amycvdh reblogged
when brains r like "today i will not brain" my brother in christ you are a brain
this went from 13K to 15K in two days flat, is everybody... okay?
ha ha. no. no,no
v9z-deactivated20201221
rb this with ur opinion on this shade of pink:
This is magenta, and not pink. Unlike pink, magenta doesn’t actually exist. Our brain just invents magenta to serve as what it considers a logical bridge between red and violet, which each exist at opposite ends of a linear spectrum.
TL;DR this color is fake (and also I hate it)
Wait til you learn about Stygean Blue
Your brain is a badly-designed hot mess of bootstrapped chemistry that will tell you that all kinds of shit is happening that has no correlation to physical reality, including time travel. It just makes things up. Your brain is guessing about what’s happening when your eyes saccade, what’s happening in your blind spot, and what the majority of the visible light spectrum looks like, and you don’t know it’s happening because it doesn’t aid your survival to become aware that a lot of what you see is fake.
The human eye only has three types of color sensitive cones, which detect red, blue, and green light. Your brain is making up every other color you perceive.
Let’s have a little fun with that thought. This is the visible spectrum of light.
You will of course note that yellow is on the chart. Yellow has a discreet wavelength, and is therefore a distinct physical color. But we can’t see it.
“Sorry, what the fuck?”
What we call yellow is just what our brain shrugs and spits out when our red and green cones are equally stimulated. We have light receptors that can pick up on the physical spectrum of light we call yellow: that’s why yellow things don’t just look like moving black blocks to us. But your brain has no fucking idea what the color yellow looks like.
Some animals have eyes that can perceive the color yellow! Goldfish have a yellow cone in their eyes. If they could talk, they could tell us what yellow looks like. But we wouldn’t be able to understand it.
What your brain actually sees of the color spectrum:
We can measure the wavelength of light, so we know that when we see ‘yellow,’ we are seeing light in that 550-ish nanometers range. But we don’t have a cone in our eyes that can pick that up. Your brain just has a very consistent guess about what color that wavelength of light could be. We decided to name that guess ‘yellow.’ We can’t imagine what yellow really looks like any more than a dog can imagine the color red.
Here’s the funny thing: your brain is never perceiving just one photon of light at a time. Something like 2*10⁸ photons per second are hitting your retina under normal conditions. Your brain doesn’t individually process all of them. So it averages them out. It grabs a bunch of photons all coming from the same direction, with the same pattern, and goes, “yeah, that cup is blue, fuck it, next.”
That’s how colors blend in our eyes. So sure, if a photon of light with a wavelength of 550 nanometers bounces into our eyes, we see what we call “yellow.” But if we see two photons at the same time, coming from the same object, one of which is 500 nms and the other of which is 600 nms, your brain will average them out and you will still see yellow even though none of the light you just saw was 550 nms.
So how does magenta factor into this?
Well, as we’ve just established, when your brain sees light from two different slices of the visible light spectrum, it will try to just average them together. Green plus red is yellow, fuck it. If it’s more red than green, we’ll call that ‘orange.’ Literally who gives a shit, we’re trying to forage over here. There are bears out here and it’s so scary.
What happens if you take the average of blue and red light, which we perceive to be magenta? What’s the centerpoint of that line?
Fucking green.
Hey, that’s not gonna work? We live on a planet where EVERYTHING IS GREEN. If something is NOT green, that means it’s either food, or a potential source of danger, and either way your brain wants you to know about it.
So your brain goes, WHOOPS. Okay - this is fine. We already made up yellow, orange, cyan, and violet. We’ll just make up another color. Something that looks really, really different from green.
And so it made up magenta.
So, physics-wise, is magenta “real?”
No; there’s no single wavelength of light that corresponds to magenta. But you’re rarely seeing only a single wavelength of light anyway. And even when you are, every color other than RGB is a dart thrown on the wall by your meat computer. This is the CIE Chromaticity Diagram:
Explaining this thing is a little more than I want to take on on a Saturday morning, but I’ve included a link above that goes into it a little more. The point is that only the colors that actually touch the ‘outline’ of the shape actually correspond to a specific wavelength of light. All of the other colors are blends of multiple wavelengths. So magenta isn’t special.
Given that color is just a fun trick your brain is playing on you to help you find food and avoid danger, is magenta real?
Yeah, absolutely. Or at least, it’s just as real as most of what we see. It’s what we see when we mix up blue and red. It would be disastrous from a survival standpoint to perceive that color as green, so we don’t. Because it’s not green. Light that’s green has a wavelength of around 510 nm. Stuff that’s magenta bounces back light that is both ~400 and ~700. Your brain knows the difference. So it fills in the gap for you, with the best guess it has, same as it does with your blind spot.
The perception of color exists within your brain, and your brain says you see magenta. So you see magenta.
So I googled Stygian Blue and…
Yall.
FORBIDDEN.
