Electromagnetic spectrum

[Nhur]

Soem days ago talking about the light in the drawings, (values, color, science) I think in something weird, I hope that i can explain because my englis is poor.

I study in my school about Electromagnetic spectrum some years ago, :

http://i187.photobucket.com/albums/x258/Nhurartworks/spectrum.gif

well I thin, damm we can see that little? the brain interprets the waves captured by our eyes and and turns it on colors right?, maybe if we could get the other waves with the eyes we could see more colors? or.... mm I dont know if we get something like bats, dolphins and our eyes we could see in a diferent way? you know see the front of ours and "see" the things of out back.

Would be interesting know how diferent could be the art with this senses. more colours? only see the infrered rays?

maybe some animals can see it and make some wierd things for this reason. who knows ....

sorry for my poor english I hope that you could understand.

[Baron Impossible]

Yes, we see a very tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum. If our range of vision was wider we would indeed see more colours. There is no way to represent these other colours in art because we have no concept of what they would look like and no way of seeing them anyhow.

[Elwell]

Different animals are sensitive to different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. If you were an owl, and could see into the infra-red, you'd be able to see a warm mouse against a cool field even with no moonlight. If you were a bee, and could see into the ultra-violet, you would see many patterns on flower blossoms that are invisible to us. Etc.

[Cthogua]

An interesting corollary to this is that since we as beings with metabolisms generate heat, which is really infra-red light, our bodies are constantly emitting light. It's just not light that our eyes are set up to see. I don't know why, but I somehow get a kick out of the idea that we're these glowing, luminescent beings, yet we ourselves can't see it.

I also think this is interesting to consider when talking about objective reality. The reality we experience, that our brain creates, is assembled out of the sensory input our bodies are equipped to take in, and even that is pared down to be a perception useful for an upright walking hunter/gatherer. It's actually been hypothesized that what we consider to be "the moment" is actually a hallucinatory representation of what your brain expects to be happening milliseconds into the future, since there is actually a slight delay in transmission between information being received by the sense organs, and it reaching the brain to be processed. It then must be processed and integrated into your experience of "reality" To counteract/compensate for that lag, scientists have theorized that our brain is actually pushing ahead of actual input (as it needs no input to create apparent reality. Dreams, sensory deprevation hallucinations, and some powerful psychedelic states are perfect examples of the brains engine of creation continuing to work without, or disregarding external stimuli) in order to keep up with what might be happening. This mechanism is how they believe some optical illusions create the impression of movement when there is none. Basically the brain is being tricked by certain cues it normally interprets as movement and it keeps shifting the input based on the expectation of that movement, then correcting based on the actual input, and so on.

The sensory worlds of other animals is something we can only crudely grasp at, and that's not even considering animals with senses we arn't even equipped with like Dolphins echolocation, and the lateral line of fish. This is something I love thinking and speculating about, especially as we enter an age where chemical, biological, and mechanical prosthetics, may allow us to drastically alter the type and amount of sensory information our brain receives, and potentially fundamentally alter our experiential "reality" far beyond the false color infra-red vision type thing we typically use to represent expanded senses.

[Dian3]

I always wondered where the magenta is.. wikipedia says:

It is an extra-spectral color, meaning it cannot be generated by a single wavelength of light, being a mixture of red and blue wavelengths.

[Sady]

That's why I like to see astronomical pictures composed of multiple wavelengths we cannot see.
Usually people say "Well, but that is a composite image, it's not truly what we see." and the point is that those composite images are more true to reality than what we actually see.

This is something I love thinking and speculating about, especially as we enter an age where chemical, biological, and mechanical prosthetics, may allow us to drastically alter the type and amount of sensory information our brain receives, and potentially fundamentally alter our experiential "reality" far beyond the false color infra-red vision type thing we typically use to represent expanded senses.

Aside from you and me and a few dozen others there is not much demand for such things. Except maybe as fun gadgets. 8(

[gnarl]

.. I don't know why, but I somehow get a kick out of the idea that we're these glowing, luminescent beings, yet we ourselves can't see it.


This sounds like Auras. People's wave lengths producing different colored lights, that possibly only a few people have the sensory to pick up. I don't know if there's truth to this, but it sounds valid enough to be possible. Can anyone elaborate on how an aura might be possible? Or why most likely it's not possible.

[Baron Impossible]

This sounds like Auras. People's wave lengths producing different colored lights, that possibly only a few people have the sensory to pick up. I don't know if there's truth to this, but it sounds valid enough to be possible. Can anyone elaborate on how an aura might be possible? Or why most likely it's not possible.

No, there's no truth in it. People's eyes - and brains - are very similar, a product of hundreds of millions of years evolution. It's not credible - nor is there evidence - that some people (usually middle-aged women living in Texas with 32 cats) have radically different eye and brain structures that allow them to see what others can't. In addition, if you actually examine the claims of people who say they see auras, they attribute the nature of the aura to a vast spectrum (pun intended) of nonsensical attributes, such as the mood of the person in question, their health, whether they're going to die soon or even whether they're alien.

[Cthogua]

That's why I like to see astronomical pictures composed of multiple wavelengths we cannot see.
Usually people say "Well, but that is a composite image, it's not truly what we see." and the point is that those composite images are more true to reality than what we actually see.


