I am very interested in learning something and I need your help to do it. So, if you could, take a look at the picture below without reading any of the comments, then post a comment of your own describing what you see that is beyond the obvious.

In other words, does this look like anything other than what it clearly is? If so, what?

By the way, if you have seen this image before (it was tweeted this morning), please say so.

Then, move on to the previous post to find out what I “saw” and what I hope to learn.

Scroll down for comments!

Confession: I adore George Takei. This post isn’t about George Takei. It’s about a gig of his.

George Takei is the newest spokesperson for Sharp, selling a product called “Quattron Quad Pixel Technology”. The product claims that the addition of a yellow filter enables the television to display “never-before-seen colors”.

Absurd. There are no “never-before-seen colors” because color, by definition, must be seen to exist. It is not a property of objects or even light, but the perception of light and its properties.

So, let’s assume that they meant what George says in the commercial: that it displays color you can’t see with your TV’s 3-color technology.

Still very difficult to believe. The current RGB system produces more than 16 million colors, many of which are indistinguishable from one another already, so this seems a bit dubious.

I looked around to see what others are saying about it and found very little. A discussion on gagetynews.com caught my eye, though.

In it the author quotes a neuroscientist named Jack Lewis (who is apparently a UK version of Dr. Oz for the brain) as saying,

A key mechanism of perceiving colour involves comparing levels of red versus green light and blue versus yellow light, which all happens in a special layer of neurons within the retina. The addition of the yellow sub-pixel (to the standard red, green and blue) in this product creates so many new colour tones that the new technology Sharp is using to create images is mimicking critical features of the brain’s visual system. This could ultimately make us feel more involved in things we watch on TV, whether it’s playing a video game with your mates, cheering on your team or watching the latest action thriller.

Well, the first sentence is correct. The rest is hogwash.

First, the retina is in the eye not the brain. One would think that would be covered in neuroscientist school.

Second, what evidence is there to support the statement that mimicking features of the brain, or even seeing an image more clearly, makes us feel “more involved in things we watch”?

Let me answer that: none. Absolutely none. What does that even mean, anyway?

http://www.sharpusa.com/ForHome/HomeEntertainment/LCDTVs/WhatIsQuattron.aspx

How it works

The color of each pixel in an LCD monitor is produced by varying the amount of light shined through each of three sub-pixels each with a red, green, or blue filter. The amount of each determines the color the pixel will ultimately display.

The Quattron monitor involves four sub-pixels: red, green, blue, and yellow. Sharp claims that the addition of a yellow sub-pixel allows the production of more colors than the standard RGB system.

Why I think this claim is just silly

Well, let’s start with the initial statement:

At Sharp, our goal is to reproduce every color in the world on TV.

Color is in the mind, not the world.

Color is a perception, not a property of objects or anything else in the environment. “Reproducing colors” really means reproducing combinations of wavelengths and intensities of light, which our brain interprets as differences in color. An explanation of this is below.

Color is not discrete.

There are certainly limits to our ability to detect differences among colors, but color itself is not a discrete variable. Wavelength can be measured by nanometer, but there is a difference between 451 and 451.1 of these nanometers. There is a difference between 451.1 and 451.11 as well. This variable is continuous and our perception of each does not follow an algorithm. The firing of neurons is only somewhat predictable; it is a matter of probabilities, not certainties.

It is also much more complicated than “see color, perceive color”.

For example, we can distinguish among light samples which differ in wavelength by 2 to 6 nm, depending on placement in the spectrum. This difference is called the “Just Noticeable Difference” (JND). However, the JND differs among individuals. In fact, the distribution of hue perception across wavelengths differs among individuals somewhat.

The point here is that there is not a definitive number of colors in the world or even in the mind.

The human visual system will not know the difference

What follows is a very watered-down version of human color vision, but I would be happy to recommend some excellent texts on the topic if you leave a comment here or email me.

Electromagnetic energy spans a spectrum from gamma rays to radio waves and includes a range we humans sense with our eyes. We call that range the visible light spectrum.

When electromagnetic energy with a wavelength in the visual light spectrum enters the human eye, photons are “caught” by sensors at the back of the retina called rods and cones. These receptors are specialized neurons which fire (when photon absorption is sufficient) and send signals to other neurons.

The number of these receptors that fire allow us to determine the intensity of light (how much light there is). Three of the four kinds of receptors allow us to distinguish among wavelengths of light. The probability of firing for each cone depends on wavelength, with one cone most likely to fire if the wavelength is approximately 420nm, another at approximately 530nm, and the third at approximately 565nm. This is, of course, on average.

These cones are sometimes referred to as blue, green, and red cones, respectively, due to the perception each produces, but since the perceptions are not exactly blue, green, and red, most researchers prefer “s” for short wavelength, “m” for medium, and “l” for long. The responses of these three cones result in all of the colors we perceive by mixing in different amounts, much like the three primaries of pigment (red, yellow, and blue) are combined.

So, what about 4-color separation as a printing process? The CYMK printing process mixes ink primaries of cyan, yellow, and magenta in different amounts to produce millions of colors. The “K” in the process refers to black. Instead of mixing the three ink colors, black ink is used. One advantage of this practice is cost efficiency. Thus, the fact that CYMK is considered a 4-color process does not make it comparable to this “Quattron” process.

Why do we see four unique hues?

Layers of neurons in the retina converge to form a set of opponencies. Red and green oppose one another, then the combination of red and green cones converge to produce a yellow opponent for blue. In color matching experiments, participants are given a circle of light at a wavelength perceived as yellow. Then they are given another circle in which wavelengths perceived as red and green may be mixed. When they are mixed in equal parts, the circles appear to match although they are quite different in physical properties.

