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simplicio comments on Generalizing From One Example - Less Wrong
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"There was a wide spectrum of imaging ability, from about five percent of people with perfect eidetic imagery to three percent of people completely unable to form mental images."
Yesterday I was surprised to learn that my wife can barely see afterimages. I was watching a lecture where the green, yellow & black American flag appears, you stare at it, and then it goes away and an afterimage of the real red white & blue one appears. She couldn't see it after 4 tries. Then I told her to stare at a lightbulb for several seconds and look away. She still didn't see anything. Staring at it even longer produced a weak afterimage that she could only just barely see if she closed her eyes.
Whenever I wear polarized lenses I can see patterns in safety-glass, and more bands on rainbows than would regularly be there; most other people I've met are similar.
One day, on a long car trip, I was talking to the guy sitting next to me and he was able to see these things with his eyes uncovered. I haven't the faintest clue whether this is a hardware or a software difference, either seem feasible.
Anyone can see those things if looking at reflection of blue sky. Blue sky's light is polarized. Ditto if looking at a reflection. But most people wouldn't notice that, the effect is fairly faint. The person who could detect polarized light would notice that LCD displays are polarized and could tell you some are polarized other way than others.
Related: ever seen Haidinger's brush?
It's very cool, but because it's on the threshold of perception it also requires a good deal of discipline not to fall into an N-ray style state of mind when attempting to view them.
Maybe the people who can see those things with their eyes uncovered lack stereo vision?
Since I was a child I found that when I close one eye, light sources (against a sufficiently dark surroundings) change their appearance... Similar to a lensflare effect. Works with each eye individually, but with both eyes open these artifacts disappear. I always figured these are optical phenomena which will be identified as such by the brain by comparison between both eyes and therefore eliminated.
So if someone lacks stereo vision, or has a significant impairment of the stereo vision system, this might explain this polarizing phenomenon. However, maybe I'm in error and those two phenomena are apples and oranges.
Hm, I don't think it's likely a function of basic differences in visual perception - I have normal vision as far as I'm concerned, but I have very vivid mental imagery. I also have very vivid dreamscapes, and every dream I have is a new scape - I've never had the same one twice. (Unrelatedly or relatedly, I dream A LOT, even when I doze off for 5-10 minutes.) In any case, I can be physically looking at something in the real world, but be "looking" at something completely different in my mind's eye, but there is a definite shift in attention that facilitates how much information I can get from either the current sensory input or the mental image.
This is more likely to be caused by a hardware difference than a software differnce, but both of these explanations seems really unlikely compared to the theory that this person's self report was confused. If in a controlled experiment, he can reliably differentiate between patterns of light polarization, then I will worry about explaining this.
I would think hardware. Polarization isn't something you can reconstruct from just color, but naturally-polarized lenses occur in nature and thus could have been produced by a mutation.
You're thinking about this all wrong. It's biological so the hardware IS the software.
A better question would be: is the difference in the eye or the brain? This you could test by taking some blue-detecting cones from the retinas of people who can and cannot detect Haidinger's brush and see if they respond differently to changes in polarization.
My understanding is that all humans have the 'hardware' to see polarized light, but that most of us filter it out -- that is, it is a software issue. However, you could also phrase this as 'the eyes register the light, but the brain discards the information'.
Have you read about Haidinger's brush?