HOW TO SEE THE FORBIDDEN COLOURS
is this why I never liked yellow and magenta?
amycvdh reblogged
“People who study anatomy and the development of the eye have shown that the retina is, in fact, the brain: in the development of the embryo, a piece of the brain comes out in front, and long fibers grow back, connecting the eyes to the brain. The retina is organized in just the way the brain is organized and, as someone has beautifully put it, “The brain has developed a way to look out upon the world.” The eye is a piece of brain that is touching light, so to speak, on the outside.”
—
Richard Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I (via exhaled-spirals)
« Every single eye is a tiny scrap of the divine mystery. Sight is the precise meeting place of object and thought, it is the pearl that allows the mind to unfurl in the light of the sun. »
— Jostein Gaarder, Through a Glass, Darkly
(via exhaled-spirals)
is this true?
(via abrce)
amycvdh reblogged
The surface of a living Human Brain.
amazing to consider words, numbers, colors, emotions, ephiphanies, jokes, books, music, grief, fear, love - all come from these squishy bits
(image by Paul Cooklin for an article on mirror neurons and conscisouness)
Eric complimented my mirror neurons today re: empathy.
amycvdh reblogged
ha-iiro-deactivated20231211
time to stop work and head home
current status: "You have failed me, brain!"
amycvdh reblogged
"We’re eye doctors."
"What’s something about the eye that most people don’t realize?"
"The eye doesn’t see. The brain sees. The eye just transmits. So what we see isn’t only determined by what comes through the eyes. What we see is affected by our memories, our feelings, and by what we’ve seen before."
amycvdh reblogged
coketalk
Whether you more strongly feel the monumental significance of tiny things or the massive void between them depends on who you are, and how your brain chemistry is balanced at a particular moment. We walk around with miniature, emotional versions of the universe inside of us.
Josh Worth, "If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel" (via coketalk)
amycvdh reblogged
As a species, humans manifest a quality called neoteny, the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. Neoteny has physical ramifications—scarce body hair and a flat face are two examples—but it also has neurological ones. Namely, we have an extraordinary capacity to continue learning throughout life. If neoteny helps to explain our ability to learn, researchers are now figuring out what drives us to take advantage of it. In 2008, a group of scientists set up a novel fMRI study. When a subject’s curiosity was piqued by a question (“What is the only country in the world that has a bill of rights for cows?” for instance), certain regions of the brain lit up. Those areas, known collectively as the basal ganglia, correspond to the brain’s reward centers—the same ones that govern our desire for sex or chocolate or total domination in Call of Duty 4. When people say they have an itch to figure something out, they’re not speaking metaphorically. They’re looking to get high on information. Curiosity, then, is not some romantic quality. It is an adaptive response…
The Editor’s Letter From The April 2014 Issue Of Popular Science Magazine | Popular Science (via alec-c-c-combo-breaker)
also a ton of fun
amycvdh reblogged
You are here, Alice Wellinger
Source: alice-wellinger.com
amycvdh reblogged
The three-pound mass balanced atop our spines is made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion neurons, each of which can make upwards of five to ten thousand synaptic connections with other neurons. A memory, at the most fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between those neurons. Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, your brain will have physically changed.
Joshua Foer, from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything (2011). (via thenoobyorker)
Cortex
This painting shows the layered structure of the cerebral cortex, where processing of sensory and motor information occurs.
Enamel on composition gold leaf (2009) (High-resolution version)
Image: Greg Dunn
amycvdh reblogged
Gratitude can have such a powerful impact on your life because it engages your brain in a virtuous cycle. Your brain only has so much power to focus its attention. It cannot easily focus on both positive and negative stimuli. It is like a small child: easily distracted. Oh your tummy hurts? Here’s a lollipop. So you lost your job? Isn’t it wonderful we’re having KFC for dinner? On top of that your brain loves to fall for the confirmation bias, that is it looks for things that prove what it already believes to be true. And the dopamine reinforces that as well. So once you start seeing things to be grateful for, your brain starts looking for more things to be grateful for. That’s how the virtuous cycle gets created.
The Grateful Brain – Alex Korb takes a look at recent research exploring our neural reward circuits. Also see the hard-wired limits of the human brain and complement with some famous thoughts on gratitude.
amycvdh reblogged
With the effulgence of the new brain, mammals developed a capacity we call limbic resonance — a symphony of mutual exchange and internal adaptation whereby two mammals become attuned to each other’s inner states. It is limbic resonance that makes looking into the face of another emotionally responsive creature a multi-layered experience. Instead of seeing a pair of eyes as two bespeckled buttons, when we look into the ocular portals into a limbic brain our vision goes deep: the sensations multiply, just as two mirrors place in opposition create a shimmering ricochet of reflections whose depth recede into infinity. Eye contact, although it occurs over a gap of yards, is not a metaphor. When we meet the gaze of another, two nervous systems achieve a palpable and intimate apposition.
A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, MD, Fari Amni, MD, Richard Lannon, MD (via 1and1makes2)