Thanks for the great brain science stuff, Leskey. The once mysterious veil of the brain's functions and workings continues to lift and let the brain's doings come into the light of day for us to see…
Color, for example is a qualia (or quale, singular), it being a representation by the brain of some wave frequencies "out there". Not all species's brain operate in color; my cat only sees in shades of gray…
Hi, Austin.
Yes, the "psychology of colour" is (or was - back in my day - LOL!)included in all design disciplines.
There are many different methods of "seeing..."
But nothing's lost. Or else: all is translation And every bit of us is lost in it... - James Merrill
My color psychology:
— COLOR SYMBOLS —
In the netherworld, I learned the lore and
Legends of the colors, of their uses
In nature and emotions, the whatfor
Of their light’s glowing activity:
All color variants, quite numberless,
Are made from the three primaries, no less;
Namely: red, yellow, and blue—often backed
By colorless white tinges or shades of black.
From just these three essential hues derives
All of heaven’s prismatic radiance,
Myriad colors of floral brilliance,
And technicolors that come so alive.
The offspring of married red and yellow
Is the secondary, orange, a bright fellow;
Its sibling, of blue and yellow, is green,
With, of course, some gradation in between.
Saintly brother purple, twixt reds and blues,
Completes the second generation hues.
Next to arrive, lime-green, is a grandchild,
As are all the tertiary colors wild—
They’re crimson, magenta, maroon, scarlet,
Amber, auburn, salmon, ocher, russet,
Mauve, taupe, fuchsia, cherry, cerise, umber,
Teal, emerald, and vermilion others.
Strangely enough, all the color-pairs
That symbolize seasons and festive fairs
As they’re found naturally in nature’s ways,
Do contrast on the color wheel, crossways:
Direct opposites on the color wheel,
Sky-blue and leafy-orange, represent fall,
For they are autumn’s contrasting colors
That quite up for its lack of flowers.
As with crocus, spring’s floral colors yet
Remain yellow primrose, purple violet—
The sensual sun, as it were, warming
The virginal earth, with love, into spring.
The Christmas Holiday Season is “seen”
In its opposing hues of red and green—
As in Holly, berry-red, ever-green,
Or in Poinsettias’ red flush, leaf of green.
We’re out of diametric color sets,
So, which for summer? It must then contain
The entire spectrum, as these the sunset
And the rainbow express, in shine and rain.
Since winter’s snow hides all things out of sight,
Its colors are hidden inside white—and night,
The cold season’s symbols, for they conceal
All of spring and summer’s bright floral feel.
For that as different as day and night,
We have the twin-opposites: black and white,
For the day-clock first became dark and light
When twin-gods split day and night, wrong and right.
Heaven’s splendor, white, for purity, bless,
Holds all the colors of prismatic light,
But the symbol of the Prince of Darkness,
Black, removes all the colors from our sight.
So then, it is proved that, in both nature
And in the color wheel, opposites attract
And complement in their contrast—to procure
Both real and symbolic color contracts.
Next, we’ll turn to the colors lone, to see
The whatfor of their light’s activity,
But first, let’s ask, Are there any missing hues,
Unknown, hidden in rainbows, or not used?
Hidden colors? No, for I see how red goes
To orange, graduating through the rainbow
Into yellow and on through green, to let
Blue into indigo to become violet.
Perhaps, between green and blue, lies some new
Tincture, unique enough to be it’s own hue,
But, alas, those turquoise waves everyday,
In tropic seas, wash that theory away.
Yet, there may be some new colors that lie
Before or beyond the spectrum and the eye,
Like infrared or ultraviolet,
Or gold, which only the fairies can see.
But what of clear, white, silver, gray, or black?
Well, they’re not true colors, for, either they lack
All color (black, clear) or hide all hues (white)
Or are mixtures (gray, silver): black-white.
But wait, there is a well-known color,
One quite common in both dress and nature,
That cannot be found in the rainbow—
Give up? It’s brown—and has nowhere to go!
Brown is the color of death, like the leaves
That crumble dry and lifeless when earth grieves,
Which is why the faeries won’t let it show
In their magically spectral rainbow.
But, alas, brown’s new hue is not to last,
For brown’s no more than red, yellow, and black.
So, onward we move: What do colors mean?
What’s nature’s physiological scheme?
When we see red, we see danger: Stop! Blood!
Metabolism rises, adrenaline floods—
And, so, restaurants use red tablecloths
To increase both the appetite and the cost.
Yellow, the quickest color we can see,
Means caution, as with black on a bee,
But yellow’s bright and cheerful, too, and lends
Light to small and sunless rooms like kitchens.
Healthful orange is the common man’s color;
So, to make the expensive look cheaper,
Such as with a hotel, they paint it orange,
And put some shiny polish on the door hinge.
