Yes, i have shamelessly picked up the title of this blog from a recent blockbuster- DAWN OF THE APES. Well, there are more than one correlation about this. All of which, behold, are scientifically driven!
Apes and humans share the maximum gene similarity. We are merely 2% genetically divergent from our ancestors ie 98% of genetic make-up of apes and human is the same. This statistic however is a classic example of so close yet so far.
We share 98% of our genes and yet look and behave like two ends of the spectrum. Would anyone have bought the hypothesis that apes and humans are just 2% apart? Some humans, i can assure you, would find it insulting to be categorized with Apes.
This is, in fact, the whole basis of my post. What you see might not always be what the reality is. I remember being hauled up by my strict convent English teacher for botching up one of my exam answers in grade IV. Complete the proverb "Seeing is...." was the question put before me. And i had completed it with "NOT BELIEVING." I guess the science enthusiast in me has woken up early.
However, Iam not a point off any linear curve. No cuckoo is flying over my nest.
Have you ever wondered what you see is the reality or not? Mark Twain, one of the earliest literary genius, summed it up very well when he said "Truth is stranger than fiction,but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possiblities; Truth isnt."
Our truth is what we see. Literally. A bus appears red because our eyes sees it that way. Our eyes then send this signal to our brain which in turn processes it and pastes a image of red and a bus like structure. And voila! We have a beautiful red bus zipping by in front of our eyes. Well then where is seeing NOT believing, you ask?? Oh its not that boring.
Lets not look at this whole picture in one go. Lets unlock this labyrinth bit by bit.
Step 1: Our eyes see red: We all know the science behind that. Wriggle back Grade VI physics. Light falls on an object. Object absorbs part of the white light spectra but reflects back one color (Iam assuming we all know that white light is made up of spectrum of colors. Grade IV science- in Indian schools that is :). Anyway, coming back....so the bus we see absorbs the rest of the spectra but reflects the red wavelength back to us.
Step 2: Our retina transmits this information to the brain: The back of our eye has a sort of projector called the Retina. The retina has several color identifying cells called cones.When wavelength corresponding to red falls on the retina the "Red cones" light up and send an electric signal to the part of the brain that is responsible for seeing(Visual Cortex).
Step 3: Visual cortex process this signal: The signal that is sent to the brain as an electric impulse is processed by the highly "intellegent" brain cells and the brain then stores this information as "Red".
Meanwhile similar pathways that lead into the visual cortex hold information about the bus- shape, size, depth.
And another pathway tells the brain how fast the bus was moving, which direction it was going ie all the motor inputs.
And that, my dear Watson, is how we see a red bus moving across.
Sounds insanely complex. Esp when you add the fact that we process all this information in fraction of milliseconds. Right?
Thats where my Class IV English teacher was wrong in cutting my one mark in the exam.
Now that we have understood "seeing", you can appreciate how it can be easily "NOT believing."
So much electric signal, so little time. Can we not goof up? And I dont mean we as people. I mean we as electric impulses, chemical signals and wavelength detectors.
What if our cones got mixed up and the blue cones started picking up the incoming red signal? Would we see a blue bus?
What if the pathway got altered and the visual signal was sent to the part of the brain that was responsible for hearing. Would we "hear" red?
And please Mr Stan Lee....before you get your writing pad out to see how this plot will unfold into another X-men series...put your pen away. I am talking of Truth and very much the truth. Coz like Mark Twain said- truth is not obliged to stick to what is possible. ("Hearing" red is part of a condition called Synaesthesia. See more of it: here)
It is my days of studying Neuroscience that i realised that there is nothing called "normal" in this world. Its merely like a democracy.Truth or lets call it "Reality" is the one that gets the larger votes. Since most of us perceive red as red, it must be red. And seeing red must be normal.
We forget that what we see is only electric signal. To the person who sees red as blue- thats his truth as much as the red is to the red seeing person. For him the bus is blue. The electric impulse hold no information about right or wrong in them. It doesnt say that you are seeing it as blue but its wrong coz its actually red for the rest of the world. The blue seeing person will know that he is seeing differently only if some red team member mentioned to him that he saw the bus as red.
We perceive the world as much as our wiring will allow us to.
