The Dress 2.0

Most people remember “the dress.” In 2015, it was an Internet sensation because

Picture from Wikipedia

some people, when they looked at a photo of the striped dress, saw the colors as gold and white, while others saw them as blue and black. No matter which side you were on, you couldn’t imagine how anyone could see the colors differently from you. In fact, the dress and how people saw it are still being discussed in scientific circles.

Now, in 2018, everyone is discussing the “Yanny/Laurel” recording. A computerized voice says a word and people hear either Yanny or Laurel. Again, it’s inconceivable to listeners that others could hear an entirely different word than they do.

These phenomena got me wondering. Is half the world seeing and hearing different things than the other half?

What about taste? Do some people dislike a food and others like it because they’re experiencing different tastes when eating the same food? Could kale taste delicious to some people because it tastes like chocolate ice cream to them?

How about smell and touch? Does tomato sauce simmering on a stovetop smell like gasoline to some people? Does velvet feel soft to some people and like gravel to others?

I suspect that the dress and Yanny/Laurel are just the tip of the iceberg, which, by the way, is probably so cold that it could be experienced as being hot.

What intrigues me is that many people got annoyed at the dress controversy and insisted that everyone stop talking about it. The same will occur with the Yanny/Laurel discussion.

Why do people want to ignore puzzling discoveries? I understand that hearing the same debate over and over can get tiresome, but the dress and Yanny/Laurel raise some questions about perception and how it differs between people, and don’t those questions deserve some consideration?

For instance, color-blind people are a known entity. We all know that they see some colors differently than most of the world sees them. But there could be other aberrant entities that we’re unaware of … because we’re part of them and we accept what we sense as being the truth. Suppose we’re all seeing, smelling, tasting, touching, and hearing different things when we use our senses?

This raises so many questions and, yet, it also clears some things up for me. For example, when I ask my family to do something, it’s not uncommon for them to not do it, and then act confused when I complain. Maybe, when I say, “Please empty the dishwasher,” they hear “Enjoy the baseball game.”

I could have been misheard all along. Now, I’ll have to investigate before I nag my family. I’ll need to ask them what they heard me say before I criticize them. And even then, when they tell me what they heard, I might hear them say something different entirely.

This is probably why people got fed up with the dress conversation and will soon get equally tired of the Yanny/Laurel discussion. It’s not that they don’t want to contemplate the possibility of an alternate reality. They just don’t see the point because there’s no absolute answer.

For the record, I saw a black/blue dress and heard “Yanny.” Social commentators have said that younger people hear “Laurel,” but maybe they really said that younger people hear “Yanny.” I guess we’ll never know.