Tetrachromacy: The Woman with Super Human Vision

originally posted by: Serdgiam
In the monkey pic, where are the differences located? I know the scene changed, but the colors look the same. I am pretty certain I do not have tetrachromacy.

Uhm...are you serious? Because if so, you just found out you are color-blind.... There is a significant difference in the colors of those two pictures.

Oh..nvm: "However, I have also been diagnosed as being partially colorblind (red/green)". Yes, the second picture has green and red (the fruits etc.) while the first picture, at least to me, almost looks monochromatic, everything has a yellow tint and there is no red or green.

As an artist, wish I had that! However, figure it might confuse things between my husband and I more when it comes to colors, he's mildly colorblind and I feel like sometimes I know too many color variations comparatively-due to art and paying attention to them already. Fascinating and going to look further into her case.

The human brain is surely capable of seeing such colors, it's just that most of us don't do it all the time like this woman does. There are certain religious substances in native cultures, or so I've heard and read, that cause colors to show up like this, so if the brain is capable of it in those situations then maybe a legal substance will eventually be invented and marketed. It would be interesting to visit a major art museum with her type of vision, for example.

Read the prophecies of Celestine, and you will see the world with different eyes.

I went to her website to look at her paintings and I don't see them as being qualitatively different from those of many other artists. I think she has a gift that would be analogous to "perfect pitch" among musicians, in the sense of a heightened discriminative capability.

Artists, in mixing colors, become aware of the color's component colors. Sometimes they choose not to work with the color, but with the components of the color instead, allowing them to tease out different emotional or design effects from the color.

The following is a good example of how an artist, Tom Thomson, has taken the blue component from the green of evergreen trees and accentuated it, for effect, at the center of the painting. There are huge numbers of examples of this in artworks. Thomson was a great landscape artist working at the beginning of the 20th century. The painting, an oil sketch measuring just over 4 X 6 inches, sold for in excess of $1.4 million.

www.artnet.com...



Ms. Antico appears to see colors, as their components, from the get-go.

This ability, like perfect pitch, is a mixed blessing, I should think, . . . and like perfect pitch is no guarantee of great art.

It is an interesting phenomenon though. Thanks to the OP for the thread.

amazing artwork to say the least but I can't help but wonder, how is the average bear supposed to appreciate extra color if the average bear can't see them?

just have to take their word for it?

a reply to: NoRulesAllowed

Yeah, that was all kind of the point of my post!

She doesn't see much difference between the pics and neither do I. Yet, the experience itself is quite a bit different (supposedly).

Its really quite interesting, with a tinge of irony in that I could recreate the pictures and also claim 'That is how my world looks.'

That said, I looked again on a more capable monitor, and could see the difference in the monkey pic. A tablet screen at the lowest brightness possible isnt that great for color reproduction. The others still look about the same though.

This would explain the Impressionist movement then. Perhaps there were several French artists who also had this peculiar quality - Renoir, Matisse, Degas, Monet etc. Impressionist paintings are certainly far more vivid in color than most. Historians claim Impressionism was a reaction against the traditional Salon Neo-classicist school but what if it were simply a quirk of fate to have several prominent tetrachromat artists working near each other during the same time frame? Makes me wonder about Van Gogh as he seemed to see many colors others would not in ordinary scenes.

a reply to: Jennyfrenzy

I had forgotten about the tetrachromats til seeing this thread. Really cool stuff, and a great "visualization" of subjective reality in a way.

I've wondered in the past whether tertrachromatacy might be an "aggravating" factor with some autistics. Not that they're related, but where they are concurrent, I could see tetrachromatacy multiplying the effect some autistics struggle with of too much color.

I assume she would purchase a Sony Aqous "Quattron" television with four color pigments in it's display, red, green, blue, and yellow.

a reply to: dogstar23

That's an interesting point.

Jack Grassel, a well known guitarist with perfect pitch has written about the down side of perfect pitch. Apparently it can be irritating and distracting when the ordinary sounds around one start organizing themselves via perfect pitch.

a reply to: Asktheanimals

Van Gogh immediately springs to my mind when thinking aboht this topic too This is my favourite and is a good example of tetrachromacy: Starry Night over the Rhone

a reply to: ipsedixit

Tetrachromacy is definitely interesting. It's also interesting to see how different members perceive the colors in her artwork. That's what I really love about art, everyone sees something different and takes away something different.


When looking at this painting I see an abundance of colors, different shades of pinks and purples that I don't see when looking at the tree.

What would really be interesting, seeing her paintings in person. Color never really translates well from artwork to pictures.

That is a beautiful painting you posted by Tom Thompson, I can feel the cold translated through his use of color! Brrr! Art is truly awesome stuff.

a reply to: Jennyfrenzy

Jenny Hi! Nice, well laid out, Thread! Thanx for the Positive Posting here! Great Job!! Take it easy, Syx.

I used to have profound visual experiences when i ws a lot younger, but artistically never went far beyond pencil or felt tip pens...
At the moment this is the best / one of the best drawings ive done and it took me just 30 minutes. Interestingly although there is no colour in the drawing, my mind while drawing it was so entranced by the birds in the photograph that i started halucinating different colours coming from the birds... The picture itself wasnt black and white, but the colours i was seeing were somehow coming from a higher dimension. It was a lot of fun and gave a warm fuzzy while feeling drawing it


If i learned how to use paint im pretty sure i could do something similar.... Its just about not being afraid to interact with the higher vibrations i think... Once you are peacefull and you heart opens i think anything is possible..... Interestingly enough, one of the things long term meditators often say about meditation is that it heightens your perception of colour after a long sit. Perhaps from a scientific perspective it would mean those with dormant tetrachromacy (if thats even a thing) are waking up their latent ability to perceive colour in more profound ways during meditation. Hmmmmm sometimes sleeping on long car journeys ive felt that very profoundly, so perhaps its true...the question i am curious to know the answer to about all this though is are those without tetrachromacy able to heighten their perception through meditative experiences or is it just those with tetrachromacy who can experience the colour spectrum in a heightened way, or am i confusing tetrachromacy with my experiences of lucidity / awakening with heightened perception...

a reply to: ipsedixit

The entire Fauve movement seems based around this kind of color-treatment of nature. Lots of beautiful stuff in that era.

Just thought I would mention that we have some pretty great artists on ATS, like this person! (He has several threads of scanned art)

a reply to: funkadeliaaaa

Beautiful drawing!

Meditation is so useful in so many ways, never thought of it enchanting color perception before.

a reply to: Serdgiam

Wow! Thanks for linking that! Love the use of color.

There really are some awesome artists in the ATS community!

a reply to: Jennyfrenzy

I have painted a lot in the past and when I was learning to paint, it was quite a moment when the concept of "fanning out" the colors came to me. By "fanning them out" I meant thinking of them as their components rather than as the mixed colors as seen by the eye. Doing this put more tools of expression in my hands.

This kind of thing has been done by artists through the ages, but I was a "literalist" desperately looking for organic ways to liven up dull landscapes. I never copied what others had done, but rather derived my techniques from scratch. It was a process of reinventing the wheel and I realized that all artists have been doing this for ages.

a reply to: Aleister

I agree. I love the "fauves". Matisse is my favorite. Of the giants of 20th century visual art, I feel closest to him in spirit, though my paintings don't look like his.

Here's one of my own paintings. I don't want to link to my web page for political reasons. I wish I could, but we don't live in that world.