theperceptioninceptionus-blog

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

*DUN DUN DUN* Who wants to play a game?

If you have watched at least one of the Saw movies, I am very sure you are familiar with this Jigsaw puppet and his famous line “Do you wanna play a game?” And then starts the antisocial diabolic game where your life hangs in the balance whether you win the game or not.

But that’s not we want to talk about. Notice the background music playing while Jigsaw is talking. It’s pretty hair-raising if you ask me! Just listening to it makes me feel like I’m also part of the game. The music just makes me fear for my life even more and I won’t be able to focus on the game itself! Now, try imagining Jigsaw talking without the background music. It seems less scary now does it.

Now that we have established that, try recalling all those horror and suspense movies you watched that got you scared to wits end and imagine them without the music, it kind of makes you feel less scared as well!

Now, a recent undergraduate study by Aquino and her colleagues wanted to test what are the effects of background music when you’re engaged in a certain task of finding things. (2016)

Now let me break down this infographic in layman’s terms. Basically, what the researchers did was to ask the participants to find grey circles in various slides containing cityscapes with a sunset background. The IPIP, on the other hand, is the  International Personality Item Pool, where the researchers could gauge on what side of the spectrum of neuroticism, the participant is in. Neuroticism is basically your tendency to be in a negative emotional state like your fear, anxiety, worry, envy and all that jazz. Results show that the people who were most likely to be put in this state were the people who answered more liberally and more likely to respond that they did see a grey circle even though there wasn’t (most bias). And in the group of participants where the background music was like that of horror and suspense movies, those who were resilient to being put to a negative emotional state were the ones who were more likely to detect the grey circles correctly (most sensitive)

Here we see how the people who can handle stress better, in spite of being bombarded with scary music, were able to perform better then those who were easier to be stressed out and succumb to negative emotions. Even though the music heightened their senses, this was channeled into a more focused state of looking for the grey circles. Thus, making them more alert. 

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

Sour pitches and familiar notes

What has research revealed about associations between taste and sound?   

by Kristina Cabochan

Google Image (2016).

Synesthesia describes a condition wherein sensory experiences are mixed. One type of synesthesia is letter or number and color synesthesia wherein a synesthete experiences an involuntary perception of color whenever a letter or a number is presented to her. These associations are consistent and lifelong.

But our daily experience being alive seems to suggest we may all be synesthetes in denial, as the neuroscientist Vilyanur Ramachandran once said. Think of the last time you heard your favorite song and started unconsciously dancing, smelled a scent that reminded you of someone or a special place, imagine eating potato chips without their characteristic crunch. We process the world with all our senses in synchrony, so shouldn't the synesthetic associations between different senses also exist or at least be closely resembled in nonsynesthetes? In their experiment, researchers Anne-Sylvie Crisinel and Charles Spence (2010) studied the associations between tastes, flavors, and sounds that exist in nonsynesthetes.

In their study, 34 participants were asked to taste solutions of 12 different substances. The 12 included tastes to represent the 5 basic tastes (caffeine for bitter, citric acid for sour, sucrose for sweet, sodium chloride for salt, monosodium glutamate for umami) and 7 more complex flavors (almond, coffee, lemon, orange flower, peppermint, rose, and vanilla). After tasting each substance, the participants were asked to choose a sound to match what they have just tasted. Four different instruments (piano, strings, woodwind, and brass) were used to create four scales from which participants can choose the flavor or taste's corresponding sound. The last part involved rating linear scales in terms of different properties (pleasantness, complexity, intensity, etc.) of the tastes or flavors.

Crisinel and Spence found that the sweet and sour tastes were associated with high-pitched notes, while bitter and umami were more often matched with low-pitched notes. Salty and the complex flavors did not match any sound strongly. Flavor or taste were matched to the type of musical instrument according to how pleasant and familiar they were. This confirms the link between familiarity and liking.

