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Comment by devindotcom | Hacker News Reader

Ahh - this stuff always disappoints me. It's so simplistic to suggest that animals like bees see just like us, but with a different color scale or something. The different wavelength sensitivity is one thing, but the entire experience of vision would be fundamentally different for an insect - from the basic optics of ommatidia to the faster perception of time and a dozen other things. Nautilus is a good site but this type of article I can simply never take seriously - like right-brain/left-brain stuff, for me it feels too transformative of the facts to be really informative.

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I would think the most direct approach to exploring other animals' "experience of vision", would be to use the machine-learning algorithms we've trained to extract sense data from the human optic-nerve/neocortex, run them on recordings of other animal-brains, and see what we get.

More likely then not, you'd just get noise.

unfortunately, the raw data coming from the eye is very much just that, raw. the experience of vision is only completed after much processing in the sensory cortex. There's a huge amount of metadata that gets mixed in with the stream - things like edge detection, attention, motion prediction, and so on. And even that's going to differ from person to person.

Although it would be very interesting if we could hijack an optic nerve stream, calibrate it using a test image, and then attempt to recreate the visual processing units. Unfortunately this falls prey to the same fundamental problems in some ways - we will only be able to interpret the signal of a mouse or cat in a way that we understand. That is, we would attempt to recreate a signal that is coherent to us and makes sense to our visual system, but that isn't really representative of their actual visual experience.

But it was informing enough for others (like me) less informed than you. Actually I knew about faster perception of time on insects and probably many other sparse details, but this article does its share to provide information in an accessible an attractive way. Give it credit for that (along with your criticism).

Certainly - and the way of showing it with the sliders is nice. I have a habit of pointing out problems instead of the good bits - usually because the good bits have already been acknowledged a few pixels away, you know?

I face this issue a lot too as a writer who has to take on complex science and make it understandable to a broader audience - something like quantum computing, for instance, or solar concentrator efficiency. It's difficult! And sometimes the details have to take a back seat. But with a lot of vision and cognition stuff I feel that fundamental concepts go by the wayside in order to make it more easily digestible. I think many people could stand and might appreciate taking it to the next level.

http://devin.com/ ?

http://coldewey.cc/

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