If Humans can only see a certain frequency of light, what else is out there?

Very interesting. I've also thought about this a fair bit over the years, ever since I took my nephew to a kid's science museum and saw an illustation that looked something like this:

www.empiricaltruth.com...

It made me realize just how much we miss with the senses we were given.

I agree that we probably just see what we need to see in this phase of our evolution, but this also stirs a few other references up for me:

1- UFOs that were filmed by Mexican military through infra-red, but could not be seen with the naked eye.

2- The story of how the Natives could not see Columbus' ship approaching simply because they had never seen one before.

The human brain has a really high potential for plasticity, so it's totally possible that we are entirely capable of seeing these spectrums, but maybe our brains protect us from what we are not ready to know or see. Or maybe our minds are just not advanced enough to grasp exactly what we are seeing. Hmm...philosophy is fun.

-Sunseeker

reply to post by For(Home)Country


Exactly. I've occasionally heard bits of New Age drivel over the years about kids being born who could see ultraviolet as a new color outside the familiar red-violet spectrum. This idea, of a new color other than those we know, has always rung an alarm bell for me. If we could suddenly see ultraviolet, it would appear as violet. If we could see infra-red, it would appear as red. Why? Because it would be the range of wavelengths our eyes could detect expanding, not new colors appearing outside the spectrum. The subjective range of our perception is a separate issue from the literal wavelengths of light our eyes can detect.

Our ability to name colors may expand; some languages only distinguish between warm and cool colors, lacking names for the specific shades we call red, yellow, blue, etc. The names still refer to the same spectrum. Likewise, just because in English we've started referring to the portion of the spectrum between blue and violet as indigo doesn't mean a new color has popped up out of nowhere. It's always been there, we just never bothered naming it before.

All this talk about color reminds me of "colour out of space"

I'm telling you guys, you'd like lovecraft a lot.

god i'm a fanboy

You can relate to this! Don't pretend you can't! :-)



You wake up late! Oh hell your late for work! Oh gosh they're going to be so angry with you at work! Gosh I better get a move on! Where are my clothes? I haven't got time for this! Where's my wallet? Where are my keys? I better find them keys quick I'm in such a hurry now! Maybe they're on that shelf in the kitchen? But I doubt it! I suppose I'll spend half the morning looking for them and then I'll be seriously late! You look on the kitchen shelf, drat they're not there! I just knew I'd have a terrible day today, I'm going to turn the house upside down until I find those keys! And so there you are, looking under things, throwing clothes across the room saying where are my keys? Where are my keys? Maybe I did leave them in the kitchen? Oh this is silly! I need to calm down! You walk back in the kitchen and you notice your keys ARE on the shelf after all. And you think to yourself, "That's funny.. I'm sure those keys weren't there earlier!"

*******************************

Whats happened here is that you woke up late, if that wasn't stressful enough you couldn't find your clothes! Then you were anxious about where your keys were? You convinced yourself that you would have a stressful morning searching for your keys!

And so you DID have a stressful morning searching for your keys! You attracted it that way!

***Here comes the mindblowing bit!!! ***

When you first looked at the shelf in the kitchen, the keys were INVISIBLE in your perception. You attracted it this way because you firmly believed you would have a stressful morning searching for your keys. It was only when you started to calm down that the keys became visible again.

What I'm trying to convince you of here is that whatever you think, whatever you believe...YOUR RIGHT!!!

And I hear you cry "Don't be silly how can the keys be invisible and then visible again?"

If a second person happened to be in the kitchen at the time, they would have seen the keys, but you would have not! YOU created the "I can't find my keys scenario" in advance with your mind, you attracted it, and so, in your perception, the keys WERE invisible!