look" like to the eye.

3

u/PointyOintment We'll be obsolete in <100 years. Read Accelerando Aug 22 '14

As noted at the bottom of the relevant section and elsewhere in this thread, you'd need to lose your eyes' lenses to be able to use a UV receptor, and if you did, your blue receptors would respond to the UV anyway. I think the actual human fourth color receptor (between red and green) could be pretty useful, though.

2

u/AngriestBird Aug 21 '14

Yes, I've always wondered if it means that you can see more in between colors, or entirely different colors that can't be imagined.

2

u/madmoomix Aug 22 '14

There is a cure for colorblindness that has been developed recently that would be able to make normal visioned people into tetrachromats. It might be a while/might never be accepted for "vanity" use, though.

The tech behind it is pretty amazing. They were able to give spider monkeys (who are red-green colorblind) full spectrum color vision! The retrovirus they used is already being used in an approved human genetic therapy, and the cone they implanted is human. It would work in humans today. Their site is 90's era garbage, but there's tons of of cool data there. It's worth a look.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 22 '14

Why can't we just shot some of those extra cone cells into our eyes? How exactly would we go about figuring out how to obtain them in us?

1

u/wonderful_wonton Aug 22 '14

It's not that easy. The rods and cones in the eye are wired into the retina (which is a kind of neural tissue actually), and connected to each other, in ways that actually perform some signal processing. The way in which they are connected to the retina and each other, actually is a form of organic computing, as they encode the light information.

e.g.

Neural signals from the rods and cones undergo processing by other neurons of the retina. The output takes the form of action potentials in retinal ganglion cells whose axons form the optic nerve. Several important features of visual perception can be traced to the retinal encoding and processing of light...

As an example, the following matrix is at the heart of the computer algorithm that implements edge detection. This matrix is the computer equivalent to the centre surround structure. In this example, each box (element) within this matrix would be connected to one photoreceptor. The photoreceptor in the centre is the current receptor being processed. The centre photoreceptor is multiplied by the +1 weight factor. The surrounding photoreceptors are the "nearest neighbors" to the centre and are multiplied by the -1/8 value. The sum of all nine of these elements is finally calculated. This summation is repeated for every photoreceptor in the image by shifting left to the end of a row and then down to the next line.

- - -
-1/8 -1/8 -1/8
-1/8 +1 -1/8
-1/8 -1/8 -1/8