Emily McDonald

And I remember that really kind of opening the doorway for me.

I mean, like, whoa, you know, you look out here and you think to yourself, uh,

I'm seeing, you know, the ground or seeing you the same way somebody else might see you, but that's not actually the case at all.

And I remember I've been in discussions before with, you know, even my fiance where it's like, this shirt is pink.

It's like, I don't know.

I don't really see it as that color.

But now I know it's like, no, actually, his brain's just constructing it wrong.

And it's mine that's constructing it right.

But we all perceive it differently, right?

And I think it's so interesting to kind of explore that and explore, you know, I don't think that we're meant to see reality the same because we're all kind of meant to have these different perspectives and make the world a more interesting place that way.

And so, yeah, I mean, it's a deep rabbit hole that we can go down when thinking about that, but...

I mean, that's just vision that I explained.

But I remember there was another study that we kind of dove into.

This was actually in my PhD because we had different kind of specialists come in and teach us about different sensory systems.

And specifically, the taste one kind of sticks with me because there was this study or this experiment where it's called like the bitter tea experiment, where they would have these mice kind of drink this tea that was very bitter and they wouldn't drink it.

But yeah, exactly.

And so they wouldn't drink it, right, because it was bitter.

So they wouldn't drink it.

But what they would do then is they actually kind of made this genetic switch where they didn't change the taste buds in these mice tongues.

What they changed was the wiring, the path from the taste bud to kind of the area in the brain where we decipher taste.