# 012 Excellent article Co authored by Deepak Chopra on need for Humans to think on reality.

DEEPAK CHOPRA co-authors an article highlighting the incredible differences in the world view of humans and other species, based on sensory perception

Reality Is An Illusion

Albert Einstein said: “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Quantum mechanics has shown for more than 80 years now that the perceived reality of hard objects that senses give us, is an illusion. Yet, if things lost their thing-ness, which our senses make us believe in, we’d have little choice but to re-evaluate what is real and what isn’t…

The Mystery Of Perception

If we follow the mystery of perception, many issues arise than the fairly simple one of hallucinations. They are rare, but the brain’s ability to turn electrical impulses and chemical reactions into a world we see, hear, touch, taste and smell, is baffling. There is no light in the brain. Yet, the light of the sun is blinding. This disparity is crucial, because without someone to see it, the sun is invisible.There is no visible light in nature without an eye to perceive it. What if your brain, having taken a totally different evolutionary path, didn’t ‘see’ light but ‘heard’ it? There’s no obstacle to such a development. (During the LSD ‘60s, trippers discovered they could taste colours or see music.)

Different Realities

Sensory abilities differ vastly among the millions of species on the planet. What is real to one species (like a bat’s sonar) is hidden to another (a deaf paramecium - a single-celled freshwater animal which has a characteristic slipper-like shape). Even among seven billion humans, every person has a different ‘mix’ of reality depending on personal acuity, predispositions, habits, memories,and upbringing (the child of a horticulturalist might automatically see 20 different wildflowers in a meadow where you see a blur of colour). We tend to ignore that sensory abilities differ from one person to another, unless the difference is striking, as between one person who is stone deaf and another who has perfect pitch. Yet, the larger truth is that each of us uses the brain like a personal CGI (Computer Generated Imaging) factory, creating a 3-D movie of the world unlike anyone else’s. Are we illusion makers or reality makers? Big question!

Visuals differ

Humans have one lens in each eye, and our eyes are trichromatic — we have three types of colour sensing cells, or cones, which allows us to distinguish combinations of a million or so colours. But even within humans, there is a twofold or threefold physical difference from one person to another in every aspect of our visual system (eg: the size of the optic nerve, lateral geniculate nucleus and primary visual cortex, etc).

Dramatic Difference

However, colour vision and eyesight vary even more dramatically among different species, many of which are monochromatic, such as seals, sea lions, and owl monkeys. If a species is a rod monochromat, then for it, the world is free of all colours other than shades of grey. If a species is a cone monochromat (with only one type of cone), then it can see about 100 shades of a single colour or its combinations. Cats are dichromatic, which means they can see only about 10,000 colours. There are gender differences in animals — among New World monkeys, males are dichromatic but many females are trichromatic, like us. Honeybees are trichromatic but they cannot see red; and they can see ultraviolet frequencies.

Evolution Differs

Evolution hasn’t ordered living creatures in a straight line from crude sight — as we humans would judge it — to more evolved sight, meaning our own. Many birds, insects, and fish are

tetrachromatic, so that some spiders and birds can see ultraviolet, which humans cannot. This would make insect prey glow green in the dark. The reason that we cannot see UV is that our lens blocks it from striking the retina, but people whose lenses have been removed in a cataract procedure or who were born without a lens (aphakia), have been reported to detect UV light.

No Normal Way

As evolution has developed different sensory systems, reality shifted.There is no ‘normal’way to decode photos of invisible light. Pigeons and some butterflies are actually pentachromats; in theory, such creatures could distinguish up to 10 billion colours even though we have no way to prove this. The Mantis has 16 different receptor types, including four types of receptors just for seeing UV light, and four others for polarised light. A human would need many distinct kinds of sunglasses to duplicate the sensation. Many snakes can also ‘see’ infrared, or heat radiation, using special detectors that send thermal information through their visual system.

What The Eye Cannot See

It’s hard to escape our assumption that eyesight connects us to the real world, but every living thing is connected to a created world. The question of matching our creation to a possible ‘real reality’ will come next. The conclusions of quantum mechanics will certainly have to be brought in. For the moment, we need to realise that the world created by other species is inconceivable to us….

Defective Perceptions

Finally, the mystery of perception must be sorted out from defective perception. Humans suffer from certain peculiar visual defects. For example, we can fill in information that we partially see (if an edge is blocked out) but some animals don’t do that. Optical illusions have proven that our visual system is often wrong in its detection accuracy for size, shape, colour, motion, and depth. (Think of desert mirages where shimmering hot air looks like water.) Yet, in a sense, confining our examples to eyesight is misleading, since the world is created by blending all the senses, and variations in touch, taste, hearing, and smell lead to bewildering riddles…

Where Do We Humans Stand?

So while feeling superior to chickens with their hundred taste buds and ignoring bees, who can smell something miles away, or sharks, who can detect faint, distant electrical impulses, humans must take advantage of one extrasensory gift — our ability to reason — in order to find out where we stand in the shadowy realm of illusion versus reality.

From Speaking Tree