So I was "thinking" of something and wanted to share...

Hey everyone...

This platform is gathering a fair bit of dust from what I can see...

Anyway, this being a place to share thoughts on neuroscience and the brain I feel like sharing with everyone an idea I had a very long time back. I have shared this dilemma with a few people and wish to put it out here for you to mull over.

I was in Delhi going back home from college when I started wondering why people like one color over the other....and then some people just don't seem to have a strong preference for any particular hue.
I guess this is where the thought took birth and today wonder why I never extrapolated the idea to a more generic hypothesis on "the likes and dislikes" of people. Oh well, that is what we are here for...Maybe we could formulate one through a discussion here...

So here's what I conjured up...It would take a bit of imagining for everyone to understand the problem.

The question is how we perceive things. When I look at the sky on a clear day an image is formed at the back of my eye which is processed by the brain and when someone asks me the color of the sky I would tell him that its blue.

Why did I call it blue? The answer to begin with is not as simple as saying that the blue wavelength our eyes and we learned to call it blue when we were little kiddies. First of all the molecules in the atmosphere are more effective in scattering shorter wavelengths of the visible spectrum and secondly our eyes are more sensitive to perceiving the color blue than violet...

Anyway, I digress from the main point and therefore apologize. We in fact do wish to stick to wavelengths and the associated names of colors for our problem.

So, whenever an Electromagnetic wavelength of near 475 nm strikes the retina we percieve it as blue. Now when we see come across the 475 nm wavelength our brain creates the perception of blue and when asked some people say that they really like the color blue. Some on the other hand might say that they are not extremely fond of blue...Now why is that? One simple explanation could be that there is a negative association somewhere in the past that the person has made with the color blue and so they dont feel like its an awesome color ( I once ate a lot of onions and the hurled it all out in the middle of the night in a purple colored goo and ever since havent been quite fond of the color purple)...

There would be a number of psychological explanations that could answer my question and most people wouldn't bother much beyond them. But I wonder if we all see the same thing or perceive blue in the exact same fashion as everyone else?

Now I need you to imagine, What if when I look at a tree and see green and perceive it as green because that is what I was taught, but what if even though the exact same wavelength hits your eye and even though you call it green because the same stimuls has been universally named, you actually perceive it as the blue I see...

Now, stop for a second, I do not wish to rewrite the last paragraph and I'vetried explaining this scenario to others before in a very shoddy fashion so let me try again...I simply say, that what I perceive when I see blue could be your green, and your red could be yellow to me. So to me, when I see the sky I see a green colored sky according to you...and when I see a mustard field then i see what you would perceive as a red colored mustard field.

If by now you understand what I meant then it would be useful to give ne example of an actualy condition of the brain which could give some vagur validity to an otherwise crazy hypothesis.

Many of you might have heard of the condition called synesthesia or mixing of senses ( for more info check out the wikipedia site on synesthesia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia)

In Synesthesia there are many manifestations but a commonly cited one is the lexical gustatory synesthesia where a person can taste a word from a spoken language by hearing it or even thinking of the word. As an example, the word "television" might evoke a taste of oranges! What is fascinating is that people with these conditions often do not realize that they have such a unique perception modality until they find out that others around then lack it...

Now why is this related. Simply because the fact that our perceptions are not the same...we might think that the feeling that is evoked when we look at the clear "blue" sky is the same in everyone, when this just might not be true.

Now when I relate this to the idea of "likes and dislikes" I suggest another small jounrey into your imagination. Imagine the sky was not what you perceived it to be right now. instead lets switch the colors a little. Imagine that the sky was brown and the trees and the grass was red and wood was bright canary yellow. Now would you like the color of the sky if it were red? I wouldnt? Too gaudy for me...

If you start thinking on these lines you would wonder if this is the reason why some people just hate certain objects or colors. Its a far fetched and I admit maniacal kind of suggestion but isnt it possible that there is some primeival center in our primate brain that guides likes and dislikes and if our perceptions are sligtly skewed then it could create a drift of sort in what would otherwise ought to be a universal perception for everyone...

I think at this point I would like to make a point clear that I think this might not be a condition in everyone. Most likely (again this is random and intuitive) 95% of the people have same perceptions and only a fraction of the problem displays a phenomenon similar to what I suggest. Like how there are homosexuals in the general human population. If there is a neurological basis for homosexuality then it is obvioulsy not being expressed in the majority of the population and is (excuse the expression all the liberals out there) an "aberration" of sorts. While we have evolved for millions of years most of us are primed to "like" certain stimuli that our senses encounter for the purpose of survival but maybe in a fraction those wires got mixed up a bit and now we see deviant behavior every now and then...


I am posting this right now without even relloking and revising because its getting a bit late and I should go to bed...But I'll come back and revise this first draft soon...In the meantime... for those who can bear with my first draft...leave comments...I'd be glad to hear what you think....After all even though this seems scientific it can take many directions during the course of a discussion...

I have been thinking about how one would test this hypothesis and have concluded that with current technology it is almost impossible...But if someone can figure out a simple and achievable method for experimentation then I might just start thinking of writing to DHHS for a grant to work on this :P