The associations did not seem to be arbitrary since they matched consistently, nor did the pairings seem intended because the tasters didn't know that flavors and tastes were being presented again. Knowing these associations will be good for advertisers and marketers of food products.             For you and me, however, we could use what we know about the seemingly natural and, possibly biological, tendency to match what is pleasant with what is familiar, and what is sweet or sour with higher notes and what is bitter or savory with lower notes, to enhancing our experience of food. Sit back, relax, unwind in the evening after that long hot summer day, eating your savory meat with Michael Buble's baritone crooning in the background. Don't forget to have your ice cream with Adam Levine's smooth falsetto too and revel in the joy of synesthesia.

All images from Google A.S. Crisinel, C. Spence. (2010). As bitter as a trombone: Synethetic correspondences in nonsynesthetes between tastes/flavors and musical notes. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics 72(7), 1994-2002. doi: 10.3758/APP.72.7.1994 

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

What Makes us Eat Until our Pants don’t Fit?

By Rio Aquino

Every after the clock strikes twelve during New Year’s eve, I have always made a promise to myself that this year, I would start regulating my body weight. Apparently, every year, I always fail to make progress. One day, I realized that my pants no longer fit! Have you ever experienced that before? Im telling you, it was horrible. 

However, my mom told me that instead of feeling bad about myself, why shouldn’t I start taking an action. As a person having body weight problems, I know that this is a sensitive topic. If you feel that this article might induce some negativity, then please stop reading now. But if you are curious, then please continue reading until the end, and I assure you that you would learn something.

What makes us eat until our pants don’t fit? Research suggests that there are many factors involved in obesity. Two of the major factors involved seem to be eating habits and physical activity habits. In this article, I gave focus on the food that we eat, specifically on relationships between the body weight, food intake, and taste perception. Does the “actual" taste of the food contribute to weight gain?

According to Donaldson and her coworkers, there is a link between our taste perception and obesity. particularly they reviewed the current studies about the relationship of one’s ability to taste with his/her body mass. But before getting any further, let’s get a little bit technical.

There are five basic taste sensations: sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami (which is described to be meaty and savory, and is also associated with MSG or monosodium glutamate). A threshold is the minimum amount of stimulus needed for an observer to detect that stimulus. Threshold is related with sensitivity in such a way that if you have a low threshold, you have a high sensitivity.

For example, the minimum amount of sugar needed for you detect that there is indeed a sugar is the sweet threshold. The lower the amount of sugar needed, means that more sensitive you are to sweetness. But if you need more sugar to detect sweetness, it means that you are less sensitive to sweetness.

Obese children reported to have a reduction in sweet and salt threshold, and on the other hand, there was raised sour and bitter threshold. If a person has a low sweet and salt threshold, they are more likely to increase the amount of sugar/ salt in their diet to be able to sense and perceive sweetness and sugar. As well all know, increased food intake leads to weight gain. Instead of ordering a regular sized coke, fries and pizza, they would prefer the super-sized.

Aside from having a low sweet and salty threshold, obese individuals are reported to eat significantly more savory snacks or food that contains MSG than normal-weight children. In addition, obese women were reported to have high intensities of umami perception. However, very little is known about umami, which is why further investigations are required.

Apart from the reported low thresholds that makes them increase to food intake to be able to perceive it well, researches suggest that obese individuals have an increased liking for sweet, salty-and-fatty food. This means that obese individuals may have a higher motivation to eat the food that they like, and has less motivation to stop eating especially when they are paying attention to the taste of the food. In other words, our liking to the food’s taste makes us eat until our pants don’t fit?

But how can we stop over eating? The implications of the researches on taste perception and body weight says that if we alter the taste of a food, it would largely affect the eating behavior of a person. Thus a person’s eating habit is very much involved in weigh gain. Lastly, I hope that you would use this information to improve your eating habit and your attitude towards yourself.

References

Donaldson, L. F., Bennett, L., Baic, S., & Melichar, J. K. (2009). Taste and weight: is there a link?. The American journal of clinical nutrition, 90(3), 800S-803S.

