#we've been looking at brains and neurons in biology

[m4gp13]

Alabaster: Hey Ethan, if I looked in your empty eye socket would I be able to see the optic nerve from your other eye?

Ethan: Do you want to survive until the morning?

Al: Preferably, yes

Ethan: Then shut the fuck up and go to sleep

[ashwin-the-artless]

This morning, while making breakfast, Goreth asked me casually if I see the same colors they do.

We took a moment to experiment, by switching who was fronting, and looking through each others perception of our eyesight.

It's a trick that Sarah and Goreth have always been able to do. From what we've read online, some human systems can do it too. And some can't.

Which is pretty similar to how things are for us Ktletaccete.

Anyway, it turns out that I perceive color slightly differently from Goreth. They're more vivid when I'm fronting, and the hues are slightly shifted.

And because we'd been switching so much, we'd momentarily lost some of our faculties and were a little befuddled.

So, Goreth mused, "I wonder if that’s because Ktletaccete eyes are built differently than mine. Or, is it a visual cortex thing? Do you even have visual cortexes?"

(reminder, I'm an alien, a Ktleteccete)

I became excited by these questions and said that I wasn't sure, but that I'd love to learn more about human physiology to help figure it out. I do know some things about Ktletaccete biology, after all, since you do tend to pick things up in nearly 500 Earth years of life.

Anyway, I knew that Goreth isn't human, and is a dragon, but they were born in a human body, sharing it with Sarah, and that's what I meant by "human eyes". And Goreth nodded and told me that's what they were assuming, anyway.

I said, "It’s probably both the eyes and neurology behind them. I mean, we don’t have mitochondria, while you do, so who knows just what makes a difference?"

"Hey, dweebs," Sarah said, waking up. "You’re both using the same set of human eyes right now."

We stood there feeling foolish for several seconds.

"Here, let me front," Sarah said.

And then we switched between the three of us.

The more we switched, though, the less obvious our differences were to us, but we think we caught them before they faded. And we've since found that if we let our brain rest for a while, we can repeat the experiment and confirm the results.

Sarah and I see color almost exactly the same way. Goreth is the odd dragon out.

It seems, in our case at least, that it's a brain hemisphere thing.

Sarah and I are localized more strongly in our right hemisphere, while Goreth is in the left. We each can, probably, use the whole brain, but our locus of awareness and bulk of neurons that we each use the most are centered in one hemisphere or the other.

And there's a whole lot of evidence supporting this, including me just hopping outside of our body for a moment and just observing Sarah and Goreth.

Anyway, best we can figure is that our visual cortex sends slightly different signals to each of us, or we each interpret them differently. And it’s brain hemisphere that makes the difference.

How or why is not something any of us can figure out yet. Not even with Phage’s help.