yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Watch: How Animals and People See the World Differently | National Geographic


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] What most people think of when they look at the world, they think other animals probably see the world pretty much the same way. Only with time do we realize that, of course, other animals don't see the same things we see. That takes us to a sort of a philosophical question: what is the animal actually seeing?

It's impossible to know because it goes into a brain that's very alien to ours. It goes through processes that we don't use when we process visual stimuli. The animal does things with that information that we don't do, so it's really hard to know. The most simple eyes just tell an animal when it's light and when it's dark.

Then you got eyes like ours that have color vision and very, very good spatial vision and can see very complex detail. The development of eyes can be categorized into four stages, from simple to complex. Stage one is the simplest form: light falling on just a few photo receptors allows an animal to sense light and dark.

At stage two, organisms can now tell which direction light is coming from. In stage three, two distinct eyes appear. The first is a cued eye with more photo receptors; the second is a compound eye that adds more cups. Both types in stage three can produce crude images of objects.

In stage four, the most advanced eyes perform complex visual tasks. Lenses, corneas, and irises focus light on photo receptors, creating sharp, clear vision. This entire evolution, from simple to complex, could theoretically happen in less than half a million years.

People have asked me, um, if I could be any animal at all, what animal would I like to be? In terms of their vision, it would only be right to say that since I work on them so much of my time, I would really like to know how mantis see the world. Their perception of the world is so different, both in terms of their sense of color, their sense of parts of the spectrum that we don't see at all, and also the way that their eyes are multiple, so that each eye sees the same thing multiple times from different points of view.

I think I’d probably, if I got myself into the mind of a mantis, I’d have no idea what was going on, and I would never be able to tell myself, "Oh, this is how they see." That's the thing that I'm afraid of, but I'd still like to spend at least a few minutes seeing how a mantis sees the [Music] world.

More Articles

View All
Eat the Top 15 Most Mind-Blowing Sushi with Lucas Sin in Tokyo's Best Omakase | Best of the World
Lucas: It’s like a sunset. Of tuna. The producers told me that I was going to be interacting and eating sushi in some way. The rarity, the specialness of the experience was not conveyed and could not have been conveyed. Here we are in Tokyo. Just got off…
Breaking Down HackerRank's Survey of 40,000 Developers with Vivek Ravisankar
All right, the Veck, why don’t we start with what you guys do, and then we’ll rewind to before you even did YC? Yes, sure! I’m S. V. Ivent, one of the founders and CEO of HackerRank. Our mission at HackerRank is to match every developer to the right job,…
The feeling of wanting to leave everything behind...
It’s quite ironic that in a world as vast as ours, we often find ourselves clinging to just a tiny part of it. Often, we die in the same place we came into existence, surrounded by roughly the same people. Somehow, we’re expected to remain close to our ro…
Virtual Girlfriends!! And Other VSAUCE WTFs
Hey, Vsauce! Michael here, and I’ve got some good news. Today, I’m bringing you a bunch of Vsauce WTFs, and hey, those always make people happy. First, a replay from Pro Evolution Soccer 2008. The goalie stops the ball, and as we move forward frame by fr…
How to Apply And Succeed at Y Combinator | Startup School
[Music] Hey everybody, this is Dalton. I am excited to talk to you today. The topic of today’s talk is how to apply and succeed at Y Combinator. To begin with, let’s talk about why it’s worth applying to Y Combinator. It’s a good idea to sit down and th…
RC step response 1 of 3 setup
In the last video, we looked at this RC circuit, and we gave it a step input with this step source. A step from V naught up to V s, with a sharp change right here at t equals zero. We sort of took an intuitive guess at what this voltage looks like—here’s …