i was born with cataracts, and had my lenses removed when i was a baby. i was never able to get artificial ones put in, so i've lived my whole life seeing like monet's lens-less eye (and some heavy prescription glasses). i'm curious about how normal people see the world compared to me. i have taken colour recognition tests and scored VERY high in accuracy, so i know i see more colours than others do. it's really cool to know that even though my vision kinda sucks even with glasses, i get to see a more vibrant world. i'm an artist, too! and maybe this is why my favourite colours are purple and blue.
Wow I can't believe no one has commented. That's amazing. Yeah i could only imagine wondering what other's can't see that you can. I find all this super interesting. Makes me want to experience it. So do you have to take special care of your eyes? Like watching what drops you use or getting in pools?
@@JoeBuk724 haha thanks! and nope, eyes carry on just fine without lenses. everything is just extremely blurry, but my prescription resolves that! i'm still visually impaired, though. i have an increased risk of glaucoma and retinal detachment as far as i know, so i make sure i get my eyes checked every year, instead of the recommended 2 years. i'm one of the last of my kind, as not long after i was born we figured out how to make implanting lenses viable in babies! the structures the lens is sewn to wasn't preserved for me though, so i'm one of the youngest people around to have this problem. pretty neat!
@@tinycatfriend Thanks for sharing! Wow that is interesting. I have to wear glasses and contacts too. Oh are contacts an option for you? Not too many people get to say they are "the last of their kind" lol. Oh I see, they removed it all so you can't get them now any way. Well that's good you can make do with glasses I recently had trouble with ghosting while reading text (particularly on a screen like a phone). So i can somewhat understand trying to explain to others what you (and only you lol) see.
@@JoeBuk724 i could use contacts, i just can't stand having to put them in. and considering how easy they are to lose, i wouldn't want to risk that when they're required for my everyday life. getting contacts (or glasses) replaced would take weeks or months because my prescription is so rare that not a lot of labs make it. i have every pair of glasses i've ever owned for this reason! haha yeah i'd love to explain how i see but alas, it's all i know~
@@tinycatfriend lol It took me a couple hours to get them in the first time, I just wasn't touching my eye enough. I still have them but quit wearing them for the most part, glasses are easier lol. But i do hate how skin flakes and stuff is always getting on them. And they stick to the lens, you can't just blow them off. Oh my, yes i didn't think of how long it must take to get special made stuff. Prob a good idea to keep the old ones around. My last ones got stepped on like Ralphie lol so I don't have those ones.
birds can also see ultra violett and the arrangement of light sensory cells in their eyes have a higher density, which makes them able to see better and they see colors stronger then we do. Having eyes like a bird would be truly amazing.
I legitimately felt sad and started crying while watching this video. I felt so bad such an amazing artist lost his talent from losing the ability to see proper colors. I really want to be an artist but I have no talent whatsoever. I admire any artist that can put their imagination to life and create a whole new world for us to see and believe.
There are other ways to repair cataracts these days, but lens removal was actually a fairly common surgery, and one that's been done since the time of the Romans. The difficult part is creating corrective lenses to still focus light on the retina.
Also, and I might be wrong about this, it might have something to do with shorter wavelength light(like ultraviolet) cause increased damage to cells, and thus would cause loss of vision long before your life would be over. I think allot of animals with short lives do not have the ultra violet lenses(birds and insects), wheres we and other long life mammals have them. I might be wrong though.
Black or fuzzy? Monet could still see out of his eye, just that there was no lens to focus the images. It explains his paintings a lot. Correct me if I'm wrong, pls
I am colorblind, and an artist. It can be very difficult. My paintings look strange, I see them as beautiful, and others do too, but it makes me sad that I will never be able to show other people what I see. Or maybe more that since what I see is so different, other people don't appreciate it. I want to make art for other people to enjoy, but I can't.
Actually, I think it's more likely that your art would give those of us without color blindness a better understanding of what you do actually see. If you mix up two hues due to seeing them as equal, we may end up getting very interesting pictures with blues in place of some greens, or blacks in place of some reds, etc. I've actually long been curious how paintings by color blind artists would look. Do you have a site featuring any of your work?
Lowraith Two of my art teachers were colorblind. :0 One of them worked almost exclusively in red and blue and he made these beautiful "fire wheel" paintings and earthworks models. A few of his paintings looked like this- www.kookseye.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Saint-Pirans-Fire.jpg He also does abstract, large scale paintings in collaboration with his wife. I have no idea what my current teacher's artwork is like, he hasn't shown us. What colors can you see with accuracy?
awkwardCrabwalk I can see all colors with above average accuracy. Which is one of the reasons colorblindness fascinates me. I can't even imagine what the world looks like from that perspective. Art produced by someone with colorblindness would be a peek into another perspective altogether, and might possibly reveal some part of the workings of the brain and how perception functions.
