My understanding: Electromagnetic radiation is carried via photons – which enter our eyes and activate receptors depending on the amount of energy the photons have when hitting them.
At what point do we "lose" photons which are above or below our visible light spectrum?
- Does the cornea at the front of the eye deflect those photons (They don't enter the eye at all)?
- Does it enter our eye, but the degree of refraction cause it not to hit the retina?
- Does it enter our eye and hit the retina, but the retina somehow doesn't pick it up?
- Does it enter our eye and hit the retina, the retina picks it up, but somewhere in our image processing the input is ignored when passed on to the brain?
- Something else?
I am looking for the answer that is more pertaining to the physics of the eye and electromagnetic radiation, but if the Biology Stack Exchange is a more appropriate place for this question, please let me know.
Best Answer
Short answer:
Generic answer:
The proteins or photo pigments responsible for sensing light usually undergo a conformation change/chemical change induced by light, but this change depends on the wavelength of the incident light. There are many different proteins that are light sensitive and the reasons why this reaction happens on a specific wavelength interval and what kind of reaction happens depends on the protein. However, not only different proteins react differently to light, but also what happens next may be different. After the protein suffers a change because of light (whatever that is) a long chain of chemical reaction begins which will end up as an electrical signal. Also, usually proteins or photopigments have to be recycled after being activated/bleached, which is done by parallel biochemical pathways. Mistakes on these paths will also after the ability of seeing a specific colour.
Example:
There are many kinds of vision mechanisms in the animal kingdom. The colours (sets of wavelength intervals) that each animal sees highly depends on the set of proteins that these animals have and the transduction path after the proteins are activated. We humans, for example, are good at seeing green and other colours that help us to identify food that we usually eat [1]. Interestingly, even small changes on the aminoacid sequence of the proteins change its sensitivity for light. For example, some people have cones (some of the cells responsible for vision in humans) with photo pigments that are sensitive at 530 nm and some people are sensitive at 562 nm. This difference is caused by only 3 aminoacids substitutions in a protein [2]. Another example involving the recycling pathway of a photopigment can be found at [3]. It was observed that some mutant Drosophila flies had their vision impaired because they could not keep the concentrations of the visual pigment Rhodopsin.
[1] Surridge, Alison K., Daniel Osorio, and Nicholas I. Mundy. "Evolution and selection of trichromatic vision in primates." Trends in Ecology & Evolution 18.4 (2003): 198-205.
[2] Neitz, Maureen, Jay Neitz, and Gerald H. Jacobs. "Spectral tuning of pigments underlying red-green color vision." Science 252.5008 (1991): 971-974.
[3] Ostroy, SANFORD E. "Characteristics of Drosophila rhodopsin in wild-type and norpA vision transduction mutants." The Journal of general physiology 72.5 (1978): 717-732.