http://discovermagazine.com/2012/jul-aug/06-humans-with-super-human-vision/article_view?b_start:int=0&-C=

Check out this article. This absolutely boggles my mind. These researches have apparently found at least one woman with 4 different types of cone cells in her eyes which allow her to see more colors than everyone else. I cannot even begin to comprehend what that must be like. I would give anything to be able to experience that.

What are your thoughts on this?

What I find interesting is that the human body has the capacity to perceive a greater range on the visible spectrum, yet somehow the majority of us are limited in the colours we see. I wonder what the disadvantage is to seeing more.

It would be interesting to see if any mutations lead people in seeing colours outside the visible spectrum.

It's funny because I was having a discussion with my dad the other day about audiophiles, and how I wish there were conclusive blind tests that showed whether or not someone can really tell the difference between a file at 128 kbps, and one at 256 kbps, or if a person can hear the difference of a file beyond 320 kbps. I was saying that it some times feels like audiophiles only pretend to be special so that they can feel some sort of unwarranted self-importance, and that they only say they can hear the difference because they know it's there. I compared it to someone changing a color hex by one unit and then claiming they could see a difference because they know it's there, despite looking identical to the human eye.

This article sort of changes my perspective on that, because it is definitely possible for someone to perceive a wider range of colors than the average person, so why wouldn't it work the same for hearing? It would be interesting if someone was born that was able to see infrared or hear radio waves. It would make me wonder if somehow there was a need for it in their environment or if it was just a test mutation.

One more thing that guys miss out on, with color blindness they get a 4th cone, we get a broken one...
I've always wondered what it would be like explaining color to a blind or completely colorblind person.
But I'm seeing a lot more stories on 'superhuman' traits lately... Whats next?

Quote from Envoy

What I find interesting is that the human body has the capacity to perceive a greater range on the visible spectrum, yet somehow the majority of us are limited in the colours we see. I wonder what the disadvantage is to seeing more.

This is kinda like saying we have the capacity to have four arms, but we're "limited" because we only have two.

There's no disadvantage to having more cone cells, there's just not a significant enough advantage compared to having three for evolution to selectively favor it.

Quote from Jeff]I cannot even begin to comprehend what that must be like.[/quote]

The only way tetrachromacy would let you see completely new colors is if the added cone's photospins were sensitive to frequencies higher or lower than the three we already have. From what I can gather, that's not the case in that article. They just see more intermediate hues between colors we already see, which is still awesome, but probably not as extraordinary as you think.

Quote from JeffIt's funny because I was having a discussion with my dad the other day about audiophiles, and how I wish there were conclusive blind tests that showed whether or not someone can really tell the difference between a file at 128 kbps, and one at 256 kbps, or if a person can hear the difference of a file beyond 320 kbps.

This completely depends on the source file, MP3s trim down frequencies that are too high for humans to hear. Lower bitrates start cutting into audible frequencies, so recordings with lots of hi-hats, cymbals, higher pitched instruments, etc. will suffer more from a lower bitrate than, say, an acapella recording.

[quote=Jeff

I was saying that it some times feels like audiophiles only pretend to be special so that they can feel some sort of unwarranted self-importance, and that they only say they can hear the difference because they know it's there.

Eh, audiophiles are usually full of shit, but they probably have much nicer headphones and/or speakers with large frequency responses. I have a pair of AKG K701's and most of the time, I can tell the difference with them. On normal speakers it's not very noticeable.

Also, I'm nitpicking, but nobody would ever "hear" radio waves, since they're a form of electromagnetic radiation like light.