Superhuman powers

When it comes to our sensory capabilities, diversity is very wide as with many other human aspects, like height, weight, skin tone or hair color. There are typical sensitivities that most of us reach (or are expected to reach to be considered healty), like the famous 20/20 visual acuity. It is so much so that essentially anyone displaying poorer vision will be invited to get corrective glasses, an experience that I have already had twice: I was long-sighted as a child, so I had to wear glasses for over a decade until the growth of my eyeballs took the visual defect away. Now, in my mid-forties I have already started to need telescopic arms because my eyes are not so efficient at focusing nearby objects anymore (a.k.a. presbyopia), so I end up putting the newspaper further and further to try to focus on the small print.

On the other side of the spectrum, there are people with seemingly superhuman senses, like the orchestra conductor that can pinpoint, in the middle of 50 instruments, who is the one out of key and who is going late; or the lady with such a fine nose that she is able to smell Parkinson's disease in patients way before they show any symptoms. However, most of these sensory superpowers are just a matter of training. After years of forging iron, a blacksmith can tell if the ingot is at the right temperature by the clang it makes when it is hit by the hammer. A carpenter can feel with their bare hands if the carving in the seat of a chair is deep enough or still too shallow, because they have touched so many that their hands are able to recognize with great accuracy if the shape fits or not.

Photo: kattebelletje

The understanding of these capabilities has improved a lot in the last decades with the advances in neurophysiology from the first experiments in subliminal messaging by James Vicary in 1957 to the imaging methods that have been recently developed to identify neuron activity almost to the level of single cells. Being exposed to the same stimulus time and time again can sometimes lead us to ignore it completely, as is the case for instance with our mouth or body odor: everybody has one, we have just learnt to ignore our own while being able to smell many other things, frequently below the threshold of our own odor. On the other hand, we  can also train ourselves to look for a given stimulus, so that everyone we get exposed to it and identify it successfully the connection in our brain gets stronger and our ability improves for future occasions.

One common features to all animal and all senses is that they have evolved to cope with typical stimulus ranges: if a noise is too soft, we will not be able to hear it, if it is too loud it can disorient us or even damage our ear. Of course, the range of sensitivity has evolved alongside our customs. Because we are mostly diurnal we have fairly good daytime vision (high resolution and in colors) whereas our night vision is much coarser and essentially only in black and white. And the fact that we are relatively big and slow also means that our vision is not incredibly fast, so cinema can work at "only" 24 frames per second, while birds would need 120 frames per second or more.

The result of our adaptation is that most of the time the stimuli we receive are in the lower part of our sensitivity range and we have enough way to cope with intensities that happen frequently in our environment, but start to suffer overload if we are repeatedly exposed to stimuli in the higher end of our tolerance range (or above it). Luckily for us, these extreme stimuli are infrequent in nature. However, the marketing industry has learned to leverage on unusual signals to capture our attention: they are the superstimuli that I have mentioned a couple of times in the past. For me, the perfect example of a superstimulus is perfume which such a high density of nuances that it can easily lead me into overload. And let us not discuss entering a department store through the fragrance section, where I become smell-less within seconds thanks to the saturation of odors.

These days the visual aspect of every product is designed very carefully, and I recently learned about a project called "Cinema Palettes", that gathers the color palettes of various movies to show how they are used to set the mood. And it is amazing how, just by looking at the palette one can very easily sync to the general ambient of the movie. But here too directors frequently play with superstimuli to create a strong impression on us, something that would be statistically impossible in nature and that only by the will of a bunch of humans turns into this unlikely reality.

I came to think about it because a couple of weeks ago a friend of mine recommended a game for my Android phone called I Love Hue, where you a presented with a lattice of colored rectangles that follow a subtle hue gradient. Some rectangles are pinned in their original position and the rest are scrambled. The task is to exchange pairs of squares to restore the original color pattern, which is, at the same time, pleasing and unsettling. For a fond solver of sudoku, picross and other logical pass-times, this game has me at a bit of a loss because there is no logic to the resolution: it simply relies on my own perception of color, so the best strategy is in fact dropping any calculation and just looking for a square that would fit next to one that is already placed. Depending on the color combinations this process can be truly excruciating, forcing me to make several attempts before I find the one I am looking for or even to give up on a certain part of the puzzle and continue somewhere else.

On the other hand, it is admittedly very pleasing to see the gradient coming back into shape, with the colors forming a bigger section of the original layout until it is finally complete. The drawback, at least for me, is that after two or three boards my eyes get somehow saturated and I am not able to distinguish the colors anymore. Karen has also given it a try and she said that it is quite easy, but I am not sure how much it was her honest opinion and how much was just pulling my leg. But it is entirely possible that she, as many other women, has superhuman color vision. I will keep you posted on my progress. Have a nice evening.