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in addition to the famous reflecting layer, cat... - argumate

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“in addition to the famous reflecting layer, cat eyes achieve night vision by having 10× fewer nerves, each nerve accounting for a larger bundle of rods spread further out, allowing greater...

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in addition to the famous reflecting layer, cat eyes achieve night vision by having 10× fewer nerves, each nerve accounting for a larger bundle of rods spread further out, allowing greater sensitivity to dim light, at the cost of precision in bright light; they see only blue & yellow but even there appear bad at discriminating. “Any other difference between objects—brightness, pattern, shape, or size—seems to matter more to cats than does color.” Peculiarly, lacking muscles to focus their eyes, they ‘scan’ objects instead, and Bradshaw suggests that “perhaps because it is just too much effort, they often don’t bother to focus at all”. The inability to see things nearby is presumably compensated by whiskers. This farsightedness has a peculiar psychological consequence: cats appear to have a special memory system to memorize what is in front of them, in order to step over obstacles; if they haven’t stepped over it and are distracted, they then forget (and need to look around before they can start walking again), but if they have stepped over it, they automatically remember for the next 10 minutes and their hindlegs will automatically step over it.

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in addition to the famous reflecting layer, cat eyes achieve night vision by having 10× fewer nerves, each nerve accounting for a larger bundle of rods spread further out, allowing greater sensitivity to dim light, at the cost of precision in bright light; they see only blue & yellow but even there appear bad at discriminating. “Any other difference between objects—brightness, pattern, shape, or size—seems to matter more to cats than does color.” Peculiarly, lacking muscles to focus their eyes, they ‘scan’ objects instead, and Bradshaw suggests that “perhaps because it is just too much effort, they often don’t bother to focus at all”. The inability to see things nearby is presumably compensated by whiskers. This farsightedness has a peculiar psychological consequence: cats appear to have a special memory system to memorize what is in front of them, in order to step over obstacles; if they haven’t stepped over it and are distracted, they then forget (and need to look around before they can start walking again), but if they have stepped over it, they automatically remember for the next 10 minutes and their hindlegs will automatically step over it.

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