It would be new colors. Visible light is a specific range. The chemicals in your cones react to visible light differently than other wavelengths. It's not that radio waves aren't hitting your retinas, it's that your don't have the special goo to do anything with them.
If you had the special goo on top of the goo you already have, it would give a different signal to your brain than visible light. In order for the stretching scenario to occur, your goo would react to all forms of EM radiation but, for some reason, the signals are the exact same as visible light.
This requires more proof. If you were correct, wouldn't it be possible to induce someone to see a vast number of colors that "don't exist"?
Quite interesting, for me:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/Chimerical-color-demo.svg
Does show instead of the red, a bright pink with violet sprinkles, though.
The other two, do fit though. (To use: Look for 20-60 seconds onto the X of the left column, then switch to the middle column X)
Also a person which got more than three rods: https://johndasfundas.blogspot.com/2015/05/seeing-100-million-colors-100-times.html
Sadly they don't show the wave length in which it works.
Would people with synesthesia have a chance at "seeing" waves outside average range? I know that some or all of them speak of "hearing color" or "seeing sound."
Yeah evidently the lenses filter those wavelengths out for our own protection, and supposedly some of it is perceptible to a degree for people who had the lenses removed. I remember reading somewhere that supposedly navies would use them as spotters, but I don't know how true that is, and it's a little difficult to search. People should also look up tetrachromia. Tetrachromats are people who [seem to] have an extra fourth type of cone that supposedly enriches the distinction between certain hues
edited
I've personally seen new colors when tripping on higher doses of mushrooms.
I don't mean adding pigments surgically. I don't think it would work if you took a person and suddenly gave them the extra pigments required to see UV or whatever.
People already exist that can see more than the standard visible spectrum. It's called tetrachromacy
neat! I knew a lot of birds are tetrachromats, but I didn't know some people are too
The species Gonodactylus smithii is the only organism known to simultaneously detect the four linear and two circular polarisation components required to measure all four Stokes parameters, which yield a full description of polarisation. It is thus believed to have optimal polarisation vision. It is the only animal known to have dynamic polarisation vision. This is achieved by rotational eye movements to maximise the polarisation contrast between the object in focus and its background.
Mantis Shrimp can also punch so fast that it causes sonoluminescence which is the emission of light from imploding bubbles in a liquid when excited by sound.
The tetrachromacy in humans is a bit shit because the additional colour detecting cell picks up light between two other existing cell types - so they can see reddish-orangey-yellow stuff with much greater discrimination but don't help us with the new colour question.
So do those people have 4 primary colors? 6 secondary colors?
What color is 100% red, 100% green, 100% blue, 0% red-green?
I don't really understand primary colours as it relates to vision. Cone cells have a range of sensitivities that vary by person and colours are mapped to wavelengths.
So something reflecting radiation with a wavelength of 470 nanometres looks blue, and something reflecting radiation with a wavelength of 660 nm looks red. Yellow, orange etc still exist at specific wavelengths, but having an extra cone cell that is very sensitive red and green means you could better see the difference between orange at 600 nm and orange at 601 nm, and if you combined that light with blue at 470nm, you'd still get brown but you'd be much better at distinguishing between brown (600nm orange+blue) and brown (601nm orange+blue).
assuming the extra cone type adds one more independent color dimension for her, that makes her a tetrachromat overall.
Assuming? We can't even get a cool claim "yeah I can see the shiny dimension of things"
Tetrachromacy may also enhance vision in dim lighting, or in looking at a screen.
This sucks
Describing the perception of longer wavelengths as "seeing" might be a bit of a stretch. When I was taught about microscopes, it was explained that resolving finer details requires shorter wavelengths of light so the radio waves would be unhelpfully blurry.
Also worth remembering that we're already sensitive to some infrared, which we experience as warmth rather than colour. If new sensing mechanisms are used to respond to other wavelengths of the EM spectrum, and if the brain is able to develop* so that it can integrate and process those inputs, then I imagine they'd be associated with experiences outside the familiar rainbow, just as warmth is.
