Emily McDonald

These were real monkeys in the rainforest.

And we knew the genotypes of these monkeys, and we could map on a color plot how these different monkeys would perceive different colored fruits in the rainforest.

It would be the same fruit.

You'd take the illuminance, the reflectance of the color of the fruit, and you could put it through what they actually call a quantum catch, which is funny because you're mentioning the word quantum earlier.

Um, but yeah, it was called a quantum catch and it's just a way to kind of do these measurements.

And you could then see on a color plot how this same colored fruit is perceived differently, like different shades of color.

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.