So, the human visual system cannot distinguish between yellow light and a mixture of green and red light. How, then, are we to tell the difference between a pixel produced by a yellow filter and one produced by a mixture of red and green filters?

Even if we could tell the difference between yellow light and a red/green mixture, the Quattron system mixes the color at the sub-pixel level. The color of the pixel is the same in either case.

So what can the Quattron system do?

Much like the K in CYMK, the Quattron system may be more energy efficient by allowing the use of yellow in the place of equal parts red and green light. Sharp claims:

When combined with Sharp’s 1080p X-Gen LCD panel, which incorporates UV2A Technology, the displays offer dramatic reduction in energy consumption compared with conventional fluorescent-backlight LCD TVs.

With four sub-pixels to mix, more variations in wavelength/intensity mixtures may be produced which, technically, means that more shades are produced. However, if this is the case, the ability of the human visual system to differentiate among them is questionable at best. So, it may be able to display more colors, but does it matter? I think not.

Oirignally Posted February 4, 2009

I just caught a report on our local Fox News station about a couple that appeared on “Good Morning New York”, complaining about Elmo’s potty mouth:

Notice that the segment opens with a statement of FACT — the toy has a dirty message — rather than a question about whether this might be true.

This is a perfect example of how human perception is influenced by knowledge. Perception driven by expectation and belief is called “top-down” processing, whereas perception that starts with information from the senses is considered “bottom-up”. Most of our daily perception is top-down in nature.

In many of my classes, I demonstrate this by playing music clips backwards. Some claim that these clips have “hidden messages”. Everyone from the Beatles to Queen to Eminem to Brittany Spears has been accused of it. An entire website is devoted to the study of what David John Oates calls the greatest discovery of all time: Reverse Speech. He even sells training courses and other products (surprise, surprise).

Oates claims that our unconscious is revealing itself through our speech and that these messages can be heard if we listen to recordings of this speech backwards. He spends countless hours listening to audio recordings of politicians, celebrities, and music — listening for anything that sounds like English and documenting it. Sometimes the audio must be slowed down before one can perceive the message.

His website is the source of many of the clips that I use. Fun classroom demonstrations are the only things of value there. My personal favorite is Neil Armstrong saying, “Man will space walk” as he is walking on the moon!

Click here to listen to Neil Armstrong

Oates says, “This is a reflection of his logical thoughts at the time. Man will continue to walk into space.” However, some have claimed that this is evidence that the moon landing was a hoax; that man will walk in space someday, but he is not at the moment.

If you listen to these clips, you will probably hear it, too. So, what is going on?

The “backmasking” and “subliminal messages” paranoia that began during the early days of the cold war has been the object of many studies, all of which point to one conclusion: we do not perceive these messages unless we are told to listen for them. One of the earliest (and best) of these, by Vokey & Read, is discussed in their article in American Psychologist in 1985. The authors conducted several experiments to fully address the question, but the most interesting is the last they discuss.

They started with a recording of the 23rd Psalm because the backmasking cryers of the time claimed that Satan was the source of the messages and religious material was free of them. In addition, they chose a passage from Jabberwocky because it is meaningless when heard forward. After listening carefully they found pieces that could be interpreted as something meaningful, albeit silly. For example, part of Jabberwocky played backwards sounds something like, “Saw a girl with a weasel in her mouth.” When participants in the study were told the message to listen for, they agreed 85% of the time. However, they did not perceive that message when given a different expectation.

This effect is fairly easy to demonstrate. Try listening to the following clips for anything intelligible:

1. Queen Singing “Another One Bites the Dust”

2. The Beverly Hillbillies Theme Song

3. “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar

It’s no fun if you cheat, so listen several times and write down anything that sounds like it might be a message.

Did you get much?

THEN, click here to read the messages. Finally, listen again. It may take a time or two, but eventually you’ll hear at least some of them. Afterward, you will never perceive the jibberish you heard the first time. Instead, you will only hear the message.

In the Elmo clip, notice that one of the women on the street said, “It sounds a lot clearer this time around.” The newscaster in the studio also said that he did not hear the message, but when he played it again he did. This behavior is exactly what I would expect — and what I do expect when I play these clips for students. They never disappoint me because they are human.

Humans do not like ambiguity. We like to make sense of the world and will do so whenever we can. When told what to expect, we often form perceptions that match that expectation. Our perceptions often persist, even when we know that they were formed in this manner.

And there is the fear factor. And the outrage. And the frustration when people do not agree with you, although you believe it is obvious.

There have been many claims of evil in toyland. You might remember a few years ago, when the Teletubbies were under fire because a talking Po doll seemed to say, “Faggot, Faggot”. So, Po is a bigot even though, according to Reverend Jerry Falwell, his buddy Tinky Winky is gay.

Last year Wal-Mart pulled a doll from their shelves because of a complaint that the Doll said “Islam is the light”. Watch this ominous video about a woman who, after taking the doll away from one child, found the same message in a video game she bought for another child. Notice that the report, a broadcast from Indiana, calls it a “discovery” and does not address the question of intention or reality AT ALL.

Yes, it’s eerie that the doll and game sound the same, however, the source of the baby-talk audio may be the same. Both the doll and the game were designed to mimic a baby speaking little more than jibberish.

So, you can blame Fisher Price. You can call Elmo a pervert and conjure up a conspiracy theory. But the evidence says otherwise.

UPDATE

In December I blogged about this case of Hannah Montana’s secret plan to turn young girls into… well… you decide.