> -----Original Message-----
> From: tay...@sandiego.edu [mailto:tay...@sandiego.edu]
> Sent: Tuesday, October 20, 2009 11:39 AM
> To: Teaching in the Psychological Sciences (TIPS)
> Subject: [tips] A slew of student questions
>
> I call on my biological psychologist tipster friends for some answers:
>
> (1) Are there gender differences in the numbers of rods and
> cones in the retina?
Not that I've ever read. The only gender differences I know of with respect to
rod & cones has to do with sex-linked color anomalous observers ("red-green
color blindness").
I think girl eyes and boy eyes are pretty much the same.
> (2) Is there a "purpose" to having different eye and hair color?
We could probably make up just-so stories, but both have mostly to do with the
amount of melanin you've got. I think skin color and hair color are the result
of a few genes, and eye color even more. Evolutionarily people have argued
that darker skin (more melanin) is protective against UV damage, and lighter
skin in less-sunny environments would facilitate the production of vitamin D.
Eye color is likey a by-product of those.
But I'm making this up.
> (3) Can sleep deprivation or a high fever "cause" visual
> hallucinations?
It might be that REM deprivation can cause hallucinations (one of the
hypotheses about hallucinations in acute alcohol withdrawal is that it's waking
"dreams"). Here's something about Parkinson's, hallucinations, and REM
deprivation.
http://www.websciences.org/cftemplate/NAPS/archives/indiv.cfm?ID=20032852
Not sure about general sleep dep, but they'd be correlated...
And I think fevers could, but do not know what the mechanisms would be.
http://www.wrongdiagnosis.com/sym/hallucinations.htm
> (4) Eye separation in birds, camelleons and rabbits? Gosh I
> don't remember the exact student question; that was all I had
> time to jot down. Drat. Maybe it will mean something to
> someone on the list....
Visual suppression is the answer, if I can infer the question.... Cover one
eye with your hand and look around; eventually you'll stop noticing your hand
and will use info from the unoccluded eye. Chances are chameleons and rabbits
and some (many birds have very good binocular vision) birds do a lot of
suppression of the info from one eye.
Now, back to doing reports.... Augh.
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