Cats and dogs can see invisible things

[Magical Realist]

Pay attention the next time your dog is barking at the ceiling..

https://youtu.be/3XC-_tdt44k

[Zinjanthropos]

Have dumb questions: If I stood in a room of complete darkness that was then bathed in UV light, would I still see complete darkness/nothing? If I was missing my eye lens?

[C C]

Have dumb questions: If I stood in a room of complete darkness that was then bathed in UV light, would I still see complete darkness/nothing?

Body fluids aren't the only substances that can fluorescence under blacklight. So even without sex or murder having transpired in the room, it might still depend upon how clean and empty it was and the type of construction materials.

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[Magical Realist]

Have dumb questions: If I stood in a room of complete darkness that was then bathed in UV light, would I still see complete darkness/nothing? If I was missing my eye lens?

Depends on the room. In this room? No..

[Image: 7e60f754ed0950d1bebb29a31cb8f5a5.jpg]

[Zinjanthropos]

In regards to OP dog barking. Watched the video featuring a mutt that apparently happened to sniff out its owner's breast cancer. This led to further testing of dogs in this regard. They now have canines that are able to detect cancer in people's urine. So how did the dog smell its owner's breast cancer? Since it wasn't sniffing her crotch after a pee, they figure the pooch detected the cancer on her breath. This dog would lay its head on owner's breast to indicate where problem was, at least that's how its actions were interpreted.

So I ask you, when you walk into a place and smell cinnamon, what do you think of? For myself, I think of either buns or apple pie. In fact I picture them in my mind but even more than that, I can practically taste them. Same goes for a lot of delicious odours.  Even with my weak human sense of smell I still conjure up an image or taste of what it might be. Why is that I ask? 

I've talked before about synesthesia: the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body. Some see a color and hear a sound for instance. I've even heard people call synesthesia a 6th sense but who knows? My thinking is that many animals possess this trait, some more developed than others and a dog's sense of smell is one of them. Not sure how a dog actually thinks but if it can see via its nose then what is it seeing? Is more than one or an array of senses stimulated when it sniffs?
 

[Syne]

I've talked before about synesthesia: the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body. Some see a color and hear a sound for instance.

I think most people see color and hear sound.

[C C]

So I ask you, when you walk into a place and smell cinnamon, what do you think of? For myself, I think of either buns or apple pie. In fact I picture them in my mind but even more than that, I can practically taste them. Same goes for a lot of delicious odours.  Even with my weak human sense of smell I still conjure up an image or taste of what it might be. Why is that I ask? 

I've talked before about synesthesia: the production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body. Some see a color and hear a sound for instance. I've even heard people call synesthesia a 6th sense but who knows? 

My thinking is that many animals possess this trait, some more developed than others and a dog's sense of smell is one of them. Not sure how a dog actually thinks but if it can see via its nose then what is it seeing? Is more than one or an array of senses stimulated when it sniffs?

We non-synesthetes associate visual objects with specific odors due to the the correlations we've had between them in the past (i.e., if I had never encountered coffee before I'd have no image in memory to associate with an "unfamiliar" odor wafting in from the hallway). Plus, smell would be pretty useless to us to if it didn't entail inferring something beyond than the odor itself, resorting to imagination if no memory-based judgement was available.

In contrast, the olfactory equipment of dogs might indeed be so powerful and sophisticated that it borders on being like radio astronomy generating a pattern of a distant object, only here via discerning odor in greater phenomenal detail and mentally mapping it. Seems very speculative, however, though there's no doubt dogs smell vastly better than us. Which is a good thing that we're not champions in that department, as people afflicted with hyperosmia demonstrate.

While grapheme-color synesthesia might actually be a form of ideasthesia, the "regular type" of synethesia is often attributed to being the result of information from one specialized sensory-processing region crossing over into another. Impulses from the ears otherwise meant solely to be converted into sound experiences defectively bleed into visual areas of the brain, and that sort of thing. Or at least that was the popular explanation back in Ramachandran days, if not even Cytowic's The Man Who Tasted Shapes period of the early '90s (been so long ago since I read it that I can't remember what Cytowic hypothesized). There are rival theories still lingering around, too. (It was also Ramachandran's team who more or less finally validated synesthesia as something people were not making up.)