A colorblind person will die thinking that she looks best in that grey cocktail gown while it actually was a red dress. A person with hemispatial neglect will keep thinking he is clean shaven though his left half of the face is bearded. (A video about hemispatial neglect can be seen here) To most of us it might seem odd. Because these behaviours dont conform to the normal. But then like my post says- do you really know what is normal? Normal is what our brain tell us. So as far as these people are concerned, they are all normal. When it comes to the brain- nothing is abnormal. Its just something that doesnt fall in the larger subset.
Any person who has remotely studied Neuroscience will have this awe for the "abnormal." The brain is so complex that to understand its functioning- we turn to whats not functioning. For example, to study color perception; we study pathways in colorblind brains. By studying what happens when things are wired a little differently, we get clues on how they should be wired in a "normal" brain. For studying how the brain perceives motion, we turn to a lady who saw the world in snapshots and not in one continuous motion.
The abnormal tells us what normal should be.
And im not even going into ideals, morals, rebels, society etc. Iam talking of plain and simple brain wiring. If brain tells us red, we see red. Tomorrow if the brain decides to tell us blue, then blue it is. Its that easy to fool us. Infact illusions take advantage of this very fact. However, thats a topic that requires another dedicated post. Some other time, then!
Coming back......
In fact "abnormals" have done us more favors than the ones listed above. Beethoven, one of the most famous musicians was deaf! How he heard music can be only known by seeing his brain wiring. Professor John Nash popularised in the movie "A beautiful mind" is considered one of the greatest intellect. Was schizophrenia helping him solve problems that a normal brain couldnt? Lewis Carolls's visual hallucinations due to his schizophrenia has given us one of the most creative and dreamy childhood books- Alice in Wonderland which is suspected to be a descriptive of his hallucinations.
I would like to end this post by quoting from that very book. It says what all i said in just one line- another indicative of the creative genuis Lewis Carroll was.
A dialogue between Alice and Chesire Cat:
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
Apes and humans share the maximum gene similarity. We are merely 2% genetically divergent from our ancestors ie 98% of genetic make-up of apes and human is the same. This statistic however is a classic example of so close yet so far.
We share 98% of our genes and yet look and behave like two ends of the spectrum. Would anyone have bought the hypothesis that apes and humans are just 2% apart? Some humans, i can assure you, would find it insulting to be categorized with Apes.
This is, in fact, the whole basis of my post. What you see might not always be what the reality is. I remember being hauled up by my strict convent English teacher for botching up one of my exam answers in grade IV. Complete the proverb "Seeing is...." was the question put before me. And i had completed it with "NOT BELIEVING." I guess the science enthusiast in me has woken up early.
However, Iam not a point off any linear curve. No cuckoo is flying over my nest.
Have you ever wondered what you see is the reality or not? Mark Twain, one of the earliest literary genius, summed it up very well when he said "Truth is stranger than fiction,but it is because fiction is obliged to stick to possiblities; Truth isnt."
Our truth is what we see. Literally. A bus appears red because our eyes sees it that way. Our eyes then send this signal to our brain which in turn processes it and pastes a image of red and a bus like structure. And voila! We have a beautiful red bus zipping by in front of our eyes. Well then where is seeing NOT believing, you ask?? Oh its not that boring.
Lets not look at this whole picture in one go. Lets unlock this labyrinth bit by bit.
Step 1: Our eyes see red: We all know the science behind that. Wriggle back Grade VI physics. Light falls on an object. Object absorbs part of the white light spectra but reflects back one color (Iam assuming we all know that white light is made up of spectrum of colors. Grade IV science- in Indian schools that is :). Anyway, coming back....so the bus we see absorbs the rest of the spectra but reflects the red wavelength back to us.
Step 2: Our retina transmits this information to the brain: The back of our eye has a sort of projector called the Retina. The retina has several color identifying cells called cones.When wavelength corresponding to red falls on the retina the "Red cones" light up and send an electric signal to the part of the brain that is responsible for seeing(Visual Cortex).
Step 3: Visual cortex process this signal: The signal that is sent to the brain as an electric impulse is processed by the highly "intellegent" brain cells and the brain then stores this information as "Red".
Meanwhile similar pathways that lead into the visual cortex hold information about the bus- shape, size, depth.
And another pathway tells the brain how fast the bus was moving, which direction it was going ie all the motor inputs.