Blue invigorates, and, therefore, provides
Extra strength and power, so blue’s on our side
When the home team’s locker room is painted
In its hue (visitor’s was pink—they fainted).
Blue, as was said, is good, except on food,
For few foods are blue; so, in diet mood,
Put a blue light in your kitchen—and lose
Weight avoiding repulsive looking food.
Pink (red tinted with white) debilitates,
Sapping strength and temper, so, that is why
It’s used in prison cells and locker rooms,
For it calms the most violent inmates.
What of purple? Well, it’s mournful, but, too,
It’s stately, regal, and virginal, new.
Of green, though it’s seldom worn, none complain;
And use it in their carpets to stay sane.
The stars are not just white, they scintillate:
Sirius is blue, its companion green;
Betelgeuse, red; many, like Sol, yellow;
Arcturus, orange—all jewels constellate.
Well, as colors go, so, then, do we, see:
Hues are just differing wavelengths of light
That the brain interprets, in its own right,
For some natural colored necessity.
May I chance upon a land of strange rainbows
Of elfin-hued flowers: red delphiniums,
Black tulips, orange fuchsias, white marigolds,
Bronze grass, and the legendary blue rose.
A very small portion of the electromagnetic spectrum is turned into color by our brains, 3 type of eye cone proeins rotating according to the amounts of primary color received.
Would another part of the spectrum have sufficed and then would brains still interpret these frequencies the same colors as now?
Also, the "3" of the primaries seems to be a magic number, "1" just giving a monotone, "2" not enough (but appears in color blind humans), and perhaps "4" did not do that much extra for the expense, Mother Nature being on Occam's budget.
Hi Robert:Originally Posted by Robert
Qualia is the Qualifier for the words that is our language.
This is the absolute experience that can never be exchanged between us by the use of words. I believe that a good part of the knowledge that we believe is conveyed only by the words that we speak is most certainly partly conveyed directly through the living medium in the form of direct interpersonal Qualia. The information that passes between family members that are very close during normal conversations could not possibly have conveyed the information that they end up with after the exchange of the words that were obviously insufficient to have conveyed that specific concept.
IMHO
You may assimilate this thought into your thread if you so desire.
Great Thread Robert.
John
The Creator of Silence.
I do not disagree with what I do not understand. I strive to understand so that I do not find myself disagreeing with the WYSIWYG of the environment that I live within.
During meditation, one clears the mind,
And so, then, there’s no real self, just one quale,
A near nothing that has little need to be;
Is this what-it’s-like to be a nothing?
Of Evolution and that of Color…
*** EYES ONY ***
DNA as Evolution’s Proof
book review by Kenneth W. Krause
Enter Sean Carroll, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of genetics, who has served up an intellectual feast for the second time in as many years. In 2005, he catered Endless Forms Most Beautiful, the much-acclaimed application of embryonic development science to the standard evolutionary paradigm. And now, in The Making of the Fittest, Carroll shares with us some of the finer and more satisfying details of natural selection and descent with modification. A rapidly expanding library of DNA sequences and the new science of genomics, the comparative study of various species’ DNA, have finally allowed scientists, nearly 150 years following the first publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, to actually see how the fittest are made, to identify the specific genetic changes that have enabled species to adapt to their diverse environments through the ages.
Carroll begins with a look at the most ancient DNA on Earth, genetic text that has somehow withstood a steady barrage of mutations for more than two billion years. These “immortal genes” endure not because they avoid all mutations, but rather because natural selection has “purified” certain amino acid sequences to prevent them from changing in ways that would compromise certain functions basic to all domains of life, archaea, bacteria, and eukaryotes (including humans) alike.
Carroll’s reasoning goes like this: Each amino acid is composed of three nucleotide bases, or a triplet (AAG, ACT, etc.), in the DNA molecule. For each possible triplet, there are 576 potential single random base mutations. Some changes are called “synonymous” because, despite mutation, the resulting triplets encode the same amino acid, allowing the protein to perform an equivalent function. Other changes are said to be “nonsynonymous” because mutation results in a different amino acid, which in turn alters the protein’s utility. If mutation occurred in a completely random fashion, one would expect nonsynonymous changes to outnumber synonymous changes three to one. That is not what is found. In fact, the real world ratio is reversed, three to one in favor of synonymous changes. “DNA sequences that encode the same protein but that are substantially different,” Carroll surmises, “are unmistakable evidence of natural selection allowing mutations that do not change protein function, while acting to eliminate mutations that would.”