Lowraith I was talking to the other person, and I gave you a link to my color blind drawing teacher's artwork. Ha, I have better than average color perception, too. I took a test once, I think I got a 98% accuracy.
Man that was a tragic artist. Not only did he go through so much suffering and disappointment, he never got to know how unique and pretty the stuff became today.
U.v. Rays are highly energetic and cause damage to cells. You'd give the back of your eye a suntan....i don't want to imagine that, but, an eye patch would protect ya....mangekyo sharingan
Bk7 or fused silica lens can do it. Although modern should contain UV absorbants since it's harmful to eyes for long living species. Better idea is to modify camera to see ultraviolet.
Yeah, there are people alive today who were given artificial lenses that don't block UV light after their cataract surgery. I believe most surgeries performed today give patients UV blocking lenses instead.
Once we get the technology to properly map nerve endings and create a synthetic connection to a computer with them, full on cyborg eyes will be possible.
I got my cataract out a few weeks ago and I agree being able to see ultraviolet light is glorious and beautiful. I need to test it more but right off the bat I can definitely understand what is being described here
wow thats crazy you guys posted a video about people who can see ultra violet light ....i was just talking about that a couple of days ago ....my left eye can see ultraviolet
Oliver Sacks wrote about one of his patients, who was a painter, that acquired achromotopsia. After he obtained achromotopsia and trying to paint with color, he switched to what he still had: black, white and grey. The paintings were vastly different.
I remember sitting on the bus coming home as a kid. I would sometimes change which eye I was seeing in and the way his vision was makes sense. I could see more blue in one eye and red in the other. I had thought my eyes did this to get a balanced mix of color and get a proper "image" of what the world looks like.
When I was 6yo, the lens in my left eye was knocked out by a blow to the eye. Other than not being able to see clearly though my left eye, I didn't notice much until I was in high school. My friends and I would go to the local mall and one of our favorite stores was Spencer Gifts (the chain). Anyway, in the back of the store was a whole host of 'black-light' posters with a couple of black light fixtures. I found that if I closed my left eye (bad eye), and looked at the lights, they were that blue-purple and didn't seem to radiated any light at all (what I gather others see). However, if I closed my right eye (good eye) I and looked at the lights, their light was like a fluorescent tube.
To me he sounds more like someone who usually speaks very fast trying to speak slower :D Perhaps he tried to bring in a somber mood because of the monet-art-theme, or he was what you said, who knows?
Could you describe why Monet's perceiving reality and paint differs? Because logically if he perceives reality more yellow, then he will choose a color from the palette what he perceives more yello, but in reality it is exactly like the real word? :) So from this viewpoint the end result of his painting shouldnt reflect his problem perceiving colors... we should see the real colors on his painting... Am I wrong?
It's not like every paint pigment gets equally shifted to the yellow, though. It's not like blue paint would all of a sudden look yellow, it's would probably just look muted and black, or yellow-black, whereas the yellows and greens would appear closer to their natural "selves". Combine that with the fact that Monet was acutely aware of color, and would have remembered that no matter what it looks like to his eye, leaves are green and he needs to add blue to yellow to make that color, whether or not it looks right to his eye, and he could have been making colors from memory and not quite getting them "right", to us at least..
It's Okay To Be Smart Thanx, but the answer's firt half didn't describe the problem (as the color of nature and the color of the paint is shifted the same, so the painting should look like the same as nature)... The second part describes it, in the case: 1, he was painting it from memory, so didn't had reference while painting... 2, he knew it's not the natural color he is painting and he made an artistical choice to shift them to please his own eyes with memories based on his earlier (good eye) state... In both cases i feel it's more an artistical choice (If he had wanted to paint naturally, he could, but he enjoyed this new idea shifting the colors), not a disability.... What do you think?
Fine Cut Bodies I don't think the color of the paint and the color of nature would shift the same. Pigments in paint aren't single-wavelength reflectors, and a color of paint doesn't reflect light the same as a color pigment in nature. Even blue paint is a spectrum of different wavelengths from blue to red, not just blue. So let's say that Monet applied a bunch of blue paint to a mix or directly to the canvas. If that blue paint was only 5% yellow, then he could add a huge amount of it and he would only experience a tiny boost in yellow, and he would think he was painting something that was actually yellow in the scene (which would be based on a completely different natural pigment), but you or I would see blue paint. Make sense? That JAMA paper linked in description might be a good place to read for more.
I can see ultraviolet, but only from very strong sources that are almost horizontal to my eye... a head CT provided the clearest I've ever seen it. and its very similar to the purple from a black light, but quite a bit deeper and with a lot of "fuzziness" that makes it seem almost dark.
I recently had cataracts surgery and the amount of colour that I can see now is incredible, I can’t believe how much colour is in the world! Before that, everything was dull and gloomy, it was horrible!
Very interesting video! But I'm a little sceptic about the "computer simulations" of what the world would have looked like to the aged Monet. We do not yet have comprehensive models of how exactly complex vision works- so how is it possible too simulate it satisfactorily?
