Where’s My Pacifier? (What is Real? 12)

 

These posts make more sense when read in order.

Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.

© John Richard Stephens, 2024.

Do you remember when you were an infant? Some people say they do. Sci-fi author Ray Bradbury was one who insisted he could remember being born.^[1] There are people with photographic memory—scientists call it highly superior autobiographic memory. They have the amazing ability to recall details from throughout their lives.

Most researchers can’t remember their infancy, so they’re conducting experiments to figure out what it’s like to be a baby. One of those who study this is psychologist Alison Gopnik at the University of California, Berkeley. She says if you want to relive the experience, you should fall in love, down four double espressos, smoke four packs of Gauloises cigarettes, take LSD, and then walk through the streets of Paris, “which”, she says, “is a fantastic state to be in, but it does mean you wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning crying”.

The caffeine and nicotine will provide you with the wide-eyed, but diffuse, single-minded attention. The rush of hormones when in love and traveling to an unfamiliar place will make your brain more pliable. The LSD will give you the vivid colors that babies seem to experience and will dissolve your sense of self. Then the Paris streets will place you in an environment that bombards your senses with constant stimuli. You’ll just need to slow down your reaction time and relinquish all control, intentions, and thoughts of the future—immersing yourself in the immediate moment.

Of course, after you do all of that you may need to have someone roll you around in a stroller with a pacifier and a drool cup.^[2]

Even children under the age of 12 don’t perceive the world as adults do. They don’t yet combine their different senses, or even the input from each eye, quite the same way as adults. And six-year-olds see visual elements that most adults no longer can.^[3]

Many animals are born ready to take on the world. Infant deer can detect dangers and, after a few stumbles, are able to run away. As Stanford University neuroscientist David Eagleman put it, “Mother nature is taking a sort of gamble with humans, in that she drops our brains into the world half-baked and lets experience take over and shape them. Our babies have much less well-developed brains than other animals do at birth.”^[4]

That development continues at least into our teens. Our brain continues to change throughout our lives, and our perceptions change along with it.

It Sounds like a Pickle

There is another way in which people can experience dramatically different perceptions—synesthesia. This is a curious phenomenon where people experience a blending of their senses. This can take a wide variety of forms. For example, someone might experience a particular musical note as looking purple, feeling spikey, and tasting like a pickle.

The most common form is when black and white text appears in the midst of a haze of color, as though seen through a filter. Usually the aura surrounds each number or letter, but occasionally each word will be mostly one color. And tests have clearly demonstrated that some people can really see auras around others.^[5]

There are more than a hundred types of synesthesia.^[6] Some people hear lights or shapes. Others taste sounds or smell colors. There are those who see conversations as written captions in their mind’s eye. Some can feel touch when they see others being touched or when they imagine it, and for some it’s the same with pain. For one person, all letters were either male or female. Another, Michael Watson, could feel tastes with his hands, apologized to his dinner guests that the chicken he was serving didn’t have enough points on it.^[7]

When neurologist Richard Cytowic squirted Angostura bitters on Watson’s tongue, the man said, “It has the springy consistency of a mushroom, almost round, but I feel bumps and can stick my fingers into little holes in the surface. There are leafy tendril-like things coming out of the holes, about six of them.”^[8]

Some experience these as vivid perceptions as part of the real world, while most see them with their mind’s eye, so, for example, one synesthete might see a black letter as being red, while another would perceive it as red in their mind’s eye. One might see sounds as colors projected on an invisible screen in front of them, while another visualizes a calendar as a flat ribbon circling their body with each month having its own color.

The associations can be very specific and detailed. Journalist Julie McDowall’s brain automatically gives a sensation or image to every name and place. She wrote, “My niece, Sophia, is pink foam shrimps and her brother Leo is thick custard. Donald is a rubber duck dipped in vinegar.”^[9] This is involuntary and can persist unchanging throughout a person’s lifetime.

 One study found synesthesia can also increase over time, suggesting the possibility that in some cases it might be learned^[10], although a friend of mine, then a fellow Air Force officer, told me that as a child she had to take special classes to unlearn some of her synesthesia before she was able to learn to read. In rare cases synesthesia can be gained suddenly with a head injury.^[11]

In general, far from being a hindrance, most synesthetes can’t imagine life without their ability, and feel sorry for those of us who lack it. It is not usually harmful and can be very beneficial. Synesthetes are better at distinguishing between smells and colors, and they can solve puzzles faster. And it can give someone a spectacular memory. In particular, it seems to aid many mathematicians. Daniel Temmet, an autistic savant who can multiply very rapidly, explained, “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”^[12]

It shouldn’t be surprising that synesthetes gravitate toward creative endeavors. They include artists Vincent van Gogh, David Hockney, Wassily Kandinsky, musicians Franz Liszt, Duke Ellington. Tori Amos, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Lorde, Pharrell Williams, Mary J. Blige, novelist Vladimir Nabokov, actor Marilyn Monroe, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, and, no doubt, many others.

Interestingly, we all seem to have the potential to experience it, since it can be induced by hypnosis^[13].or hallucinogens. There are a couple of cases where it was caused by strokes.^[14] This suggests that for most people, cross-communication between the senses is inhibited, but can be released in these circumstances. In one experiment a color blind synesthete was induced to see colors that their eyes were unable to see.^[15]

It might even operate in everyone at a subconscious level. Consider the common metaphors: loud shirt, hot pink, deep purple, sharp cheese, bright sounds, bitter chill, heavy rain, hot blooded, sweet woman, cold fish, cool cat, and the blues.

So overall it appears that each of us is isolated in our own sensory world that’s unlike those of everyone else.

All of this, of course, raises questions about the validity of reviews of things like movies and music. It also presents major difficulties for chefs who need to come up with recipes that will please people who have a huge range of palates.