But evolution is not merely loss prohibitive; it is intensively creative as well. Consider first the development of color vision in certain primates. All Old World (African and Asian) apes and monkeys, including humans, possess trichromatic color vision encoded by three opsin genes, SWS (sensitive to blue light tuned to a wavelength of 417 nanometers), MWS (green to 530 nm), and LWS (red to 560 nm). New World monkeys and most other mammals have dichromatic vision and just a single gene responsible for encoding the MWS/LWS opsin (light to wavelengths from 510 to 550 nm).
Carroll demonstrates how, in humans, the first set of three opsins evolved from the second set of two possessed by the common ancestor of apes and Old World monkeys. Our separate green and red opsins are 98 percent similar and lie together head-to-toe on our X chromosome. Such characteristics are highly suggestive of gene duplication followed by a divergence of function. By isolating amino acids, replacing one with another, and measuring the effects of such replacements, biologists have determined that only three amino acid positions are responsible for the fine spectral tuning of human MWS and LWS opsins to 530 nm and 560 nm. Such precise color tuning, Carroll concludes, must have been under intense selective pressure in the natural world. Indeed, detailed field studies of food preference and consumption habits among trichromatic chimpanzees, lemurs, and colobus and spider monkeys consistently revealed a fondness for redder leaves, indicative of high protein levels and low toughness.
Discriminating between a light source’s wavelengths, of course, is the occupation of the eye’s cone photoreceptor cells, which are most useful in brightly lit environments. Consider next the evolution of deep-sea vision. Seeing in dim light, by contrast, requires the use of a species’ rod photoreceptors. Rhodopsins in most terrestrial animals are tuned to maximally absorb wavelengths of approximately 500 nm; but, at ocean depths of 200 meters or so, only a narrow band of blue light with a wavelength of 480 nm is available. Amazingly, the rhodopsins of dolphins, Sowerby’s beaked whales, and deep-sea fish are “blue-shifted,” or fine-tuned 10–20 nm toward the blue end of the light spectrum.
Exactly how did this happen? By replacing amino acids found in one species with those of another, scientists have distinguished three positions, 83, 292, and 299, that are primarily responsible for the 11 nm shift in bottlenose dolphins. The beaked whale’s rhodopsin is further blue-shifted to 484 nm and differs from its dolphin counterpart only at site 299. Interestingly, deep-sea eels possess a rhodopsin that is blue-shifted to 482 nm and contains the same three crucial amino acids as that of the beaked whale. Shallow-water eels, by contrast, have a rhodopsin sensitive to a wavelength of 502 nm, akin to that of terrestrial mammals, and identical at the three crucial sites to the rhodopsins of harbor seals and manatees, two surface-dwelling mammals. Perhaps even more significant, however, is the fact that eels are fish, the evolutionary lines of which split away from other vertebrates hundreds of millions of years ago. Whales and dolphins are cetaceans — mammals descended from a terrestrial ancestor that eventually returned to the water. Only independent evolution can explain this phenomenon. According to Carroll, “When two species or groups of species evolve the same exact amino acids in a protein in adapting to similar environments, this is very strong evidence of natural selection for the same adaptation.”
But in some notable instances natural selection relaxes altogether, allowing harmful mutations to accumulate and to “fossilize” an organism’s DNA. Take the coelacanth, for example, a large, primitive fish thought to be closely related to the first four-legged vertebrates. With no MWS/LWS gene, the coelacanth’s only hope for color vision lies with its short-wavelength SWS gene. But alas, this opsin, though still recognizable, is so riddled with mutations that it is no longer capable of constructing a functional protein. Dolphins and whales also possess a fossilized SWS opsin gene. But of course we shouldn’t feel sorry for these deep-water creatures because, unlike their ancestors, they have absolutely no use for color vision. Predictably, nocturnal and subterranean mammals like the owl monkey, bush baby, slow loris, and blind mole rat also possess independently fossilized SWS genes. These pathetically useless remnants of a primordial ancestor’s lifestyle supply solid evidence against theories of design. Unlike an intelligent creator, “[n]atural selection cannot preserve what is not being used and it cannot plan for the future,” writes Carroll. “The fossilization and loss of genes are exactly what is predicted to evolve in the absence of natural selection.”
At this point, one can hardly help but recognize a profound similarity in the mechanisms of vision among complex animals. Indeed, recent discoveries have shown that tremendously different-looking eyes have much more in common than anyone had previously thought. For example, the same “tool kit” protein — now referred to as Pax-6 — controls the construction of eyes belonging to creatures as diverse as worms, flies, mice, squid, and humans, implying an extremely ancient, common ancestor with a primitive eye composed of photoreceptor and pigment cells. “The eye,” Carroll observes, “far from being one of the most difficult structures to account for by evolution, has become instead one of the leading sources of insights into how evolution works with common genetic tools to build complex organs.”
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