Thursday 12 April 2018

Thoughts about senses

Quite often, I wonder about how other people perceive the world, on a really fundamental level. Like, some people are colourblind and some people can see extra colours most people can't. Some people don't seem to have working tastebuds, and other people have the burden of being supertasters. And some people don't care about flavour so much as they enjoy texture. Notably either Ben or Jerry - one of the two ice cream guys, decided to put chunks of things in because texture was far more important to him than flavour. And then there are such things as synaesthesia, which actually seems kind of like a super power if you're a musician. So what if all senses are like that and we just haven't noticed yet or invented language to describe it? And someone could live their whole life sensing things a little differently to everyone around them and they wouldn't know because it didn't come up in conversation, and people tend to assume everyone else is the same and usually have a general fear for not being normal. What if all these differences are actually fairly commonplace? Like, [A] can't distinguish red/green and [B] can't smell the difference between basil and coriander. And [C] can't taste the difference between sugar, aspartame and stevia. I don't know what I'm getting at other than - it's not useful to assume your perception of the world is 100% the same as another person's.