There are many variations and gradations of the senses. It’s likely that the way you perceive the world is completely unique. There are also other variations, such those who can’t recognize faces—even of their family—and there are super-recognizers who can recognize a face from the side that they only saw once years before. Some people have an extremely vivid mind’s eye and there are those who lack one altogether and are unable to visualize anything. There are people who hear a narration in their head, with some hearing inner voices of others talking, while others only hear themselves thinking, and still others never hear anything. For all of these differences, most people fall somewhere between the extremes.

There’s even a wide variation in the ways people think—verbal (monologue, dialogue, debate or argument, emotional, dispassionate, negative or positive), visualization (object visual, spatial visual, visualizing text, visualizing in images, visualizing as movies), emotions, sensations, and unsymbolized thoughts. And again, much of our thinking takes place before we become aware of it. We experience some or most of these, but each in widely varying degrees.[16]

The way each of us experiences the world varies considerably, so we’re back to the question of how much of the world you perceive is real? You can see here that we’re on shaky ground.

The research continues, with more interesting discoveries on the way, no doubt.

 

If you like this, please subscribe below to receive an email the next time I post something wondrous. It's free.

 

Click here for the next article in this series:

We're All Mad Here

---

[1] William Booth, “The Universe Of Ray Bradbury”, The Washington Post, November 14, 2000, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2000/11/14/the-universe-of-ray-bradbury/5b840371-6b56-4f12-a1e1-d0ab8b09df64/. See also Notes and Queries, “Is it possible to remember being born?”, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-2899,00.html.

[2] Anil Ananthaswamy, “Into the minds of babes”, New Scientist, no. 2983, August 23, 2014, pp. 40-43, and as “Trippy tots: How to see the world as a baby”, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329830-700-trippy-tots-how-to-see-the-world-as-a-baby/.

[3] University College London, "Children and adults see the world differently, research finds", ScienceDaily, September 14, 2010, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100913153630.htm, citing Marko Nardini, Rachael Bedford, and Denis Mareschal, "Fusion of visual cues is not mandatory in children", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1001699107.

[4] Clare Wilson, “David Eagleman interview: How our brains could create whole new senses”, New Scientist, no. 3334, May 15, 2021, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033340-900-david-eagleman-interview-how-our-brains-could-create-whole-new-senses/, May 12, 2021.

[5] Anonymous, “Haloes are real—what colour is yours?”, New Scientist, no. 2898, January 2, 2013, p. 13, www.newscientist.com/article/mg21728985.200-haloes-are-real--what-colour-is-yours.html, citing Vilayanur S. Ramachandrana, Luke Millera, Margaret S. Livingstoneb, and David Branga, “Colored halos around faces and emotion-evoked colors: A new form of synesthesia”, Neurocase, vol. 18, no. 4, 2012, pp. 352-358, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13554794.2011.608366, https://doi.org/10.1080/13554794.2011.608366

Also, University College London, “My favourite aunt is purple: Why some people see ‘auras’ around their loved ones”, UCL News, October 18, 2004, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2004/oct/my-favourite-aunt-purple-why-some-people-see-auras-around-their-loved-ones, citing Jamie Ward, “Emotionally Mediated Synaesthesia”, Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2004, 21(7), p761.

[6] For a detailed outline of synesthesia and its many types, see Aleksandra Rogowska, “Categorization of Synaesthesia”, Review of General Psychology, 2011, Vol. 15, No. 3, 213–227, http://brainnarratives.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2012/12/categorization-of-synesthesia-2012.pdf, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024078.

[7] Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman, Wednesday Is Indigo Blue, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009.

[8] Richard E. Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993 (2003), pp. 64-65.

[9] Julie McDowall, “Experience: I taste people’s names”, The Guardian, April 5, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/05/experience-i-taste-peoples-names-synaesthesia.

[10] Julia Simner, Jenny Harrold, Harriet Creed, Louise Monro, and Louise Foulkes, “Early detection of markers for synaesthesia in childhood populations”, Brain, vol. 132, no. 1, January 2009, pp. 57–64, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awn292.

[11] Rachael Rettner, "Musician's head injury triggered rare synesthesia, causing him to 'see' music”, Live Science, May 18, 2023, https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/musicians-head-injury-triggered-rare-synesthesia-causing-him-to-see-music.

And Tanya Lewis, "A Beautiful Mind: Brain Injury Turns Man Into Math Genius", Live Science, May 5, 2014, https://www.livescience.com/45349-brain-injury-turns-man-into-math-genius.html.

[12] Dana Smith, “Can Synesthesia in Autism Lead to Savantism?”, Scientific American Mind, December 4, 2013, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/can-synesthesia-in-autism-lead-to-savantism/.

[13] Roi Cohen Kadosh, Avishai Henik, Andres Catena, Vincent Walsh, and Luis J. Fuentes, “Induced Cross-Modal Synaesthetic Experience Without Abnormal Neuronal Connections”, Psychological Science, vol 20, no. 2, February 1, 2009, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02286.x.

And University of Turku,, "Tasting colors? Synesthesia induced with hypnosis", ScienceDaily, December 13, 2017, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171213120032.htm, citing Sakari Kallio, Mika Koivisto, and Johanna K. Kaakinen, "Synaesthesia-type associations and perceptual changes induced by hypnotic suggestion", Scientific Reports, 2017; 7 (1), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16174-y.

[14] “James Bond theme music sends stroke victim into ecstasy”, CBC News, July 30, 2013, https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/james-bond-theme-music-sends-stroke-victim-into-ecstasy-1.1332053. And Elizabeth Preston, “Man Develops Synesthesia after Stroke, Finds James Bond Theme ‘Orgasmic’ ”, Discover Magazine, August 2, 2013, https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/man-develops-synesthesia-after-stroke-finds-james-bond-theme-orgasmic, citing Tom A. Schweizer, Zeyu Li, Corinne E. Fischer, Michael P. Alexander, Stephen D. Smith, Simon J. Graham, and Luis Fornazarri, “From the thalamus with love: A rare window into the locus of emotional synesthesia”, Neurology, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0b013e31829d86cc.

