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Hello, respected Canaries. Few of the discoveries in science trickle down to us at a level that would actually have the potential to change our perception. I ran across such a trickle recently, and after following it upstream awhile, a question arose: Do we have latent, newly-evolved super-physical capabilities that we just haven't yet realized are within our power to use? Here's what brought me to this question....



Rainbows, Prisms & Our Relationship with Color
One day on a jaunt to downtown Dallas, I stopped by a building called the Plaza of the Americas. The inside of this skyscraper is an open-air solarium with an ice rink and cafés on its ground floor, rather a nice place for an office building -open, airy and spacious all the way up to its top floors. I stop by this building now and then just because I like its fresh, multi-layered community space. That day, I noticed something I'd never seen before: the whole place was striated with fragments of rainbows. Rainbow colors frosted the leaves of palm trees and gilded café tables and chairs. At first I thought these lights were being electronically projected. Then I noticed the giant prisms suspended on one of the plate glass windows high overhead. There were about four prisms, each about five feet long, casting their colorful spells randomly on surfaces throughout the entire complex. There was something inexplicably magical about these fragments of rainbow splashed in such unexpected places.

A rainbow's spectrum of colors seems to enchant humans of all ages. What is it about rainbows that make us love them so much? Ancient cultures saw them as signs of beneficence: the Greeks considered the rainbow to be a messenger's path between Earth and Heaven. The Hopi Indians knew the rainbow as a sign from the Great Spirit who is in all things. In the Bible, the rainbow is a symbol of a covenant God made to humanity. Our collective intuition concludes in no uncertain terms that there is something distinctly Divine embodied in the presence of a rainbow.

Maybe it's something about the full spectrum of colors that touches us to our depths. Our relationship to color tends to be very personal, very intimate, suggesting its ability to influence our well being. Certain colors make us feel good, and other colors, we feel uneasy with. Early civilizations of Egypt, China and India even practiced chromotherapy, healing with colors. Though our modern cultures are out of conscious touch with this ancient wisdom, we have gained some new insights about color, thanks to science, and especially thanks to Isaac Newton. He was the first to use a prism to refract white light into its spectrum of colors, which later led to our understanding of the wavelengths of light and the varying wavelengths of colors.

The Evolution of Vision: High Speed Purple
The ability of the human eye to see color is another way of saying that we can literally see electromagnetic wavelengths specific to certain colors. This a mysterious path traversed by evolution, one that is so profound that Creationists often use the example of the human eye as an argument against evolution, since they claim that nothing so complex as the eye could have been the result of evolutionary physical forces. Biologists, of course, offer fascinating and persuasive studies of exactly how this evolution can be traced through the many forms of vision in nature. An enlightening synopsis of this can be seen in the video from WGBH-TV's show "Evolution: Darwin's Dangerous Idea" at THIS LINK.

We are apparently still experiencing a steady transformation of these abilities. Evolution's relentless work upon our very own bodies is leaving hints, here and there. For instance, it's a well documented fact that not everyone's eyes have developed to the point of being able to see the color purple. The slowest (and longest) color wavelength is red and the fastest (and shortest) wavelength is violet, commonly called purple. Many people can't really tell the difference between the color purple and certain shades of blue. This is because the ability to see this high speed purple wavelength is a skill still in process of evolving. Most humans are trichromatic –having three types of color receptors in the eyes. Now here's a little mindblower:

As many as half of all women, but only a small percentage of men, are tetrachromats – they have four types of color receptors in their retinas. Women share this expanded visual perception with birds, marsupials, spiders, reptiles and many species of fish – but not with most men.

So many women are attracted to the color purple that it is generally considered by the majority of men to be a color that only women relate to. Is this because fewer men can see that wavelength on the spectrum? Maybe there's a biological reason underlying a man's distaste for the color purple –maybe they can't even see it.

Strange as it seems, because of having one more color receptor in the eye, half of all women are apparently seeing far more than anyone else. Somehow, none of us seem to be aware of this extra perk we're getting. And this not-knowing makes me wonder what else we might be in possession of, yet unaware of. There are hints inside the science of vision and color that suggest some amazing things.

Apparently, because of improvements in microscopic lenses, science has recently learned a lot about photons. Now let me tell you why photons have caught my attention, and why I think they might interest you. We could all be seeing more –and there are ways to practice! Also, there are some newly-realized physical properties of color that are now being developed for upcoming commercial applications, thanks to breakthroughs with photons.

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