It turns out that some women may see 100 million colors, way more than the average person. It’s hard to imagine what the world would look like for these individuals! In a related note, I just finished reading Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars, a collection of stories about unusual neurological conditions, and I can highly recommend it.

It’s also interesting to note that we humans whether trichromat or tetrachromat are still using far more impoverished retinas that some other organisms like fish and amphibians who have much more sophisticated systems that process visual information in many more channels than we do. On top of that, they can fix their retinas when damaged….. We, either have lost that machinery or “forgotten” how to use it.