[15] Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard, “Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes”, Scientific American, May 2003, pp. 53-59, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hearing-colors-tasting-shapes/, and in Scientific American Mind, vol. 16, no. 3, October 2005, pp. 16-23.

[16] Kate Douglas, “How are you thinking?”, New Scientist, July 22, 2023, pp. 32-35, and as “Revealed: What your thoughts look like and how they compare to others’ ”, July 19, 2023, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25934484-800-revealed-what-your-thoughts-look-like-and-how-they-compare-to-others/.

What do You See? (What is Real? 11)

 

These posts make more sense when read in order.

Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.

 

I mentioned some illusions earlier, but not everyone experiences them to the same degree, and some don’t experience them at all. Part of this is based on culture and experience—how and where you were raised. Also, the ability to see some illusions diminishes as you get older. In addition, there also seems to be a link between the size of a person’s visual cortex and whether they can see some illusions or not. This area can vary as much as three times in size among individuals. Those with the larger area were less likely to see the illusions.[1] They have a more accurate view of the world, yet lose whatever advantage the ability to see illusions might provide. As there are still people who are one or the other, perhaps evolution is transitioning us from one to the other, or there is variability so that when our environment changes, one or the other will be better prepared. Interestingly, research shows that cats, rats, birds, fish, and insects do see the optical illusions they were tested on.

This photograph astonished people and sparked many debates because they couldn’t agree on its colors.

In 2015 a Scottish woman uploaded an image of a dress that went viral on the Internet when people couldn’t agree on its colors. Most people saw it as white and gold, others as blue and black, some as blue and brown, then there were those who saw it switch back and forth. This seems to result from our brain’s varying assumptions on the type of lighting in the photograph. Yellowish light—whether from sunlight, incandescent, halogen, or household LED bulbs—causes your brain to subtract gold so you see a blue and black dress, whereas bluish light—from blue sky, florescent, or daylight LED bulbs—causes your brain to subtract blue, so you see a white and gold dress. Since the lighting conditions in the photograph are unclear, your visual processing system makes assumptions. Still, people were amazed that their friends, relatives, and colleagues saw it as a completely different dress. The dress is actually dark blue and black.

We think of colors as a property of the objects we are looking at, but that’s wrong. Objects absorb certain electromagnetic wavelengths and reflect others. How we perceive those wavelengths is all in our brain and varies from person to person, and from one species to another. Colors are not part of the physical world, they are something we experience in our minds. This has been known for a long time. Back in 1757, Scottish philosopher David Hume noted that “colour is allowed [i.e. acknowledged] to be merely a phantasm of the senses.”[2]

So, what about our basic perceptions?

There is a large variation there. The numbers of cones we have in our retinas varies by a factor up to 40. That’s a huge range. Overall females are able to see colors better than males. Still, there are some males at the top of the males’ scale that distinguish colors better than females who are near the bottom of the females’ scale. As with most everything, you’ll run into problems if you apply generalities to individuals, as that can lead to unfounded prejudices. There are color blind females, although they’re much rarer than color blind males. But in general the overall trend is there.

 This is because females tend to have more cones than males. While they gain in color perception and discrimination, males tend to have more rods, so they have sharper vision, are better at detecting motion, and can see better at night. In addition, males’ cones have shifted so for males and females to see the same hue, males need a color with a slightly longer wavelength.

There is a similar variation in what a particular type of cone is sensitive to among individuals. Most often this happens with what we call the red cones—although they actually peak at yellow—but it happens with green as well. This is different from the seven types of color blindness and the differences are much more subtle than that—these are variations among people with normal vision.

There are many things that can alter our vision—genes, pathologies, past experiences, what we eat, the season, even our moods. Since colors are largely created in our brain, our perceptions of them can vary considerably and it’s difficult to tell what a person is actually experiencing when they look at a color. Scientists used to think we all saw colors the same way, but recent research has now convinced many that there’s considerable variation. “I think we can say for certain that people don’t see the same colors.” So said vision scientist Joseph Carroll of the Medical College of Wisconsin.[3]

So Alice could go through life seeing the world as slightly redder or slightly greener than the average person. Or what she sees as red could be what the average person sees as blue. She’d still call it red, since that’s what she learned to call it and nothing would ever indicate to her that she’s seeing anything different.

Something very interesting happens in the case of a few rare females. When one of the genes for red or green cones mutates to respond to another color, a female with that gene might end up having four types of cones. This only happens in females because they have two X chromosomes, which is where the genes lie. Males—not counting transgender individuals and those with Klinefelter Syndrome—have one X chromosome, so they have one gene for red cones, but these rare females have two different genes for red—one on each X. (That is, I think all the cases I know of all have an extra red gene and not green.) More than 50% of females have this anomaly, but with no effect on their vision because the extra color sensitivity is too similar to their other red cones, but there are a rare few who have four-color vision.

Now, a person with only rods sees in shades of gray. If they have one cone, they can distinguish around a thousand gradations of color. With two cones, they can discern about ten thousand colors. Most people have three cones and can see from one to two million different colors. Add a fourth cone that is significantly different from the others and the number jumps to a hundred million.

I’ve only seen reports of three women with tetrachromatic vision. One is a doctor near Newcastle, England known as cDa29 so she can remain anonymous, another is Susan Hogan in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and the third is Concetta Antico in Byron Bay, Australia.[4] For them, each hue that we see is peppered with many subtler shades. Not just that, each object is a kaleidoscope of colors. What looks to us like a gray rock, to them is shimmering with colors.