There's another kind of sensory displacement, where the sensations which the brain "locates" in a phantom limb are actually coming from skin on a different part of the body (like the face). At least the stimulatory information in those cases is still remaining in its normal mode of experience (tactile, touch, haptic, pain, etc).

"Ramachandran finds that within weeks or months of an amputation or severe peripheral nerve damage patients report “referred sensations,” i.e. sensory stimulation of a still existing part of their body surface (e.g., the face) will result in perceived sensations in the no longer existing limb (e.g., the arm or hand)." --Selectionism and the Brain

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[Zinjanthropos]

We non-synesthetes associate visual objects with specific odors due to the the correlations we've had between them in the past (i.e., if I had never encountered coffee before I'd have no image in memory to associate with an "unfamiliar" odor wafting in from the hallway). Plus, smell would be pretty useless to us to if it didn't entail inferring something beyond than the odor itself, resorting to imagination if no memory-based judgement was available. 

Is there an animal in the world that can associate an odor or any sensory stimulant with an object the minute it is born? I think even synesthetes would agree the smell of coffee to an infant would not conjure up an image of Starbucks. 

When I was writing the previous post I thought about Pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of a dinner bell. I think synesthesia might closely relate to that but i'm no expert.

[C C]

Is there an animal in the world that can associate an odor or any sensory stimulant with an object the minute it is born? I think even synesthetes would agree the smell of coffee to an infant would not conjure up an image of Starbucks. 

Yeah, but that's just it: A normal convention like smelling a cinnamon odor and thinking or recalling apple pie doesn't stem from synesthesia or its potential cross-activation cause. With arguable exceptions like the guy who could taste shapes, synesthesia has little to do with objects, especially those recalled from memory. The qualities are usually perceptually projected "out there" rather than "in here". (Even any tactile sensations occurring in the mouth or on the body would still at least seem half-way public, as if someone else in principle could see a thing supposedly abiding or pressing there, though not experiencing the feelings it generated.)

When I was writing the previous post I thought about Pavlov's dogs salivating at the sound of a dinner bell. I think synesthesia might closely relate to that but i'm no expert.

Synesthesia proper usually doesn't have anything to do with conditioning. Ideasthesia, however, could arise initially during childhood as a non-language coping tool for grappling with abstract concepts or the symbols representing them. But the ability might still be genetic-based or fall out of chemical imbalances during development in the womb, rather than being a capacity anyone could contingently acquire once a need arises and triggers it.

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[stryder]

I suffer a slight form of Synesthesia in regards to slippery nylon (and close relative manmade fibres), the actual reason for it coming into being was due to a traumatic experience as a child.... Okay from the perspective of an adult it would seem ridiculously silly. My mother use to cut my hair, she had been a trained hairdresser and use to do peoples perms amongst other things. This meant when she'd cut my hair she'd make me wear a nylon gown to stop the hair going everywhere. The gown itself had the faint smells of the number of chemicals that were used during perming, and it was near enough airtight. Being shrouded by it felt as if there was no airflow and therefore suffocating along with the feel and sound constantly causing fidgeting (along with the cut hair) so I would often be verbally scolded to sit still.

Nowadays I can't stand the feel, the sound or even the look of slippery nylon (I wig out just hearing it, even on a recording. It's akin to how some people feel if they hear teeth grate, a knife scratch a plate or a person running their finger nails across a chalkboard), it made it awkward when young and doing any sports (I couldn't wear a coloured bib for a particular team because of the material), lifejackets, waterproofs, trouser pockets etc. are all a reminder over how something so petty can be effectively that traumatic and life changing.

So Synesthesia can be an artefact of conditioning, not just down to an abnormal sensory connection.