i always thought it was interesting how the senses of sight and sound can so easily be reproduced by our imagination. while other senses such as smell or touch cannot. we can think about them, but can't reproduce them the same way we can create an image of something or think about some song. plenty of animals evolved to prioritize on different senses in order to survive, dogs can smell better, cats can see better in the dark and have great balance, sharks use their noses as "water wave" sensors to track down moving fish, others even use vibrations on the ground to track moving prey... thinking about how an animal can just live off those different senses while not being anywhere as dependent on sight, is so alien to us thats its almost unimaginable. if we had a better sense of smell and worst eyesight, would we describe places by their smell? would we classify people as attractive by their scent? exactly how much of the world around us would be completely altered, and how different would our perception of life be? does this mean our senses often times only give us partial truth? that there is always more than one way to describe a place, someone or even an idea?
Gee, well...a few things on that. Firstly, there are just a few cells near the fovia that register colour while all of the rest register black and white, edges, motion etc. The fovia themselves have no receptors, so there should be 2 black spots seemingly hanging in the air about 6 feet in front of you. You don't see them because your brain fills in those spaces with what it figures should be there. The same with most all of the colour that you think you see - it too is manufactured by your brain and placed where it expects those colours to be. The reason that your eyes "saccade" (move around a lot looking all over everywhere around you all of the time) is to build up the image that you "see". Most of that image is completely fabricated by your brain based on what you expect to see rather than what is actually there. The short answer to your question then, is "yes". While we can reach a sort of consensus on what we sense, each of us has our own unique perspective based on the wetware and the software we possess and use. Fun factoid: The colour of a purple flower or an amethyst gem is magic to our eyes because that colour is not directly percieved by our eyes. Rather, its presence is inferred by visual cues and then completely fabricated in our brains, hence its strange attraction. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
