I wonder how the human sense of proprioception holds up against other animals, this seems to be an exceptionally well developed sense, most of the time it works so well we don’t even think about it.
I’m not sure how many hair cells there are in the ear, but each one is an individual sensor just like the rod cells in our eyes are individual sensors.
It’s factually incorrect to say that there’s 2 ear sensors and millions of eye sensors.
Most - Cognizance of (imminent) danger
Least - Common
Nice link s.rat. Thanks for sharing.
True, but that isn’t the comparison I was making. The comparison was about colours versus phonemes. There are two ear sensors that sense spatially. Whereas there are quarter of a million spatially separated sensors in the eye.
My point is that the ear is a spectral analyser (which is what the hairs do) whereas the eye’s spectral resolution is highly limited. It can resolve a single colour at a location (where colour isn’t a simple wavelength) whereas the ear can resolve insane complexity across a very wide range of frequencies. The ear can do harmonic analysis, the eye cannot. So it is chalk and cheese.
But you can communicate with very nearly the same level of nuance using just vision. We’re doing it now.
Consider both a blind person and a deaf person watching TV. The deaf person can get most of the sound information just by reading closed captions that take up only a small fraction of the screen. But to communicate even a small portion of the visual scene to the blind person would require a great deal of time, more than is spent on the actual sound of the TV show.
I would have agreed to a point. Reading Oliver Saks’ “Seeing Voices” rather changed my mind on this. He describes an entire next level of communication available to the pre-lingually deaf when they learn to sign. The difference between the ability to communicate and feel included between the pre-lingually deaf, and the blind is counter-intuitive. Saks may be a bit biased, but he makes a powerful case. It is one of my all time favourite books.
Not true at all. English and many other languages have eleven basic color words and many more (several hundred in English) other color words. Some languages have less than 10 basic color words, but they’ll still have lots of others.
When they first made synthetic lenses. the plastic was tranparent to UV and people who received them could see some ways into that part of the spectrum. We don’t have UV cones, so the blue cones were the main ones being excited by the UV; thus the UV looked blue. For some reason, they thought this was a bad idea (I think excess UV can damage the retina), so now such lenses are made with a plastic that’s opaque to UV.
Just based on anatomy, I would guess that humans would need an exceptional sense of balance.
What are the different ways vision can be used? I.e.: What are the different visual skills humans have?
Which visual tasks/skills are humans best at?
When we imagine something visual, are the visual parts of our brain chiefly involved or is it chiefly other parts? I.e.: If I see a cat and if I imagine the same cat, am I chiefly* relying on the same parts of my brain?
- I know it won’t be exactly the same hence “chiefly”.
We often underestimate the importance to us of the “primitive” senses, such as touch, taste, smell. and proprioception.
I agree with many others upthread that it is sight that sets us apart from most animals.
Comparing us to other animals, esp dogs, without cites, using “Dog Sense” by John Bradshaw as my primary reference (Amazon.com); also using WAG:
I am not aware that we are in any way special in regards to general proprioception and touch, but:
–We are bipedal, essentially unique among mammals, which may speak to special skills in balance and possible proprioception. Birds may have us beat. (WAG)
–We have excellent 2-point discrimination in hands, probably far better than most animals (I’m looking at you, donkeys!) (IMHO)
Taste and smell often work together. We frankly suck at smelling compared to other mammals. Dogs are far better than us, but are probably average for mammals (Bradshaw). Bears are great sniffers. Birds are plus/minus. Some can smell a few scents very well, many are apparently nose-blind.
Hearing: We are mediocre, subpar. By this I mean we are quite a bit worse than many mammals (IIRC), but our deficit is mild compared with our lousy sense of smell.
Sight: We are just downright excellent (compared to other mammals). Dogs have pretty good sight compared with many other mammals. Bradshaw estimates that their overall sight package rivals or modestly exceeds ours at night (when they have superior light sensitivity), but they give us no contest in daylight. Of course, we can’t touch the sight of birds (esp. raptors).
I think it is a little difficult to do a simple better/worse than comparison with other animals.
Raptors have a much better angular resolution and motion detection, allowing them to detect prey at silly distances. But they don’t have anything like the the field of view, colour perception, or total number of sensors. They also lack a massive amount of visual processing wetware that we possess.
Humans and sense of smell is a funny one. We are better than most people think. It is just that we don’t actively use it. Modern life renders much of it useless except as amusement. But stop for a moment and start to smell things around you. Do so in much the same way that a dog does. That is, stuff your nose right into it. There is a whole world there.
There are competitions where sense of smell is the most critical capability. Whisky tasting comes to mind. Given a set of ten shots of Scotch, taken from any of the hundreds of distilleries, and of any age, identify them. A good competitor can get 10 from 10. Wine tasting competitions are another.
We are nothing as good as dogs, but we are better than we often give ourselves credit for.
The amount of wetware we possess to process what we sense is pretty good. We do get outclassed in some areas. Dolphins wipe the floor with us in terms of sonic processing.
Proprioception is an interesting one. It always bugs me that it is ignored so often when discussing the senses. Our manual dexterity is remarkable. What we can do with fine control without seeing what we are manipulating (try fixing some tiny gadget you cant see inside properly) is likely better than just about any animal. But it is also one that is very hard to measure.
So, visually, do we well on other aspects besides field of view, color perception and number of sensors?
In terms of color perception, what do we go that is particularly good?
I’m interested in the visual processing wetware. Can you go on about that?
Is our ability to orient ourselves and imaginary objects in 3D space related to vision?
It’s related to vision, but also related to propriception, the orientation sense, and a number of others.
And the wetware that Francis refers to is our ability to look at a scene and say things like “That’s a wrench”, or “That’s a computer”, or “That’s my Aunt Martha”. It’s not too hard to build a camera with basically the same capabilities as the eye, but it’s really hard to build a computer system behind the camera that can process the information the way our brains do. In fact, this is what people are referring to when they speak of the field of “computer vision”: Not the camera part, but the processing part.