Martinez, J. A. (2000). Body-weight regulation: causes of obesity.Proceedings of the Nutrition Society, 59(03), 337-345.

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

Strawberries are red, Blueberries are blue. What do you think of your food having a different hue?

By Eileen Mae B. Sarmiento

Imagine your food having a different color from its original one. How appealing would it be to you to eat an adobo in blue color? How about your favorite pepperoni pizza in purple? Then can you imagine drinking milk in color orange? It’s hard, isn’t? It’s because we are not used to it. It is hard to associate something we were used to into something else. I also doubt you would think it tastes the same as before if this happens.

It is said that we just don’t taste with our tongue but even other modalities are involved. Visual is pretty much dominant is our taste perception of food. Isn’t that just the sight of the food, we have a “taste” of the dish already. Like when you see a perfectly creamy white pasta, you’ll go “That looks tasty!” or just a sight of a bright red soup you’ll go “Yikes! That seems so spicy”.  This natural reactions we have suggests that color of the food and drink has an effect on the succeeding experience of flavor and taste. Color brings out the expectation we have of the food (Alley & Alley, 1998). Thus, if there’s a mismatch of color to its corresponding food or beverage, possibility of misidentification of the food and even its flavor will happen. In the study of DuBose and colleagues (1980), when a cherry-flavored drink was colored orange, participants reported that it tasted orange. Color can be of an indicator of concentration especially for juice drinks. When a pineapple juice served to you is almost as colorless as the water, then perhaps you would think that it’s no longer a pure flavored pineapple juice, but rather a “pineapple flavored water”.

Speaking of fruit juices, Ndom, Elegbeleye, & Ademoroti had a research about how the color would affect the judgment fruit flavored juices if they are of incoherent to its actual color. The purchased colorless fruit juices and they themselves did the coloring using unflavored food colorings. In one of the setups, they presented an apple-colored orange drink to the participants to the experimental group, where they will first rate the quality of taste by only visualizing. After rating it, they were then asked to taste the drink, then asked again to rate the drink according to taste.

In summary of their findings, participants had a hard time identifying the quality of drink for the beverage with inappropriate color compared with the right one. Also, the appropriateness of color of the beverage affected on how they perceived the quality of product – high quality if the color is coherent to the food’s real color than that of the inappropriate.

This may explain why Heinz colored ketchup received a lot of criticisms back then and did not really last long in the market. And here, UFC, releasing the same idea, grossing the hell out of me! As a crazy-for-ketchup kind of girl, I think it insults the very appealing red color of my beloved catsup! Well, good thing, it’s not tomato ketchup, or I might really picket outside UFCs company!

But it’s not only how color gives expectation on how a food would taste. It could also happen the other way around – where the quality of flavor may affect how they perceive the color of the food or drink. This is what Wan and colleagues studied in 2014. They had participants to drink different kinds of tea while blindfolded and were asked about the first color (of the tea) that came to their minds upon tasting the drink. Generally, the results showed that participants perceived the teas mostly to be brown, followed by to be green, then yellow, and then black. These results is possibly explained by what Clydesdale (1993) said about getting used to something we have grown up with.

Aside from the color of the food itself, the color of utensils used to serve with the food also affects how one perceives taste. According to literatures, studies have shown that desserts served in a white plate perceived to be sweeter than on those served in black plates (Piqueraz-Fiszman, et al 2012; Stewart and Goss 2013), and that using blue spoon in tasting a pink yogurt makes it saltier than for white yogurt, while using black spoons make yogurts less sweet than white spoon. Tu and friends (2015) studied on how the perceived spiciness of a food may be affected by the color of the plate. They used a bean curd (which in China, bean curd is spicy) as the food to be assessed of the perceived spiciness. Results show that it is expected for the bean curd to be spicier if it is served on a red plate than the green plate and yellow plate, spicier on a yellow plate than green plate and white plate (red>yellow>green>white). The authors associated the outcomes of their study to the usual color association of food to chili peppers. Chili peppers starts to spurt with white, then becomes green, will ripe into red and to yellow – wherein ripe chili peppers bring out its spiciest flavor. In addition, the results were also associated to how spiciness makes one feel hot or warm, and the color red and yellow are of warm colors while green and white belongs to that of cool colors. Thus the results of association of red-yellow plate with very hot and green-white plate with less spicy. Well, this may be the reason why in Korea, most of their dish are served in a white plate.

