human tetrachromats?

[gusl]

via etopiei, orally:

Are some women tetrachromat? i.e. are most people relatively colorblind?

How plastic is a baby's brain? Would giving him/her extra cones at birth produce color vision? What about the adult brain?

This seems like a respectable paper:
Richer color experience in observers with multiple photopigment opsin genes

Comments

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

are most people relatively colorblind?

Yup. Not only are humans blind to most color differences, but we're only even sensitive to an extremely tiny slice of the spectrum to begin with. I expect posthumans will be able to see many more colors and far outside the human range of vision.

[gaspaheangea.livejournal.com]

I second that, and there's an argument from dullness of visual stimuli: i.e. most cultural artifacts that we've got with have spectacularly dull colors (whether this is taste resultant or not is unknown).

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

I like your interests list

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Are you suggesting that earlier humans were colorblind more often? or that their frequencies were shifted compared to ours?