That BIG thing

I’m now published at Inkling Magazine and that‘s the big thing of mine.  Inkling Magazine’s motto is: On the HUNCH that science rocks.  You pretty much know what that article of mine is all about – at least globally.

Titled, A Rose by Any Other Name Would Look as Red, the article explains how the human brain seems to calibrate colour vision against a standard, making up for differences in eye hardware.  In simpler terms, although your eyes and my eyes are different, we all see the same colours.  Or do we? Actually, our brains decide how we perceive colours.

Every person is different. Take my neighbor, for example. He has amazingly selective hearing. When his two dogs start to bark madly at 2 a.m, he is undisturbed, whereas I fall out of bed thinking that the Death-Eaters are attacking my house. Maybe his eyesight is different too. That would explain why he waters his lawn every single day, even though it looks pretty green to me. Which makes me wonder: Does he see colors differently than I do? Could our eyes be telling us different stories? 

In this lawn-watering example, the answer seems to be no. Barring color blindness, no matter how different our individual eyes may be, our brains ensure that we experience colors in the same way, according to a group of ground-breaking studies in the past decade. But those rules can change when we start mucking with vision – through colored contact lenses or even changing latitudes. But seeing as my neighbor hasn’t been on any far-fetched vacations nor does he have a fondness for red sunglasses, I can only assume that he just likes wasting water.

I took more than a week (four drafts) to come up with a decent article.  Big thanks to Anna Gosline, who edited this article and really guided me through the process.  She stuck up with me and proved to be an awesome mentor, having been a writer for New Scientist herself.  Without her support, I would never have been able to get this published.  Also, many thanks have to go to my dad for his support and suggestions.

I also have my very own profile at Inkling – with a couple of embarrassing photos – and I’m very proud about that.  I’m also proud about the fact that for the first time ever, I read actual scientific papers from scientific journals!

All in all, I’m really happy about this.

Note: This is probably the last decent post in this blog.  I’ll obviously tell you when I’ve migrated the blog to start it back from scratch.  Already working on it.  So, farewell!

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