Taste is not isolated by the tongue, neither it is coordinated with other senses alone such as vision. Enjoying food also involves the love and passion for it. Keep eating. Be happy!

sources:

NDOM, R. E., ELEGBELEYE, A. O., & ADEMOROTI, A. O. (2011). THE EFFECT OF COLOUR ON THE PERCEPTION OF TASTE, QUALITY AND PREFERENCE OF FRUIT FLAVOURED DRINKS. IFE Psychologia, 19(2), 167-189.

Tu, Y., Yang, Z., & Ma, C. (2016). The Taste of Plate: How the Spiciness of Food is Affected by the Color of the Plate Used to Serve It. Journal Of Sensory Studies, 31(1), 50-60. doi:10.1111/joss.12190

Wan, X., Zhou, X., Mu, B., Du, D., Velasco, C., Michel, C., & Spence, C. (2014). Crossmodal Expectations of Tea Color Based on Flavor: A Preliminary Study with Naïve Assessors. Journal Of Sensory Studies,29(4), 285-293. doi:10.1111/joss.12102

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

The Problem with Dining Out

by Kyle Lim

Research has established countless times that eating is a multi-sensory experience. While eating, we often forget that our other senses influence our perception of taste and food to great lengths. We are constantly bombarded with packaging of all shapes, colors, and sizes that quietly affects how we perceive the taste of whatever’s inside. We may perceive a certain dish to be significantly less tasty based solely on the texture of the food. In the Philippines, one’s sense of smell is so associated with the taste of food that fast food giant Jollibee’s trademark phrase is Langhap Sarap, which loosely translates to “inhaled relish or deliciousness.” And who can forget Charles Spence, the scientist who has been making groundbreaking contributions to the world of food. I find his work to be quite fascinating, especially his Sound of the Sea dish at the Fat Duck as a product of collaborating with Heston Blumenthal.

Speaking of the Fat Duck’s famous dish, one sense modality that doesn’t seem to have a clear connection to taste is hearing. Admittedly, there hasn’t been a huge pool of studies regarding the relationship between the two, so it comes as no surprise that, in 2014, Charles Spence himself conducted a review of the existing literature. The rationale behind this decision is that in recent years, people have been complaining more and more about how the background music or noise in many dining establishments is simply too loud, which disrupts the whole dining experience. In fact, according to a recent Zagat survey, noise is currently the second most widespread complaint amongst diners, with poor customer service being the first. Spence’s review has explained that restaurant noise can reach decibels of up to 90 to 102, which is beyond the level of noise generated by city traffic. It doesn’t help that plenty of restaurants are shifting to a more industrial feel interior-wise, which involves the use of bare wood, stone floors, and stripped down surfaces that all enhance the reflectance of sounds.

What’s even more worrying is that restaurant managers and owners seem to be taking advantage of this. They have realized that playing loud and fast music would compel diners to talk less and consume more simply because they wouldn’t be able to hear each other properly. As a result, restaurant-goers leave establishments quickly and make room for more, thereby allowing restaurants and bars to generate more profit. There was even a study by Guéguen and coworkers in 2008 that found a relationship between drinking more and exposure to loud background music. They followed 120 customers in two bars in France and discovered that these people ordered significantly more drinks (around 3.4 drinks, finished in 11.5 minutes) when music was 88 to 91 decibels as compared to customers who were exposed to music of 72 to 75 decibels (around 2.6 drinks, finished in 14.5 minutes).