Now, those of us with three working cones can see a lot of hues. One company, Borg Warner Chemicals, manufactured more than 2,000 shades of white, including pearl, frost, eggshell, and wisp. We can distinguish these. I can’t imagine how many additional shades these women can see. In addition, they have increased luminance, making colors brighter and enabling them to see colors at night.

Concetta Antico is an artist who incorporates this into her paintings, giving us a better idea of what it might be like to see the way she does.[5] For her, a simple green bush would be flecked with pink, lilac, orange, yellow, turquoise, and many other colors.

“I always felt like I was living in a very magical world”, she explained. “I know children say that, but for me, it was like everything was hyper-wonderful, hyper-different. I was always exploring into nature, delving and trying to see the intricacies, because I’d see so much more detail in everything.[...] I often think to myself, how could you be unhappy in this world? Just go sit in a park. Just go look at a bush or a tree. You can’t not appreciate how magnificent it is.”[6]

While what she sees must be stunning, there is a downside. She sees blemishes on her skin that are invisible to everyone else, and she says, “The grocery store is a nightmare. It’s like a trash pile of color coming in at every angle.”[7]

Compared to these women, those of us with “normal” vision are color blind. On the other hand, their amazing ability probably doesn’t rival the vision of birds who have between four and seven cones, depending on the species. Chickens have five. But, with their enhanced color vision, day-active birds need between five and 20 times as much light to see, so they can’t see well in twilight and usually head to their roosting spot soon after sunset.[8]

Theoretically it’s possible for a person to have five cones if they have working duplicates of both red and green cones that have deviated enough to respond to other colors.

There’s one caveat. The number of cones doesn’t necessarily mean better color vision. It’s possible some animals have more cones so they can see colors without needing complicated neural processing. The information from our three cones is heavily processed by our brain to create the colors we see. An insect’s brain is too small to do that. They might see only the colors their cones are sensitive to. A butterfly has 15 and a dragonfly has 30, so perhaps they only see 15 and 30 colors respectively. The mantis shrimp—a crustacean that resembles a lobster and is neither a mantis nor a shrimp—has the most complicated eyes in the world. Even though they have up to 12 cones, their discrimination between colors isn’t very good.[9]

Scientists at the University of Wisconsin–Madison believe they’ve developed glasses that can give those of us with three functional cones, four-cone vision. Perhaps someday they’ll reach the market.[10] There are already glasses available that give the color blind full-color vision.[11] Others are working on contacts. Researchers have also genetically engineered a mouse and two squirrel monkeys to have tricolor vision, so gene therapy may soon be an option.[12]

Since we tend to assume everyone experiences the world like us, many people don’t even realize they’re color blind, or have any other sensory deficiencies or enhancements unless something unusual happens to tip them off that something’s different.

Many people don’t realize they perceive the world differently from others until they’re in their 20s or older. Individuals fall somewhere in perceptual spectrums—such as from tone deafness to perfect pitch, and from face-blindness to super-recognizers—and most people have no idea where they are in those ranges. Sometimes even those at the extremes haven’t a clue until they notice something unusual or someone else points it out to them.

It’s obvious we have different preferences in food, clothes, books, music, and movies, but we don’t usually consider whether this is because of basic differences in our senses and how we perceive things.

Scientists have found we have fundamental variations in our perceptions. We even see the size and locations of objects differently.[13] Thinner people tend to hear sounds as being closer than they actually are, while women respond to looming sounds faster than men.[14] It seems we don’t even perceive sound patterns in the same way.[15] And each of us appears to have different olfactory blind spots.[16]

We learn about what music is when we are young. This is why newer types of music and exotic music from other cultures may not sound like music to us. People who grew up listening to big band music thought rock and roll was just noise, while many rockers felt rap was severely lacking, and rappers will no doubt feel the same about some new form of music. And all of them will probably have a similar view of traditional Chinese music, which sounds like caterwauling to many Westerners, although I believe you can learn to appreciate it if you are exposed to it in the right way. We can learn to like something new.

Just as everyone’s fingerprints are different, there’s evidence that everyone’s experience of the world is different, being altered by the differences in our senses and colored by our experiences. This is especially true when you compare two people from different cultures.

As noted earlier, our senses change throughout the day and throughout our lifetimes. Robin Carhart-Harris, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the Imperial College, London, pointed out, “Our brains become more constrained and compartmentalized as we develop from infancy into adulthood, and we may become more focused and rigid in our thinking as we mature. In many ways, the brain in the LSD state resembles the state our brains were in when we were infants: free and unconstrained.”[17]

 

If you like this, please subscribe below to receive an email the next time I post something wondrous. It's free.

 

Click here for the next article in this series:

Where's My Pacifier?

 

---

[1] Wellcome Trust, "Brain's architecture makes our view of the world unique", ScienceDaily, December 6, 2010, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/12/101205202512.htm, citing D Samuel Schwarzkopf, Chen Song, and Geraint Rees. “The surface area of human V1 predicts the subjective experience of object size.”, Nature Neuroscience, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1038/nn.2706.

[2] David Hume, “Of the Standard of Taste”, 1757, in David Hume, Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary Part 1, 1777, https://davidhume.org/texts/empl1/st.

[3] Natalie Wolchover, “Your Color Red Really Could Be My Blue”, Live Science, June 29, 2012, https://www.livescience.com/21275-color-red-blue-scientists.html.

[4] Mark Roth, “Some women may see 100 million colors, thanks to their genes”, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, September 13, 2006, http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06256/721190-114.stm.

And Bronwyn Adcock, “ ‘I’m really just high on life and beauty’: the woman who can see 100 million colours”, The Guardian, January 29, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/30/im-really-just-high-on-life-and-beauty-the-woman-who-can-see-100-million-colours.

