Published today 6:45
How we perceive color and odor depends on how the brain interprets the world and what language we speak.
How we perceive color and odor depends on how the brain interprets the world and what language we speak.
” Please, can you help me – this dress is white and gold, or blue and black? My friends and I can not get along and we’re about to freak out completely. “
The 21-year-old Scottish singer Caitlin McNeills post on the blog site Tumblr February 25 spread with lightning speed over social media.
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In five hours awarded it 16 million times and soon people all over the world to be just disagree that Caitlin McNeill and her friends.
For some, it is obvious that the dress is blue with black stripes, while others can only see that it is white and gold stripes.
– It is a completely unique optical illusion because people see it as totally different. This is probably the right at a point where our brains are picking up different signals from the image to interpret it, said Michael Webster, professor of psychology and director of the Centre for Integrative Neuroscience at Nevada University in Reno, United States.
The difference is how we interpret light in the picture. If the woman in dress standing in the shade, it may be a white dress that looks bluish in the shadowy light. She is standing in bright sunlight, it is obvious that the dress is blue. So far, scientists agree. But after more than two weeks, they still do not agree on why we see the picture so different.
– We have a mailing list for researchers where everyone is discussing this. We do not understand what kind of signals people see in the image and why they do not react the same signals. We can not explain the individual differences, says Michael Webster.
The brain interprets all the time what we see based on what it has learned that the world works: the light usually comes from above and the same colors looks different in different lights. The color of the wall is the same even if it falls a shadow over it. In a room with yellow light will we finally see that white book pages are white. And even though the lens of the eye becomes yellower and yellower the older we get, we still find that colors look the same as before.
– Syn is really just a matter of guess and interpret, says Michael Webster.
He himself is convinced to the strong effect because the dress is just blue.
– Shadows tend to be bluish. Had the dress was red and green striped we had not seen this since we do not live in a world with red and green shadows, he says.
The image evokes such strong reactions because we believe that our eyes gives a real picture of the world around us, and we tend to be quite agree on what colors we see. Odors are we, however, much worse at recognizing.
– In experiments where people must identify the scents they usually only get about half right, says Asifa Majid, a professor of language, communication and cultural cognition in Radbouduniversitetet in Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Philosophers have since Plato and Aristotle made it clear that the sense of smell is man’s lowest and least important sense. Modern Western psychologists argue that we are bad at describing smells because the brain has weak connections between the olfactory center, language center.
– But almost all attempts are made to Western students. And then we generalize the results to the whole of humanity, says Asifa Majid.
That it looks different in other cultures show jahaifolket, who live in the rain forest in the border areas between Malaysia and Thailand. They have a language of words for different types of scents that are as general as our word for color. In experiments Asifa Majid had together with Niclas Burenhult, associate professor of linguistics at the Humanities Lab at Lund University, was jahaitalare equal agree what color something is like how something smells. When the English-speaking people had to do the same test, they were much more consistent when they talked about the color of a painted box than when they described the smell of an odor sample.
They also took much longer to respond. Jahaierna responded promptly with a doftord while the English-speaking subjects almost always began with being silent and think, then talk at length about what the smell reminded and ask to smell again and often eventually come to the conclusion that they did not know what it was. This despite the fact that almost all the smells – cinnamon, turpentine, lemon, smoke, chocolate, rose, paint thinner, banana, pineapple, gasoline, soap and onions – should be more familiar to Westerners than jahaier.
In Swedish we have single words to odors, stale and acrid, but Jahai-word cover all types of scents.
– The parallel with colors is very good. Colors’re also abstract words where a variety of shades can be subsumed under the same term. The words denote nor the sources, just as we say red fire engine and not colored, says Niclas Burenhult.
Jahaifolket are hunters and gatherers, and it is important for them to be able to communicate about odors. Niclas Burenhult have been present when jahaierna chasing bamboo rats that live in burrows under the ground and seen how the hunters first dig up the droppings to feel the smell of a nest is new or old.
Scent Words are important even on a deeper level. Jahaierna believe in a deity, Karey, who lives in the clouds. Usually, he is kindly disposed, but he can get angry and send thunder when they do something that smells wrong.
– You can not for example the noise and be loud when you are bathing in a river. Then attracts get there Karey. When he feels the smell of the dirt that runs off the people he gets angry and punishes them, says Niclas Burenhult.
When jahaier going to go out in the rain forest to hunt, they are always freshly washed. On the way home, when they become sweaty in the hunt, pick the fragrant leaves and flowers and put in your hair and belt to not smell bad. They also have several different words for the smell of blood and raw meat. The meat from certain prey is okay to wash in the river while others have a blood Karey think smells bad. Them, the hunters rinse off in the woods, with water they collect from the river in bamboo tubes.
There is also a certain type of blood scent that jahaier mean attracts tigers, among other things, the smell of crushed head lice.
– Therefore, it is impermissible to pick lice from someone out in the woods, says Niclas Burenhult.
Word for odors is also available in the languages spoken in southern Africa and in Latin America. That we Westerners rarely put into words odors depends more on our culture than in our brains.
We will probably never experience the smells that jahaierna do, or agree on what color the dress in the picture has.
– We rely so much on our minds talk about the right things for us and are surprised when differences are so great. It begs the question: can we really the same world? said Michael Webster.
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