I linked to the JAMA research paper that did that in the description. Cataracts should be pretty easy to model, in terms of the blurriness and color shift. What is difficult to understand is how conscious Monet was of the change and whether he tried to correct it over time.
Dude being able to see a little bit of ultraviolet is insanity-inducing sometimes. I can see down to like 380nm from what I've noticed, and it's absolutely bizarre without my eyeglasses. I may be an artist, but you'll never catch me wearing contacts ever again after the first time I tried them... some colors are just WAY too vivid without something to filter ultraviolet.
I saw this years ago. Back now because someone mentioned honeybees and UV light in the same sentence and I had to go figure out why my first thought was Monet.
0:31 My internet went out the excat second the Pause screen showed up. I thought that the loading icon was in your video and not youtube not loading, lol
i just came here from "why animals dont wear glasses" video..and even though this is an older video, it look like this guy is much older and seasoned than his future counterpart...
Not all pigments reflect a lot of light. Some are transparent (like Monet's yellow lenses). The light you see has passed through the paint and reflected back off of whatever is underneath.
I have to imagine Monet's life experience was not unlike Beethoven's loss of hearing. Having attained the ability to make great things, they slowly became unable to appreciate the beauty of their creations. One has to wonder what Beethoven might have composed if he were given the proper use of one ear again toward the end.
(@3:42): It would be kool to see a composite image of these two pieces superimposed together to see what the resulting combined image would look like!!
I recently had cataract surgery. And while I can't see UV light because I have a fake lens in place of the original now.. I do notice a difference in hues from my left to my right eye. Probably because my 'good' eye has a few spots already, but I hadn't been aware I was seeing such dingy whites and because of my eyes. I thought that I was seeing them just fine and I guess my brain was supplying the rest from memory of when I was younger.
I'm curious how his vision would have looked with both eyes trying to look at the same thing. Would one eye's vision take dominance or would his brain try to stitch the two images with different colors together?
There is no pigment called "French aquamarine." It's "French _ultra_ marine." Ultramarine pigment originally was made from the mineral lapis lazuli. _French_ ultramarine is the synthetic version. But Monet did not use it. He used cobalt blue. "The point is to know how to use the colors, the choice of which is, when all's said and done, a matter of habit. Anyway, I use flake white, cadmium yellow, vermilion, deep madder, cobalt blue, emerald green, and that's all." - Claude Monet By the way, emerald green was also used as rat poison.
Ah, it would be so awesome if we were able to immediately perceive all the wavelengths of electromagnetic-light (albeit rather confusing, probably?) but our poor brains would probably collapse
This video inspired me to get the lender removed from one of my eyes so that I can see ultraviolet lol. I mean it'll be in a few years but still. I'm lowkey excited
@@MedK001 I honestly haven't thought about that in a long time. Perhaps just writing about my excitement helped me get it out of my system? Plus there's just been so much going on recently. I do still really want to see UV light, but I don't know if I'd still actively seek it out. I honestly don't know if I ever actually really planned on doing so to begin with. However I do wear glasses so if at any point I decide to get my vision fixed by getting knew lenses in my eyes, or if I happen to get cataracts like Claude Monet, it's definitely something I would like to do! Also edit to say your icon is very fitting lmao
I heard about this one before but I really don't understand it. Wouldn't this affect also the color he chose to paint with? I mean, if he is seeing all yellowish, than the paint would look yellower for that eye as well. However, when he changed his eye, the landscape got bluer but than again so did the yellower paint would become blueish. Unless he is looking with one eye and painting with the other. This would really change things because he would be looking for a yellow paint using an eye that sees mostly blue! The end result would be that for the same eye, his landscape would be extremely different than his painting. Still, this would only account for the paintings after removing his lenses...
you think in the near future we could create an artificial lens for our eye (like an implant/replacement) that doesnt filter out the ultra violet colors?
That would be exceptionally difficult to transmit it to brain... I think you shouldn't limit yourself to ultraviolet... Why not see radio waves? Microwaves? Tho what good will that do?
Ok so just blue cone cells respond to ultraviolet light, does that mean if we would remove our lenses we would see it as regular blue? Or is that regular kind of blue actual mixed with other cone cells and Monet instead saw some kind of superblue? Cause if it's the second, I need to find a way to see this (that doesn't ruin my eye ideally).
I lost an eye to cataracts as a baby and have no lens in my left eye. When I take out my contact, I don't notice any difference aside from being able to see less...
Violet doesn't have a wavelength because it's a mix of blu and red. The ultraviolet should be called ultrablu light. I'm curios of knowing how this miss understanding came to be.
Rid Rid Violet has a wavelength. Red has a wave length. All the colours have a wave length. The wave length determines what colour it is. Pretty sure what I am saying is true.
Forgive me fore the slightly morbid question, but did Monet die due to his retina getting radiation poisoning or somethings? Was the inside of his eye irradiated?
