Colors- Radiolab Podcast

This podcast begins with the discussion of Isaac Newton trying to discover if the color is within or outside the mind. Most people know his experiments with the prism, but I did not know that he stuck something into his eye to try to discover the answer that question. I find this disturbing and interesting that he would choose to do this. Eventually, his experimenting led to the findings of what we know today.
I thought that many of the points that were made in this podcast were very interesting. It surprised me that all humans/animals see different variations of colors. Dogs only see blues and greens. They do not have the cone for red. This one cone that they do not have adds such a limitation on colors. On the other side of this, sparrows can see more than us. They can see ultraviolets. In addition, butterflies have 7 photoreceptors, and a mantis shrimp has 16, while humans only have 3. Also, I thought it was cool how the podcast used the choir to help depict what colors various animals could see.

Image result for human vision vs butterfly

Another aspect of this podcast that I thought was intriguing was the aspect about the monkeys. Experiments were done to try to get colorblind monkeys to see red. The human gene for a red cone was injected into the monkey's eyes and suddenly they had red cones in addition to their blue and green cones. It was interesting how they tested to see if monkey's could see color. It surprised me that after 20 weeks the monkeys could actually see the red blob. Before this podcast, I did not think about how everyone sees color so differently.

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