[5] Concetta Antico, https://concettaantico.com/.

[6] Bronwyn Adcock, “ ‘I’m really just high on life and beauty’: the woman who can see 100 million colours”, The Guardian, January 29, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/jan/30/im-really-just-high-on-life-and-beauty-the-woman-who-can-see-100-million-colours.

[7] David Robson, “The women with superhuman vision”, BBC Future, September 5, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140905-the-women-with-super-human-vision.

[8] The Swedish Research Council, "Birds lose color vision in twilight", ScienceDaily, November 16, 2009, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/11/091111121543.htm, (comp.) citing Journal of Experimental Biology, 2009, 212, pp. 3693-3699.

[9] Stephen L. Macknik, “Parallels Between Mantis Shrimp and Human Color Vision”, Scientific American, March 20, 2014, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/illusion-chasers/parallels-between-shrimp-and-human-color-vision/.

And Veronique Greenwood, “Eye of the Beholder”, New Scientist, no. 3017, April 18, 2015, pp. 40-43, and as “Eye of the beholder: How colour vision made us human”, April 16, 2015, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22630170-400-eye-of-the-beholder-how-colour-vision-made-us-human/.

And Jessica Morrison,” Mantis shrimp's super colour vision debunked”, Nature, January 23, 2014, https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2014.14578, https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2014.14578.

[10] Chris Baraniuk, “Glasses give us new power to see colours”, New Scientist, no. 3118, March 25, 2017, p. 10, and the longer version “Special glasses give people superhuman colour vision”, March 21, 2017, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2125335-special-glasses-give-people-superhuman-colour-vision/, citing arxiv.org/abs/1703.04392.

[11] Frank Swain, “True colours”, New Scientist, no. 3169, March 17, 2018, pp. 39-41, and as “New shades: The controversial quest to ‘fix’ colour blindness”, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23731690-900-new-shades-the-controversial-quest-to-fix-colour-blindness/.

Also, University of California - Davis Health, "Special filters in glasses can help the color blind see colors better, study finds: Effect persists even when glasses are not worn", ScienceDaily, July 13, 2020. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200713165608.htm, citing John S. Werner, Brennan Marsh-Armstrong and Kenneth Knoblauch, “Adaptive Changes in Color Vision from Long-Term Filter Usage in Anomalous but Not Normal Trichromacy,” Current Biology, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2020.05.054.

And https://enchroma.com/.

[12] Nicholas Wade, “With Genetic Gift, 2 Monkeys Are Viewing a More Colorful World”, New York Times, September 22, 2009, p. D3 of the New York edition, https://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/22/science/22gene.html.

[13] University of California - Berkeley, "Vision scientists discover why people literally don't see eye to eye: Study finds visual localization and acuity varies from person to person", ScienceDaily, July 14, 2020. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/07/200714144735.htm, citing Zixuan Wang, Yuki Murai, David Whitney, "Idiosyncratic perception: a link between acuity, perceived position and apparent size", Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2020; 287 (1930): 20200825, https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2020.0825.

[14] American Institute of Physics, “Wimps Hear Dangerous Noises Differently”, ScienceDaily, April 27, 2009, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090426094051.htm.

[15] Shawn Carlson, “Dissecting the Brain with Sound”, Scientific American, December 1996, pp. 112-15.

[16] Laura Spinney, “You Smell Flowers, I Smell Stale Urine”, Scientific American, February 2011, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-smell-flowers-i-smell/, January 20, 2011.

[17] Imperial College London, “Brain on LSD revealed: First scans show how the drug affects the brain”, ScienceDaily, April 11, 2016, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/04/160411153006.htm, citing Robin L. Carhart-Harris, Suresh Muthukumaraswamy, Leor Roseman, Mendel Kaelen, Wouter Droog, Kevin Murphy, Enzo Tagliazucchi, Eduardo E. Schenberg, Timothy Nest, Csaba Orban, Robert Leech, Luke T. Williams, Tim M. Williams, Mark Bolstridge, Ben Sessa, John McGonigle, Martin I. Sereno, David Nichols, Peter J. Hellyer, Peter Hobden, John Evans, Krish D. Singh, Richard G. Wise, H. Valerie Curran, Amanda Feilding, and David J. Nutt, “Neural correlates of the LSD experience revealed by multimodal neuroimaging”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), April 2016, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1518377113.

In a World of Our Own (What is Real? 10)

 

These posts make more sense when read in order.

Please click here for the first article in this series to enter the rabbit hole.

 

We assume everyone else experiences the world like we do. That we see colors the same, hear music the same, and taste foods the same, but we don’t. Everyone is in a unique sensory world of their own. This is obvious when it comes to people’s tastes in foods, but it applies to the others senses too.

In general, females have better senses of both taste and smell than males. Most of what we think of as taste is actually smell, which is why you lose your sense of flavor when you have a stuffy nose. Block your nose and apple and raw potato taste the same. In the back of our nasal passage on an area about half the size of a postage stamp, we have hundreds of receptors that detect volatile chemicals. Everyone has a different mix of receptors and receptors with different sensitivities, so everyone’s sense of smell is unique.

Primates are particularly sensitive to flavors because we’ve lost the transverse lamina—a bone which separates our mouths from our noses. This allows aromas to rise from the back of our mouths into our noses enabling us and our primate cousins to sense very complex flavors.

Our sense of taste is limited to a few basic types. We have taste cells that sense sweet, sour, salty, savory, and bitter, although it’s not quite that simple since we have more than 30 different bitter receptors and two types for salt. We also seem to have ones that taste fat, and there might be some for starch, water, carbon dioxide, and metallic taste, and some that respond to several of these tastes.

