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
NEW! Khan Academy's AI Tutor, Khanmigo - In Depth Demo
Hey everyone, Sal here, and I wanted to show you an in-depth demo of the new AI that we have happening throughout Khan Academy. What you’re going to see is that it exists in two ways. One is helping students and learners and teachers with many of the thi…
Best Crypto To Buy Right Now | Kitco NEWS
[Music] So in this environment, Roy, give me your top DeFi or crypto investment. Is there an altcoin that you think has room to rally? Give me, in two sentences, your top investment in the space right now. “I’m going to disappoint you right now because I…
When Sex Turns Lethal | Original Sin: Sex
In modern day Monaco, if you want to get married, you need to post a written announcement on the town hall for 10 days. Across the globe, governments love to legislate who can and can’t get married for reasons of control, paranoia, or fear. Scientists at …
Consumer protection | Scams & fraud | Financial literacy | Khan Academy
So one thing to think about as you think about your own financial literacy is what do you do in a situation where you try to interact with some type of a business or a financial institution, and they either are misinforming you in some way or they’re not …
How Far Can We Go? Limits of Humanity (Old Version – Watch the New One)
Is there a border we will never cross? Are there places we will never reach, no matter how hard we try? Turns out there are. Even with science fiction technology, we are trapped in our pocket of the universe. How can that be? And how far can we go? We li…
Are GMOs Good or Bad? Genetic Engineering & Our Food
GMOs are one of the most controversial areas of science. Genetic engineering is used in many fields, but even though medical applications like GM insulin are widely accepted, the debate heats up when it comes to food and agriculture. Why is that? Why is t…