And that, my dear Watson, is how we see a red bus moving across.
Sounds insanely complex. Esp when you add the fact that we process all this information in fraction of milliseconds. Right?
Thats where my Class IV English teacher was wrong in cutting my one mark in the exam.
Now that we have understood "seeing", you can appreciate how it can be easily "NOT believing."
So much electric signal, so little time. Can we not goof up? And I dont mean we as people. I mean we as electric impulses, chemical signals and wavelength detectors.
What if our cones got mixed up and the blue cones started picking up the incoming red signal? Would we see a blue bus?
What if the pathway got altered and the visual signal was sent to the part of the brain that was responsible for hearing. Would we "hear" red?
And please Mr Stan Lee....before you get your writing pad out to see how this plot will unfold into another X-men series...put your pen away. I am talking of Truth and very much the truth. Coz like Mark Twain said- truth is not obliged to stick to what is possible. ("Hearing" red is part of a condition called Synaesthesia. See more of it: here)
It is my days of studying Neuroscience that i realised that there is nothing called "normal" in this world. Its merely like a democracy.Truth or lets call it "Reality" is the one that gets the larger votes. Since most of us perceive red as red, it must be red. And seeing red must be normal.
We forget that what we see is only electric signal. To the person who sees red as blue- thats his truth as much as the red is to the red seeing person. For him the bus is blue. The electric impulse hold no information about right or wrong in them. It doesnt say that you are seeing it as blue but its wrong coz its actually red for the rest of the world. The blue seeing person will know that he is seeing differently only if some red team member mentioned to him that he saw the bus as red.
We perceive the world as much as our wiring will allow us to.
A colorblind person will die thinking that she looks best in that grey cocktail gown while it actually was a red dress. A person with hemispatial neglect will keep thinking he is clean shaven though his left half of the face is bearded. (A video about hemispatial neglect can be seen here) To most of us it might seem odd. Because these behaviours dont conform to the normal. But then like my post says- do you really know what is normal? Normal is what our brain tell us. So as far as these people are concerned, they are all normal. When it comes to the brain- nothing is abnormal. Its just something that doesnt fall in the larger subset.
Any person who has remotely studied Neuroscience will have this awe for the "abnormal." The brain is so complex that to understand its functioning- we turn to whats not functioning. For example, to study color perception; we study pathways in colorblind brains. By studying what happens when things are wired a little differently, we get clues on how they should be wired in a "normal" brain. For studying how the brain perceives motion, we turn to a lady who saw the world in snapshots and not in one continuous motion.
The abnormal tells us what normal should be.
And im not even going into ideals, morals, rebels, society etc. Iam talking of plain and simple brain wiring. If brain tells us red, we see red. Tomorrow if the brain decides to tell us blue, then blue it is. Its that easy to fool us. Infact illusions take advantage of this very fact. However, thats a topic that requires another dedicated post. Some other time, then!
Coming back......
In fact "abnormals" have done us more favors than the ones listed above. Beethoven, one of the most famous musicians was deaf! How he heard music can be only known by seeing his brain wiring. Professor John Nash popularised in the movie "A beautiful mind" is considered one of the greatest intellect. Was schizophrenia helping him solve problems that a normal brain couldnt? Lewis Carolls's visual hallucinations due to his schizophrenia has given us one of the most creative and dreamy childhood books- Alice in Wonderland which is suspected to be a descriptive of his hallucinations.
I would like to end this post by quoting from that very book. It says what all i said in just one line- another indicative of the creative genuis Lewis Carroll was.
A dialogue between Alice and Chesire Cat:
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked.
- "Oh, you can't help that," said the Cat: "We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."
- "How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.
- "You must be," said the Cat, "otherwise you wouldn't have come here."
- Alice didn't think that proved it at all: however she went on. "And how do you know that you're mad?"
- "To begin with," said the Cat, "a dog's not mad. You grant that?"
- "I suppose so," said Alice
- "Well, then," the Cat went on, "you see a dog growls when it's angry, and wags its tail when it's pleased. Now I growl when I'm pleased, and wag my tail when I'm angry. Therefore I'm mad."
- It took a hallucinating schizophrenic person to tell us the actual truth. if we cant categorise anything as normal probably its safer to call us all abnormal.
- "Iam mad, you are mad. We all are mad"