Taste researchers categorize people as nontasters, normal tasters, and supertasters. Supertasters can have more than 10 thousand receptors, while nontasters might have fewer than 500. Females are much more likely to be supertasters than males. Asians and Africans are more likely than those of European descent. Supertasters don’t like bitterness, so prefer milk chocolate to dark chocolate. They love sweets and add lots of cream and sugar to coffee, if they drink coffee at all. They want food to be mild. Both supertasters and nontasters use additional salt and sugar—supertasters to hide bitterness, nontasters to increase flavor. Nontasters prefer spicy foods, jalapeños, and atomic hot sauce.

© John Richard Stephens, 2024.

The spiciness in food is not a taste. It doesn’t activate any of our taste receptors. The capsaicin in chili peppers actually activates a pain receptor that senses heat. Normally the TRPV1 receptor goes off at temperatures of 104º Fahrenheit (40º C) or higher, but capsaicin lowers that to 91º F (33º C). This heat receptor is also triggered by wasabi, mustard oil, the low pH of vinegar, allicin in garlic, and by piperine in black pepper. Menthol in mint has the opposite effect by triggering the TRPM8 cold receptor.

About half the population is sensitive to bitterness, which is why many don’t like Brussels sprouts, spinach, and hops. Part of that is genetic, but bitterness is also an acquired taste. Many people learn to like it by the time they’re adults, which is why more children than adults are repulsed by it, although you can train many kids to like it by pairing it with something they like, such as broccoli and cheese. Also, you can overcome a dislike of bitterness by adding a touch of sugar or a lot of fat. People who find coffee bitter will still go for mochaccinos or lattes.^[1] And while almost all animals dislike sour tastes, humans and pigs are rare exceptions.

It’s apparent that we all like different things, so many of us have probably figured out that our senses of taste, smell, and flavor differ. This is most obvious when it comes to the “king of fruits”, the durian (Durio zibethinus). Greatly prized by many people, particularly in Southeast Asia, those who love it talk of its creamy texture and exquisite custard-like flavor. But to many other people it tastes like a mixture of rotten onions, spoiled meat, garbage, and old sweat socks, with a subtle hint of sewage. The smell is so strong that in some countries it’s illegal to have it in certain public places, transportation, and hotels. It even causes divorces, as the smell is so powerful you can’t wash it off.

To me it tastes like slightly fruity custard. It has a slightly oniony smell, but that didn’t come through in the taste. I suspect the smell gets stronger as the fruit ripens. My wife thought it smelled like fruit that was going bad and she thought Vietnamese durian sweet cakes smelled like garbage. I ended up eating three-quarters of a pound of the fruit in one sitting, since I couldn’t bring it indoors and had to throw the rest away. I’m not a huge fan, like some, so it’s not going to break up my marriage. I would recommend cherimoya, which to me tastes similar, but which I think will appeal to a much broader audience. Mark Twain described that as “a rare and curious luxury[...], which is deliciousness itself.”^[2]

The Scots have haggis (a pudding of heart, liver, lungs, suet, and oatmeal stuffed in the sheep or calf’s stomach), Sardinia has maggot cheese (cheese infested with live maggots), the Philippines has balut (soft-boiled duck eggs containing embryos with beaks, bones, and feathers), Scandinavia has lutefisk (dried fish brined in lye until gelatinous), and Iceland has hákarl (ammonia fermented shark meat). Tastes clearly vary.

Some differences in perceptions are cultural. Taste preferences begin with the foods your mother ate while you were in the womb and evolve with what foods you’re exposed to throughout your life. The culture you live in also influences your interpretations of color. For those who were raised in Western cultures, red is usually associated with anger, danger and passion, while in China it symbolizes luck, celebration, success, and brides. In the West, black is associated with death, while in Asia, white is, and sometimes light blue.

Do You Have Good Taste?

What your mother ate while she was pregnant with you and what she fed you as a baby also influenced what tastes good to you. These are two ways babies learn what’s safe to eat. One example of this is that researchers found that for people whose mothers drank alcohol while pregnant, alcohol tasted sweeter and less bitter to them. Alcohol is a mixture of both bitter and sweet.^[3] You can make that a double entendre if you like, I won’t.

But young children are naturally sensitive to bitterness, since it’s an indication that a food might be poisonous, and a small amount of something bad—which might only make an adult sick—can kill a baby. Ultrasound scans have shown fetuses grimacing when their mothers ate kale. Eventually we learn that bitter things like coffee are safe and most people—except for supertasters—grow to like them.

People do lose some sense of taste and smell as they age. Still, some 90-year-olds are more sensitive than some 20-year-olds. But the loss is selective and only affects certain smells and tastes, such as fried meats, onions, salt, and coffee. As a result of this sensory loss, some elders also lose their appetite, but this can be corrected by adding monosodium glutamate. Though MSG has received a lot of bad press, it is actually quite natural and less toxic than salt. You consume it every time you have tomatoes, cheese, and fruit juices.^[4]

Actually, our own sense of taste changes throughout the day. In the morning, when our levels of the hormone leptin are low we’re more sensitive to sweet tastes than we are at night when they’re high. Caffeine also temporarily reduces your sense of sweet taste, while alcohol temporarily reduces overall flavors and smoking does it for longer. Cold temperatures deaden taste, which is why some drinks and beers are served very cold; it’s to hide their poor taste. Similarly, salt is added to many products to mask their bitterness, such as with canned tomato sauces, so those without added salt will probably taste better.

Tastes on a Plane

People often complain about airline food. Aside from the difficulties of preparing dinners for hundreds of people—some with restrictive diets—while dealing with cost restrictions, the lack of space for a preparation area, the requirement that the meals not weigh much, and the problems with refrigerating and then reheating them without a flame or a microwave, there’s also the problem that eating at high altitudes significantly alters how the food tastes, making them seem dry and flavorless.

