How do animals see colors differently than humans?
In: Biology
We see colours by having light sensing cells in our retina that are more sensitive to some colours than others. Depending on which colour cells are detecting light and which aren’t, the brain can give a colour to what we’re seeing.
Many animals have different types of colour sensing cells than ours, tuned to different colours and/or different numbers of colours. So they can obtain different colour information than us from what they see.
Animals seeing colors differently from us is all about the setup of their eyes. Most of us have three types of color receptors, making us trichromats and decent at picking a range of colors.
However, some animals like dogs are dichromats, seeing the world in mainly blues and yellows, whereas some birds are tetrachromats, meaning they can see an extra slice of the color spectrum we can’t even imagine.
It’s like each species is wearing its own brand of color-blinding sunglasses, tuning into different channels of the color world.
You don’t see color with your eyes. Color is an interpretation your brain makes based on structures in your eye being differently stimulated by variations in wavelength. So different eye structures get stimulated differently then get interpreted by different brain structures resulting in many different versions of color seeing. Some may not see color as part of their visual field but react reflexively to its presence like insects or shrimp. Some can have no color receptors in their retina but instead focus their vision on narrow bands of the spectrum selecting different colors to pay attention to at different times, like squid. Some may have many more primary colors resulting in a complex colour space we can’t even really imagine with our three primary color brains. There is really no way to imagine the complexity they see without sharing their biology. We can test and model it but never know the experience.
Latest Answers