Bit of a harsh critique, though I appreciate reading people's comments on my writing. Ultimately, doing some writing over the past few months has taught me that I shouldn't necessarily underestimate people's ability to understand scientific concepts if only I take the time to explain them properly. I'm sorry that what I wrote wasn't sufficiently comprehensible :-( Also, I never took a philosophy class. None of what I said was meant to be pretentious or superior - I was just putting out there some concepts I found interesting.
Yeah, don't take it personally. Most of what I wrote there was just pent-up generalized frustration with a lot of published material out there. I regret not sufficiently framing my post within that context.
The authors I really want to hit with this kind of critique are the ones who aren't embracing what you describe here:
> Ultimately, doing some writing over the past few months has taught me that I shouldn't necessarily underestimate people's ability to understand scientific concepts if only I take the time to explain them properly.
There's a troublingly large contingent out there that, as XKCD put it, [communicates badly and then acts smug when it's misunderstood][1], [confused about how communication works][2]. These are the ones I really take issue with: the ones who are pleased when the audience who can absorb their material is small, interpreting it as validation of their own abilities (thinking "I'm one of a few people who can understand this"), instead of a refutation of them.
[2]: https://xkcd.com/1028/ "Anyone who says that they're great at communicating but 'people are bad at listening' is confused about how communication works."
I particularly apologize for the part about it being pretentious to mention the Cartesian Theatre. While I would cut that in later drafts for being irrelevant (which, like all irrelevant material, confuses the subject), it really doesn't come across as anything more than that, and I was especially projecting my frustrations from other stuff I've read when I characterized it like that.
It's not necessarily the case. Most animals would disregard whatever feeding they saw, and select the 'old' or 'new' food for their partner at chance level, indicating no awareness of satiation on one food
I'm the author of the article, and I'm quite happy to see a response from a neuroscientist who studied this topic in the past. I wanted to ask you about point 3, because obviously I could have made a mistake. From what I understand (and what I have studied) retinal ganglion cells computing the S vs M and S vs M+L dimensions are the critical ones underlying coding of colour information along the blue-yellow and red-green axis. The additive axis, featuring amplitude information, from what I understand primarily concerns luminosity rather than colour discrimination. Without any of the ratio information, colour discrimination would not exist. Am I wrong? Would genuinely love to hear from you on this.
Painters don't stick to just three pigments, but all the pigments they use CAN be created by mixing three primaries in different proportions. I'm quite sure that's the whole basis for Thomas Young's colour mixing experiments performed in the 1800s, finding that every colour we see can be made with mixtures of three lights. Any more than that is redundant. Similarly, while an RGB pixel on your monitor may not emit all single-wavelength light, it doesn't negate the validity of the statement that three single wavelengths can be used to recreate all colours visible to the human eye. I'm quite sure that some RGB pixels are indeed single wavelength, though I would love to hear from those of you who know better about this because I don't know for sure...
>Painters don't stick to just three pigments, but all the pigments they use CAN be created by mixing three primaries in different proportions.
No. Paint is not light, and has physical properties that constrain what you can do with them. Some colors just don't mix well together, so you'll find recommendation on what exact type of pigment work best for specific mixes.
Yeah, that's true, paint is subtractive, as opposed to light. But isn't it still the case that all pigments can be achieved by mixing three primaries? Whereas in light mixing the primaries are considered to be red, green, blue, in pigment mixing they are considered to be cyan, magenta, yellow. Obviously please correct me if I'm wrong (no sarcasm implied), links would be useful.
No. No matter whether you're doing additive or subtractive color, there will be perceivable colors that you can't reach just by mixing a finite number of primaries. In fact, CMYK printing has a rather small gamut, with more colors that are clearly unreachable than RGB has.
Perceivable colors are a three-dimensional space, and colors you can make out of three primaries are a three-dimensional space, but they're different shapes. Mixing primary colors is a way of interpolating between them linearly, and the space of perceivable colors doesn't have convenient linear edges.
Here's an example. Your printer has cyan, magenta, and yellow ink (and also black for convenience). So it can print any color, right? It should be able to print bright lime green, something that looks like RGB #00ff00, right?
No, in fact, you can't print that color without "spot color" ink. When you mix cyan and yellow to make green, it will necessarily get darker. If you use enough cyan and yellow to get full-saturation green, it'll be too dark. If you use less ink, it won't be saturated enough.
Lime green is outside of the CMYK gamut. Similarly, the deep cyan you'd get by printing with lots of cyan ink is outside of the RGB gamut.
No, I meant some pigments won't mix well because of other physical properties. The only example I can think of from the top of my head is in the Quiller, Color choices. It is mainly concerned with watercolors, and some colors mix uniformly (so blue+yellow -> green) and some look like an emulsion (so not green, but yellow with blue bubbles inside). Which can be interesting, because the mixing of colors is thus done by the eye instead of the paint, and is in fact one of the major painting effects used by impressionists.
The notion that some of the neurons silenced by alcohol are inhibitory neurons is actually the explanation that researchers have proposed for why stimulating glycine receptors produces an increase in dopamine release. The idea which is shown in a diagram in the article is that silencing GABA-releasing interneurons (which are inhibitory) with glycine consequently disinhibits dopaminergic neurons.
The idea of whether rats with exciting lives would indeed be less likely to become addicted to cocaine / morphine is quite controversial, and there have been some failures to replicate that original study (references here: 1. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9148292?dopt=Abstract and 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2616610?dopt=Abstract). I think the argument is that social isolation can and probably does make animals and humans more prone to drug addiction, but it's definitely not the only factor, and both animals and humans with good lives can still become hooked.
Hi! I wrote the Neurosphere article you're discussing, and noticed this lively comments section. I agree with the question you're asking - if she was born this way, why did she question it? From the research I did on her life, it appears that she always assumed people could see these colours, and apparently when teaching her students in art school she would try to say things like "Try to depict all the colours you see in this leaf, like the turquoise and orange on the sides..." and her students often just found it too embarassing to tell her they didn't see any of these colours. She slowly started realising that her colour perception may be different, until one day a neurology student taking her class suggested she took a genetic test. That's it. Since then I suppose she has really harnessed the results of the test to market her vibrant art as reflecting her 'tetrachromatic reality'. Some people have commented on Twitter questioning this, and it's something I think I will write about in the near future because it's a completely fair point.