The pressure and oxygen levels of an airline cabin are about the same as being on top of a mountain that’s one-and-a-quarter to one-and-half-miles high (2 to 2.4 km). This reduces the tastes of salt and sugar, while retaining acidic and bitter flavors. It even increases the taste of some ingredients, such as curry and lemongrass. For some people, the noise levels in an air cabin also reduce sweetness, while enhancing savory and crunchiness. Low cabin humidity—which is dryer than most deserts—dries out passengers’ nasal passages, reducing their sense of smell and flavor, and making food seem dryer. This is why airlines tend to use heavy sauces, while ramping up salt and spiciness. It’s also why tomato juice is a popular selection on planes.

Taste, like smell, is a chemical sense. Sweetness is sensed from complex particles, like sucrose and sucralose, but sour detects the hydrogen ion, H+. Amazingly, scientists in Japan and Singapore have created the sensations of taste just by applying various amounts of electricity. Japanese scientists made an electric fork which gives the taste of salt, without any salt, and chopsticks that can make salt taste one-and-a-half-times saltier, while the Singapore researchers made a cup that creates what they call virtual cocktails. Using electricity, lights, and scent, they make you think you’re drinking lemonade when you’re actually downing water. You can switch the electrodes between sweet, salty, and bitter. Their test model has three scents, and the colored lights do the rest.^[5]

You’d think that color doesn’t have much of an effect, but it does. In one study found that hot chocolate tastes better in an orange or dark-cream colored cup.^[6] Also yellow cans enhance the lemon flavor of drinks, while pink or red drinks taste sweeter, and coffee tastes stronger when it comes in a brown bag.

In his book Drunkard’s Walk (the title refers to mathematics and a type randomness—not alcohol), Leonard Mlodinow—a theoretical physicist and coauthor of a couple books with Stephen Hawking—effectively hosed down wine experts and their ratings system, at one point pointing how one wine guide chose a particular wine as the best of the year, while another guide chose the same wine as the worst vintage in a decade. Citing considerable research, he showed how the vagaries and variations of human taste and smell, along with our biases, render the expert opinions and ratings system practically useless for consumers.^[7]

In fact, in recent years we’ve discovered that just about everything influences flavor. High-end restaurants are adjusting table shapes, weight of cutlery, and shape of plates to influence taste. Even types of music can alter flavors by up to 15 percent. Particular music can enhance sweet, sour, savory, spicy, creamy, and bitter tastes, ranging from high-pitched for sweetness to low-pitched for bitterness.^[8]

Tastes are largely innate—the term scientists now use instead of “instinctive”—although our tastes are influenced by what our mothers ate while we were in the womb and we can alter our likes and dislikes, such as by learning to enjoy the bitter tastes of dark chocolate, coffee, and beer.

Smells, on the other hand, are not inherently good or bad. Those are value judgments we place on them, gained through learning and context. Just ask your dog, who probably finds all smells interesting. To illustrate how our expectations influence smells, researchers had subjects smell a mixture of chemicals that was labeled “dried vomit”, which they found repulsive. Then the researchers gave them the exact same mixture labeled “Parmesan cheese”, which they liked. Of course the subjects were stunned to find out that both were the same odor.^[9]

P

eople also rate identical chocolate chip cookies and saltine crackers as tasting better when they’re labeled “new and improved” rather than “factory typical”. And they rated them as tasting much worse when labeled “consumer complaint”. This is in spite of the fact that all the cookies and crackers were exactly the same.^[10]

Topi Pigula, CC BY-SA 4.0 (adjusted).

Researchers at Stanford and CalTech asked subjects to rate five Cabernet Sauvignons and it was given to them with different price labels. They were actually given three wines because they were given two of the wines twice with different price labels. The subjects preferred the higher priced version of the identical wines and fMRI scans of their brains showed higher levels of pleasure with the higher price tags. Two months later the subjects returned to try five more wines, but they were given the exact same ones without price tags. This time their ratings of the duplicate wines were the same. It was the higher prices, not the wine, that increased their enjoyment.^[11]

But don’t look down on wine lovers. When researchers put Coke in Pepsi bottles and Pepsi in Coke bottles, most test subjects confirmed they preferred their brand, even though what they tasted was actually the other brand.^[12] This happens to everyone. We can all be fooled because there’s a lot more to flavor than how it tastes. Expectations play a big role, as it did in the vomit/cheese test.

Are you starting to get a feel for how our perceptions do not reflect reality?

Flavor Hallucinogens

We’ve seen how many things can influence flavor. What you eat can change it too. Usually this is temporary and subtle, but there are exceptions. Chewing miracle berries can radically alter your sense of taste. Not the way smoking changes and reduces flavors. The berries radically alter it. They’ve been referred to as “a hallucinogen for the taste buds” and while they’re not exactly a miracle, they are quite impressive because they make acidic things taste very sweet.

Miracle Berries. Stéphanie Kilgast, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

The berries,

Synsepalum dulcificum, themselves don’t taste like much, but once they coat your tongue, your taste is transformed for about an hour.

I tried them several times with some friends back in 2009 and 2010. I recall liking lemon slices the best, as they tasted like lemon drops or lemon meringue. Raw onions were also surprisingly good. I’ve read that people have said that vinegar is like apple juice, wine becomes grape juice, goat cheese tastes like cheesecake, and straight Tabasco sauce is “hot doughnut glaze”. I tried vinegar and Tabasco, but can’t recall what they were like.

Once you try everything you have available to sample, then you start mixing things like a mad scientist into rather peculiar concoctions. I remember that potato chips with mustard were pretty tasty. I’ve also read that stirring lemon sorbet into a pint of Guinness makes it taste like a chocolate shake.

