Chapters First strip Cast Buy art About Fan art Downloads Blog Contact Mind-altering drugs and some of Teh Ackshual Skience.

*)Actual science! Rodents can't see red, but their brains can process it. See Inserted human gene makes mice see red in the New Scientist. If an inserted gene can "unlock" this ability in a rodent's brain, then I don't see why mind-altering drugs wouldn't also be able to do this.

Colour by Mravac Kid. Some post-production by me. Menjou © Starline X. Hodge.


The squirrel sings like a canary. A totally baked canary. The URL of this comic is http://www.rocr.net/?p=20070509



Comments

Well, the reason mind-altering drugs won't be able to do this is because the mice in the study had the gene inserted in them at the embryo stage, i e, already at birth they had additional light receptors in the eyes compared with standard mice. There is a description of the general "knock-in" procedure at http://www.linguamedica.jp/mita/20030618/knockout/knockout.htm.

(Not to spoil the story or anything, I just thought you might be interested. ;-)
Posted by kai
I didn't mean to suggest that mind-altering drugs would allow rodents to see extra colours with their eyes - just that they would have the ability to perceive more colours with their brains than they can do now.

By the way, I read rather a lot about tetrachromaty in humans on the Wikipedia page on that subject the other day, and while every referenced page for that article contradicted both every other referenced page and the Wikipedia article itself, something like this may still be going on in humans - i.e. the human "optical processing centre" of the brain may well be able to process more colours than it does now, should it be hooked up to an eyeball that can receive them.

Thanks for the link!
[Edited by moderator]
Posted by Reinder

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