Spence’s review looked at several studies linking background noise or music with taste or smell perception, but unfortunately, some of them yielded null results. Here are a few that did result in significant outcomes:

Ferber and Cabanac (1987) found that people described sweet sucrose solutions as more pleasant when listening to loud background noise (90 decibels) as compared to loud music (90 decibels), “quiet” music (70 decibels), or total silence.

Woods and coworkers (2011) discovered that participants rated salty foods like crisps and cheeses as less salty and sweet foods like biscuits and flapjacks as less sweet in conditions of loud background noise (75 to 85 decibels). 

Seo and coworkers (2011) saw that an audio book verbal noise at 70 decibels had a more detrimental effect on odor discrimination task performance than party noise at the same decibel level.

A research by Spence himself and his coworkers revealed that olfactory stimuli were rated to be less pleasant in the presence of white noise rather than music.

As you can see, these studies do not actually clear up the relationship between noise and taste perception due to contradictory results. I think this just reveals that more research has to be done with regard to hearing and taste perception, and that there must be several other factors that caused the studies to turn out in a particular way. Even the existing explanations for why noise affects taste perception, such as the attention/distraction account or sensation transference (which you can Google to learn more about), lack empirical evidence and are quite theoretical in nature.

Spence’s review doesn’t seem to address the relativity of noise: that sounds considered to be noise by some people don’t necessarily appear to be noise for others. This issue grows in importance when we consider various cultures around the world, such as the Philippines, where eating is usually accompanied by noise and chatter. Additionally, we can even habituate or gradually get used to background noise up to the point of tuning it out and, in effect, not allowing the noise to affect whatever it is that you’re doing. 

I think Spence’s review deviated slightly from the problem he initially described and established. He started off the article by explaining how customers have been complaining about the increasing volume of background noise in dining establishments, yet he followed up by giving us examples of studies that dealt with hearing and taste perception. While this is still related to the eating experience, I would have like to seen him focus more on the relationship between food or restaurant ratings and specific background noises in specific places. A good example of this would have to be Yan and Dando’s 2015 study that looked at how participants rated certain solutions while listening to the noise in airline cabins, which is a place where food normally gets criticized. 

In spite of the still muddled relationship between hearing and taste, I think we can take away three key learnings from Spence’s work. First, we often fail to realize that hearing does have an effect on what we taste. When we think about food, the senses of sight, taste, smell, and even touch readily come to mind. We tend to forget that audition also plays a crucial part, so we are largely unaware of the effects it has on us. Second, you can actually pay attention when it comes to taste. When we put food into our mouths, we usually perceive its flavor as something highly specific or familiar, regardless of whether or not we are attending to it. Nothing more, nothing less. Bacon will always taste like bacon, and if it’s prepared differently, then it’s going to taste like how it was prepared. But as Spence’s work revealed, that’s not always the case, and distractions like noise can actually prevent us from attending to our food and having a more pleasant gustatory experience. Lastly, noise will always be a prevalent part of dining out. Whether we like it or not, we will constantly be surrounded by chatter, conversation, and background noise whenever we go out to eat. Dining out, after all, is normally a social activity, and food indubitably tastes better when shared with a friend or two.

References:

Spence, C. (2014). Noise and its impact on the perception of food and drink. Flavour, 3(9). http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2044-7248-3-9

Yan, K. & Dando, R. (2015). A crossmodal role for audition in taste perception. Journal Of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception And Performance, 41(3), 590-596. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/xhp0000044

Sound of the Sea image from: http://www.dawn.com/news/1134295

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

Sweet, sweet, sweet victory

By Ryza Sollestre

3…2…1…

And the crowd goes wild! Your favorite team just won and the food never tasted so better! 

Cornell food scientists Noel and Rando examined how emotions from the outcome of college hockey games influenced the perception of sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami taste to hedonic responses to food served after.