To me, the sweet taste from miracle berries doesn’t taste quite like sugar. It’s a little different and can get tiring after a while. But then my sense for things like this seems quite different from the average person. Sweeteners like aspartame (NutraSweet, Equal, and Canderel), sucralose (Splenda), saccharin (Sweet’N Low), and stevia (Truvia and PureVia) taste absolutely awful to me, so I throw away anything that contains them. So perhaps the berries will be a bit different for you.

There’s another fruit called lumbah (Curculigo latifolia) that has a similar affect, only it turns sour to sweet.^[13]

 

If you like this, please subscribe below to receive an email the next time I post something wondrous. It's free.

 

Click here for the next article in this series:

What Do You See?

---

[1] University of Washington, “Researchers Show That The Human Genome Is Helpless In The Face Of Chocolate”, ScienceDaily, February 5, 2001, https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2001/02/010205074522.htm.

[2] Mark Twain, Roughing It, Hartford, CT: American Publishing Co., 1872.

[3] Anonymous, “Fetal exposure to alcohol blunts its bitter tang”, New Scientist, no. 2699, March 14, 2009, p. 15, and as “Fetal exposure removes alcohol’s bitter tang”, March 11, 2009, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126994-000-fetal-exposure-removes-alcohols-bitter-tang/.

[4] Jessica Hamzelou, “Lost your appetite? Umami tea can help”, New Scientist, no. 3006, January 31, 2015, p. 16, and the longer version “Is MSG a silent killer or useful flavour booster?", https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn26854-is-msg-a-silent-killer-or-useful-flavour-booster/, citing Flavour, http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-4-10.

[5] Reuters, “Electric Fork Tricks Taste Buds into a Salty Sensation”, April 1, 2016, https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/id117456524.

And Timothy Revell, “Trick your taste buds with virtual cocktails”, New Scientist, no. 3151, November 11, 2017, p. 15, and as “Virtual cocktails hijack your senses to turn water into wine”, https://www.newscientist.com/article/2152409-virtual-cocktails-hijack-your-senses-to-turn-water-into-wine/, citing MM ’17 Proceedings of the 2017 ACM on Multimedia Conference, https://doi.org/10.1145/3123266.3123440.

And Meriame Berboucha, “Say Goodbye To Cocktails And Hello To The Vocktail: A Virtual Cocktail”, Forbes, November 8, 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/meriameberboucha/2017/11/08/say-goodbye-to-cocktails-and-hello-to-the-vocktail-a-virtual-cocktail/.

[6] Plataforma SINC, "Cup color influences the taste of hot chocolate", ScienceDaily, January 3, 2013. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/01/130103073238.htm, citing Betina Piqueras-Fiszman and Charles Spence, "The Influence of the Color of the Cup on Consumers' Perception of a Hot Beverage", Journal of Sensory Studies, 2012; 27 (5): 324, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-459X.2012.00397.x.

[7] Leonard Mlodinow, Drunkard’s Walk, New York: Pantheon Books, 2008.

[8] James Lloyd, “Experiment with our food” (interview with psychologist Charles Spence), BBC Focus, April 2017, pp. 90-91. Republished as James Lloyd, “The strange science of gastrophysics”, BBC Science Focus Magazine, July 3, 2019, https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/the-strange-science-of-gastrophysics/.

[9] Université de Montréal. “'Smelling' with our eyes: Descriptions affect odor perception.” ScienceDaily, February 11, 2014. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/02/140211084007.htm, citing S. Manescu, J. Frasnelli, F. Lepore, J. Djordjevic, "Now You Like Me, Now You Don't: Impact of Labels on Odor Perception", Chemical Senses, 2013; 39 (2): 167, https://doi.org/10.1093/chemse/bjt066.

And Heather Murphy, “You Will Never Smell My World the Way I Do”, New York Times, May 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/03/science/smell-odors-people-scientists.html.

[10] Ohio State University. "How to ruin the taste of a cookie with just two words: Negative labels influence consumer perception of food, study finds", ScienceDaily, January 26, 2022, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/01/220126090533.htm, citing Maria T. Cotter, Morgan Whitecotton, Devin G. Peterson, and Christopher T. Simons. "The impact of applied labeling context on consumer acceptance of differently valenced products", Food Quality and Preference, 2022; 97: 104491, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2021.104491.

[11] Leonard Mlodinow, Drunkard’s Walk, New York: Pantheon Books, 2008, citing Hilke Plassman, John O’Doherty, Baba Shia, and Antonio Rongel, “Marketing Actions Can Modulate Neural Representations of Experienced Pleasantness,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, January 22, 2008 105 (3) 1050-1054, https://www.pnas.org/content/105/3/1050, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.0706929105.

[12] Leonard Mlodinow, Drunkard’s Walk, New York: Pantheon Books, 2008, citing Mary E. Woolfolk, William Castellan, and Charles I. Brooks, “Pepsi versus Coke: Labels, Not Tastes, Prevail”, Psychological Reports, vol. 52, no. 1, February 1, 1983, pp. 185-86, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2466/pr0.1983.52.1.185, https://doi.org/10.2466/pr0.1983.52.1.185.

[13] James W. Kalat, Biological Psychology, Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1981, p. 186.

And Ed Yong, “How the miracle fruit changes sour into sweet”, Discover Magazine, September 26, 2011, https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/how-the-miracle-fruit-changes-sour-into-sweet, citing Koizumi, Tsuchiya, Nakajima, Ito, Terada, Shimizu-Ibuka, Briand, Asakura, Misaka, and Abe, "Human sweet taste receptor mediates acid-induced sweetness of miraculin", PNAS, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1016644108.

And Patrick Farrell and Kassim Bracken, “A Tiny Fruit That Tricks the Tongue”, New York Times, May 28, 2008,

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/dining/28flavor.html and https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/28/travel/28iht-28flavor.13269454.html.