"I don't want to be human! I want to see gamma rays! I want to hear X-rays! And I want to - I want to smell dark matter! Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can't even express these things properly because I have to - I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid limiting spoken language! But I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws! And feel the wind of a supernova flowing over me! I'm a machine! And I can know much more! I can experience so much more. But I'm trapped in this absurd body! And why? Because my five creators thought that God wanted it that way!"
Brains are incredibly adaptive. There are tons of experiences where people have had diminished or lost access to one of the senses and recovered surprisingly well.
I had a colleague once who had a stroke and described his vision afterwards as looking though splintered glass. After a while, he explained he didn’t perceive it anymore and that his brain just decided to “workaround” the issue making new connections where needed.
I think having some “sense” of magnetic fields could be very subtle, like just a feeling of which direction you’re facing when you’re turning around (you could argue you already use the position of the sun this way, subconsciously).
People into body mods who get a magnetic implant often describe it as a sixth sense [1].
Probably similar to how we already deal with it - shutting down, having a meltdown, seeking sensory isolation, etc. I mean most people already do this, by e.g. putting in some earbuds and looking at your phone / newspaper / middle distance while in public transit.
One of the key functions of the mind is which aspects of input to pay attention to and which not to. So I wonder what sensory overload is. You can get sensory overload if there's environmental overload. But otherwise it's like the mind can't discriminate well enough.
Oddly, the shrimp themselves are not great at color discrimination.
Hanne Theon and colleagues trained mantis shrimp to attack squares of certain colors to get food rewards. Attacks on other “distractor” squares weren’t rewarded. By varying the color of those distractors, one can measure the spectral sensitivity of their visual system.
Using similar methods, humans can distinguish between wavelengths a few nm apart; mantis shrimp are more like 20 nm.
This is disappointing, but the reason is pretty wild. Most animals have “color opponency”: circuits early in the visual system convert the photoreceptors’ output into a differential representation: the intensity of red light here minus the intensity of green light in the surrounding neighborhood. This mechanism “normalizes” for the total amount of light, thereby letting you separately perceive hue and brightness, and has some other nice properties.
Mantis Shrimp took a different path. There’s no obvious inhibitory interaction between the photoreceptors. They may therefore separately perceive redness, greenness, blueness, etc, but without combining these streams of information, their color acuity is poor. Interestingly, they do a “scanning” behavior that sort of recreates the opponency by dragging different types of photoreceptors across the same part of the visual world.
Thoen, H. H., How, M. J., Chiou, T. H., & Marshall, J. (2014). A different form of color vision in mantis shrimp. Science, 343(6169), 411–413. http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1126/science.1245824
If we suddenly got it, yes. Otherwise we would design cities not to bother us. Also, dogs do live in large numbers even in our present cities and have longer lifespans than they do in the wild.
It's a beautiful quote. I truly think what the quote describes is the endgame for our species. This short story conceptualizes the beauty of such an idea really well: http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/GentleSeduction.html
Many or maybe most humans can also see the polarity of light. Take your smart phone and make the screen display a white image. While it shows this image for a long time, rotate the phone. You should see a yellow whispy checkerboard pattern turning with the phone. This "brush" is actually a visible measurement of the polarity of the light coming from the phone.
After some practice I can see Haidinger's brush (=> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haidinger%27s_brush ) with little to no effort. Turns out that this is inadvisable! Why? Because now I can see the effect each time I have to change between screens in landscape and portrait orientation when they are next to each other. It was so distracting that I had to change back to a landscape-only setup.
Huh, I can see it reliably but the effect is soooo subtle I can't imagine this being a nuisance. The dust that I often don't bother to wipe of my monitors is more of a problem (at least a few times in the past it masqueraded as punctuation).
Just too much snake oil in this field -- in top Nature journals, nonetheless. It's funny, when I was an undergrad I took a research idea to Alan Jasanoff and he rejected it with similarly simple back-of-the-envelope math. Guess he has a knack for sniffing out BS.
Like hearing and balance are both in the same sensory organ, and consist of sensitive hairs in liquid-filled chamber? Or the pancreas, which consists of separate endocrine and exocrine glands in one wibbly wobbly visceral organ? Nature would never do things like that.
I don't agree hearing and balance are the same sensory organ. They are two separate organs, just very near each other and indeed resembling each other, which explains why they are near each other.
The thought I was expressing is that there seems to be no separate organ at all here and that seems unexpected to me. I would expect there to at least be something like a specialized region. Not just that the eye in general happens to also have this ability.
I wouldn't say "suspicious", but I do think it's interesting. Yes, it needs to receive light, but any exposed part of the animal could do that. Does it "feel" to the animal like it's part of vision, in the way that we experience taste in an integrated way combining signals from taste and smell receptors? Does pairing with vision make it easier to process both together for navigation? That is, you're point is how a separate organ would make it like an independent sense; is it functionally beneficial for it to not be independent?
This kind of magnetic sensitivity seems to be dependent on receiving light, because the sensitive molecules form the radical pairs when exposed to light. With this information, evolving within the eye scenario sounds plausible to me.
Birds abilities to navigate is outright insane, for example albatross can travel ten thousands of miles, I believe it is only bird that circumvents earth, I am not convinced that magnetoreceptor is the only answer to how birds able to navigate, if not mistaken in WWII researchers glued magnets to pigeons head, it did not affect there's abilities to navigate.
That would throw off a simple compass, but if they can see relative strengths of magnetic fields it would be more like a source of glare than a blindfold
