When Alek Komarnitsky got Crystalens implants for his cataracts, he expected some color shifts in his vision. He didn’t expect to see into the ultraviolet spectrum:
My son has a very small prism that casts rainbow colors which are well highlighted on the kitchen wall.
I put a yellow sticky where I saw the violet color end, and then asked my wife and kids (age 13 & 10) to show me the “end of the rainbow” — which was less than I saw — and about the same as the camera sees.
Speaking of Ultra Violet Vision, did you know that birds can see UV?
“Birds may be the most visually-oriented animals in nature. They have one of the most sophisticated visual systems, the largest eyes of any animal (relative to body size) and the highest proportion of brain power devoted to vision. They have often been described as “a pair of eyes with wings”.
Birds’ ability to see color far surpasses that of humans, as does their visual acuity and the speed with which they process images. In almost all aspects of the visual experience, birds see a world that we can scarcely imagine.”
Birds can also use their UV vision to see the nutrients in their food. This is not unlike humans’ ability to detect sugar content simply by looking at the amount of green or yellow in a banana’s skin. For birds, their UV-sensitive eyes allow them to see oils, sugars, vitamins, minerals and amino acids that are invisible to us. Without UV light, food may simply not “look right” to birds and may lead to problems with appetite.”
Recent studies have shown that birds require five-to-twenty times the light humans do in order to see in color. In general, this means that birds have severely limited color vision in lighting conditions dimmer than those of a clear sunrise or sunset.
Most human homes are not lit to nearly this brightness level. Standard living room lighting is about eight times dimmer than sunrise or sunset. Even the most brightly-lit rooms in our homes — the kitchen and bathroom — are rarely bright enough to fully support avian vision.”
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“In addition to seeing more color detail, birds are also capable of seeing ultraviolet light. They likely perceive UV as an additional set of colors, which combine with the other colors in their visual spectrum. These extra color combinations are what allow birds to see around 200 times the number of colors that humans perceive.”
Really interesting. I’d assume that the human brain can only recognize a certain color spectrum, so the UV he saw looked like what a person would normally see as ordinary violet, while the ordinary violet was shifted down a little bit, and so on, down to the bottom of the spectrum, where reds that he normally could have seen were shifted down to an IR point where they became invisible.
I doubt if he gained anything that he didn’t have before. Remember he had his eye altered by having his cataract surgery. The normal human lens acts as a filter, does it not? Remove the filter and more range is exposed. Perhaps it is not such a good thing to see in the extended range. Could those shorter waves be harmful?