Both my eyes may from time to time perceive colors in a different way. When they do, one would see everything in more greenish-blue hues, the other in more red-yellowish hues. It's often the case when I closed one eye for a moment, or when that eye was on the pillow side after resting. So I assume it's either temperature-related, or simply that one of my eyes' cone cells were too exposed to, say, red, because of red light filtering through my closed eyelid, and therefore were less sensitive to it afterwards.

(I scored 3 on http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-well-do-you-see-color-173018)

Now that I have read all the comments on the linked blog post I have some thoughts to share that I want to have judged seperately.

From user "seez"

Some people can differentiate between orders of magnitude more colors than other people. You can test yourself here: http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/how-well-do-you-see-color-173018

I once had a long argument with a group of friends about why vision was more interesting than sound. Turns out all the ones who sided with vision could differentiate between far more colors.

This seems like it would be easy to test. What is the relevant literature to design a suitable experiment for this?

You can also test if you’re tonedeaf: http://jakemandell.com/tonedeaf/

Similar to the other case, I would like to test for a correlation between enjoyment of music and this. I am not sure what the practical use of this data is but I am interested in it anyway.

From user "St. Rev"

I can’t smell jasmine. I didn’t discover this until I was in my thirties and someone handed me a twig of jasmine flowers. My sense of smell is otherwise better than normal.

From user "Alicorn"

I’m a little bit faceblind (but not as bad as some people, like Leah).

From user "lmm"

This makes me wonder whether there are people who actually get emotionally affected by art, in the same way as I do with music. I enjoy art on an intellectual level, but I’ve never looked at a painting and had it make me feel sad or transcendent or any of the reactions people tend to talk about.

Reading these I wonder about how these discrepancies arise. Are they usually genetic in nature as in that some genetic factor determines certain neurological structures or are they the result of some environmental factor too? The jasmin example sounds more like a defective connection between the brain and receptors in the nose. Then again, only some part of the population is able to smell some metabolic product of asparagus in urine and we know this is a single gene mutation. The faceblind example sounds like some environmental factor being absent such as plenty of faces. The art experience thing I don't know.

Do high IQ people have more of these unusual structures? In my experience more intelligent people report such strange stuff more often and/or are able to empathise with me more. Then again, it could be that intelligent people in general are just more aware of these things and such more considerate.

Anyway I am very happy to see that other people have plenty of these little stuffs and I am not alone in this. I am very happy to be able to participate in this community.

The presence of an object (or even my own finger) near the center of my forehead causes a tingling sensation, which can even shift directions (but still, always centered on my forehead) as the object moves.

Overall I have a preference for being alone. Having other people around often bothers me, in particular if I have to share my time between paying attention to them and pursuing other (lonely) activities which I'd rather do instead.

However, I also can't feel happy without at least some human presence/interaction. I know if I stay alone with no contact at all for more than a few days, I'll feel lonely and start craving some human company. The way I balance these two impulses in practice, is to live with the same person who I get along with well, almost 24 hours a day, day after day, and have otherwise very few other contacts with other people. This is in no way perfect, but it's better than any alternative I can think of.

Overall, I tend to dislike interacting with/within groups of people more than with individuals. I particularly enjoy discussing interesting topics, so long as it's just with one person. I'm often disappointed in people, have fairly high standards, and only a few topics of interest which I like to share. This severely limits the amount of people, and circumstances in which I can pleasantly interact with them. I can still interact with just about anybody, I just don't enjoy the perpetual strain I experience when doing so.

why do those here with privileged information not invest heavily in the formation of new for-profit cryonics organizations, or start them alone, or invest in technology which will soon develop to make the revival of cryonics patients possible?

"The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent." (John Maynard Keynes)

Also, at which amount of money would you be indifferent between either being put to death and receiving that much (to do as you please with, as set in your last will if you wish), or staying alive and not receiving that amount of money?

Here's a link to an discussion in an open thread a while back where I posit that one rarely mentioned reason that humanity came to have a technological civilization is that earth's history was unusually conducive to the formation of large hydrocarbon accumulations just waiting for us to find and exploit: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ecf/open_thread_september_115_2012/7bcy

A planet needs to host life for hundreds of millions of years to generates the level of oil, gas and coal that we find. Imagine our civilizational trajectory it there was no possibility of an industrial revolution.

At least I feel like there should be a factor for "fossil energy availability" in the Drake equation.

Per PZ Myers, the state of the art in neural preservation doesn't recoverably preserve usable amounts of state in zebrafish brains, which are a few hundred microns on a side. How thin slices were you thinking of? And how fast were you going to be slicing?

I’ve worked with tiny little zebrafish brains, things a few hundred microns long on one axis, and I’ve done lots of EM work on them. You can’t fix them into a state resembling life very accurately: even with chemical perfusion with strong aldehyedes of small tissue specimens that takes hundreds of milliseconds, you get degenerative changes. There’s a technique where you slam the specimen into a block cooled to liquid helium temperatures — even there you get variation in preservation, it still takes 0.1ms to cryofix the tissue, and what they’re interested in preserving is cell states in a single cell layer, not whole multi-layered tissues. With the most elaborate and careful procedures, they report excellent fixation within 5 microns of the surface, and disruption of the tissue by ice crystal formation within 20 microns. So even with the best techniques available now, we could possibly preserve the thinnest, outermost, single cell layer of your brain…but all the fine axons and dendrites that penetrate deeper? Forget those.