Aside from you and me and a few dozen others there is not much demand for such things. Except maybe as fun gadgets. 8(

Actually a couple of uses immediately spring to mind. Military and medical are the two most obvious I think. DARPA has been funding research into soldier sensory enhancement for decades. Law enforcement would also find such technology useful. In fact search and rescue, and law enforcement around the world already uses the superior senses of other animals (mostly dogs) to aid in their efforts. In the medical field "sensory expansion" has been in use since the X-ray was developed. Sure it's not in, or attached to our heads but it produces information we cannot otherwise glean with our regular 5 senses. MRI's and CAT scans are just further extensions of this endeavor. Another area where sensory additions/enhancements/augmentations are useful is in interfaces, and things like remote vehicle operation.

Also, we've been focusing on external senses, what about internal ones? 99% of what happens in our body is automated and we are completely unaware of. Does it have to be this way? Obviously our body already has systems for transferring information all around the body, and our brain uses that information to regulate things, just on a sub-aware level. What if there were some way of accessing that level of awareness and being able to willfully act within ones own body? Doctors would no longer be needed to make educated guesses on what might be wrong with you. Cancer could be spotted almost from the moment of it's inception, failing organs could be immediately identified. Diseases, infections, imbalances, all that could be identified and dealt with. Timothy Leary (at least let me finish) hypothesized, in "The Politics of Ecstasy" based on personal exploration and the accounts of many fellow trippers, that drugs (and what are drugs other than chemical technology? ) shift consciousness (and what is consciousness but an effect created via chemical technology, ie our brains) through different levels of awareness from the ego level, to the sensory, to what he calls the "somatic" level (meaning organs and internal body processes), then eventually on to cellular and atomic awarenesses, and that different drugs have the effect of activating or enhancing certain levels of that awareness. Alcohol, and sedatives/narcotics fall into the anesthetic category and don't really shift awareness as much as shut it down. Stimulants, boost the ego and sensory awarenesses, and psychedelics amplify the somatic, cellular, and atomic levels of awareness. Anyone who has had any experience with LSD can vouch for atleast the biological awareness. Some people react in horror as they become aware of the pumping, squeezing, twisting, and pushing constantly going on internally. Obviously there's the question of illusion vs perception, and our hallucino-phobic culture is trained to assume that any supposition based on observations made about psychedelic states to be patently illusion. On the other hand there's direct experience. I have a friend who took some LSD and felt really ill, particularly in his lower abdomen and thought maybe he had appendicitis. So he went to the hospital the next day, where they found out he did infact have appendicitis but that it was extremely early in the infection and they said he shouldn't have been able to feel it yet. Perhaps he has a more sensitive appendix than most, or perhaps he became more aware of the state of his body through the use of LSD. Of course there's also all the "my friend thought he was an orange and tried to peel himself" stories, but I think 90% of bad trip experiences are really related to our cultures lack of a context for such an experience and peoples disrespect/irresponsibility/unpreparedness when dealing with consciousness altering chemicals. Anyway, mind-body control/awareness is hardly a new subject, or particular to psychedelics, in fact it is the focus of many yogic and meditational practices, and have been observed to have real effects on the bodies rhythms and chemistry. So is it really such a leap that certain kinds of chemical technology might create states which could amplify those mechanisms?

Just to be clear, I'm not stating any of these ideas as absolute truth. I'm also not trying to turn this thread into a drug policy/experience thread or anything. However when you're talking about senses, experiential reality, and technology, psychedelics have to be considered.

In case anyone is interested the first chapter of The Politics of Ecstasy, 'The Seven Tongues of God" can be read on google books here (http://books.google.com/books?id=ag56qhrn-_0C&lpg=PP1&ots=H3iIWGHSH0&dq=%22politics%20of%20ecstasy%22%20levels&pg=PA13) I highly recommend it, if not for the only reason that it presents some interesting ideas in a surprisingly reasonable fashion. Even if you disagree and find his conclusions ridiculous, the ideas provide fertile grist for concepts, IMHO.

[Baron Impossible]

So is it really such a leap that certain kinds of chemical technology might create states which could amplify those mechanisms?

Probably not, but bear in mind there's a big difference between speculating on the body promoting to consciousness what is normally filtered out as noise (essentially intuition) and the body detecting stimulae without the required sensory organs (essentially woo-woo). However many drugs you take you're never going to see in the infra-red although it's feasible that your awareness of stimulae within the normal human range could be enhanced.

[Cthogua]

Probably not, but bear in mind there's a big difference between speculating on the body promoting to consciousness what is normally filtered out as noise (essentially intuition) and the body detecting stimulae without the required sensory organs (essentially woo-woo). However many drugs you take you're never going to see in the infra-red although it's feasible that your awareness of stimulae within the normal human range could be enhanced.

Oh yeah I agree that the sense organ issue completely prevents certain types of information from being experienced and processed. We're probably never going to be able to experience a world bathed in AM radio waves or see infra-red light with our eyes, drugs or no. The interesting thing is that we do process infra-red information, just with our skin, experiencing it as heat. Our skin is also sensitive to electrical information, however the amount that actually radiates from a person is faaar below our organ's sensitivity to such things so hoping to be able to read something about someone based on their bio-electric field from across the room might be hoping for a bit much. Regarding internal processes though, our nervous system is spread through out our entire body and collects all of the information required to have that kind of "somatic" awareness. That's why I find Leary's idea so compelling. Not to mention the experience of my friend and his appendix, as well as various other psychedelic correlates. Animals seem to have some level of this awareness more so than people, as they will often alter their diet when deficient in certain minerals. Obviously they're not able to simply will their afflictions away, but there seems to be a greater awareness of the functional level of the body than modern humans exhibit.