But if you're just going to somehow redefine the sensitivity† of our retinal pigments, then our brains aren't going to know that, and will process the signals it receives just the same, even if the photons initiating those signals are very different. This is how things like cochlear implants can be useful, after all. What I'm curious about now is: what happens when the chromatic appearance of familiar objects doesn't match memories? Over time, will the brain try to synthesize an experience that links the old and new perceptions?
* Not just in infancy, but evolutionarily, since the visual cortex is going to need to work a whole lot harder. In the absence of those developments, I'd expect new stimuli, at best, to be arbitrarily mapped onto the processing regions for other stimuli, producing a kind of phantom colour experience.
† We sort of do this when we look at false-colour images, and they don't have new colours; the colours we know are shifted and spread across different parts of the EM spectrum.
I don't really have a direct answer to this though I feel like no matter the color being able to see radio waves would be pure misery. I imagine many (most?) electronics would pulse or shimmer with a bright (red?) glow and you'd be able to see it all the time through walls (and your eyelids). Every radio tower, every cell tower, every phone, etc. always visible forever. No fucking thanks
Honestly I think it would just kind of fade into a vague glow which our minds would filter out.
We can already see polarised light, and that's basically how it is
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush
Your eyes might have a second lid which would be able to reduce the penetration depth if that would be a problem. I do think that if the world would be as said, then the world and the human equivalent would be more or less able to deal with it. Though if electricity would've only just been generated, then that evolutionary step might not be done, so goods would've taken that role. blindfolds, farraday cages around your sleeping room and alike.
It would be a world in which special objects are marked like in video games which is a fun idea.
I really like you bringing up what you did though, since your comment made me have nice silly thoughts. Thanks!
oh my god why did they have to ruin the idea of new colors? because stretching, that like, makes sense
i mean sure we literally cannot imagine additional colors so obviously the bottom option is the only available view in our perception. but dat don't make it any less convincing
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I made this pic to explain a thought I had in the other thread lol
If your brain was the same, probably yeah it would stretch.
It would definitely stretch if the only change was that your 2 of your 3 cones changed to detect higher and lower frequencies, and the 3rd just widened - you'd have only one cone dedicated to the narrow spectrum that most people have 3 to detect, so anything that only emits our human-visible light would be nearly monochromatic.
Who knows which color it would land on, but yeah it would definitely be monochromatic if an object wasn't warm, wasn't UV reflective, wasn't a radio, etc., you'd see it as monochromatic.
I like the color purple, so it's a shame in the stretched out version that it is reserved for the kind of extreme intensity gamma rays that would tear apart every living cell in your body the moment you viewed it.
It'd probably be different colours if you just keep adding receptors sensitive to more and more wavelengths.
It's all relative to the "equipment" (sense organs, brain regions, etc) doing the detecting, nothing intrinsic to the perception of light itself
It would be patterns instead of colors. X-rays are Paisley while AM radio is checkerboard.
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There's something of a cultural element to colours. Some cultures recognize blue-green as a separate colour from either component. And while violet and indigo are physically distinct, they just look like lighter and darker versions of the same colour to me. So I think the answer would be somewhat subjective.
It would also probably be harder to distinguish differences at the same resolution as visible light when it came to very high or very low EM wavelengths.
Some cultures recognize blue-green as a separate colour from either component
I've heard that in Japanese everything from blue to green (including cyan, seafoam green, etc.) is simply lumped under one word but I don't know how true that is.
Japanese started using the word 緑 "midori" to mean green after the war and increased contact with western countries. The word midori used to refer to freshly growing plants, like the English words greenery or flora. Otherwise both blue and green were 青 (ao) until pretty recently, with green considered a particular shade of blue. And weirdly even though the word midori used to literally refer to vegetation, the word ao (blue) is still used to refer to vegetables or plants as green.
This mirrors what happened in Chinese too, even with the same characters, although I'm not sure when Chinese started separating blue-green.
Colors don't exist as such. They are just our brain mapping functions to patterns.
Dogs see fewer colors than us. If we could see more spectrum our brains would have no tools to process or. So we'd see something like thr bottom one
The one on the bottom isn't right either, if we could see more, it wouldn't re-scale our current color range, it'd just make everything on the left violet and everything on the right red