In their study, the fans were given a salted-caramel pretzel ice cream and lime-lemon sorbet.  The salted-caramel pretzel ice cream was rated more pleasant than the lime-lemon sorbet, which is a mix of a sweet and sour flavor. But when their team won, the lime-lemon sorbet obtained higher hedonic ratings. The positive state enhanced the sweet taste and diminished the sour flavor of the sorbet. So when the team wins, the less-favorable food was enjoyed as well. The opposite also follows. When the home team loses, the sorbet was perceived to be sourer and less sweet, thus low hedonic ratings. The wins or losses of the team did not affect the salty, bitter, and umami taste on the other hand. 

The researchers linked their findings to emotional eating, or overeating to relieve negative emotions. Since less-favorable food becomes more unappealing to our palate when we experience negative emotions, we reach for more hedonistic choices, most are unhealthy food. 

This could be the reason why you reach and crave for a gallon of ice cream, not just when the team you are rooting for loses but also when you are heartbroken, or why you fill your stomach with chips and chocolates in stressful situations.

The study was quite impressive in a way that they make use of a real-life manipulation than being confined in the laboratory. The results could be therefore assumed to parallel real life settings—that a pleasant or unpleasant event could influence our perception. 

So we’ve learned that taste perception is multimodal, meaning the taste of food can be influenced by our sense of sight, hearing, olfaction, and touch. Our experience is not limited to the ingredients used or the quality of food but interestingly, even our emotions could affect the taste of the food we eat. Our taste perception, therefore, is a mix of bottom-up and top-down processing.  This just shows how rich and complex our experience of how we perceive taste or flavor. With this, we should appreciate, savor, and relish the food we eat more, because it’s not just a plate of meal to fill your hungry stomach, but it is surely an experience making use of all your senses.

Cornell University. (2015, July 9). Is defeat sweeter than victory? Researchers reveal the science behind emotional eating. ScienceDaily. Retrieved May 13, 2016 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/07/150709093313.htm Noel, C., & Dando, R. (2015). The effect of emotional state on taste perception [Abstract]. Appetite, 95, 89-95. doi:10.1016/j.appet.2015.06.003

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.

José Ortega y Gasset

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

"Get up offa that thing and dance till you feel better!"

Music, rhythm, and movement--why does rhythm move us?

by Kristina Cabochan

If you've ever watched James Brown in a grainy video of one of his classic performances, you cannot mistake the funk oozing out of his every pore, moving his feet and his whole body to crazy rhythms in perfect synchrony with the music he is making. There is just something about rhythm that moves our feet, literally.

James Brown. Live in Hamburg (1973) Google Images. Wikipedia

The research on musicians and their enhanced perceptual and cognitive skills as a result of their experience training with musical instruments has been abundant in the field of psychology. However, when Butler and Trainor set out to study musicians, they did so on a rebellious note. They wanted to see whether Professional Club DJs could exhibit the same kind of enhanced perceptual ability of rhythms that more traditional, classically trained percussionists develop through experience. In their study, they wanted to expand the scope of what we define as "musician" through two systematic, well-designed experiments

Their first experiment was to test how well the participants can retain an internal representation, or a memory, of a rhythm sequence. This accuracy of their internal rhythm memory was tested through their identification of a single beat that will be presented after a few milliseconds of silence as "on-beat" or "too early".

Mona Tavakoli. Percussionist. Raining Jane. Google Images.

This first experiment involved three sets ten of participants. The first set included 10 club DJs who has been DJ-ing for around 12 or so number of years. They matched this set of DJs with another 10 percussionists who have been playing and training on their instruments for around the same number of years. And the last set, the control, was matched in terms of age to the other groups.

The results show that the Club DJs performed similarly to the percussionists, who both performed better than their age-matched controls at detecting whether the beat was on time or not. What makes the results in the first experiment even more exciting is how some participants were allowed to move provided they don't make a sound, to keep time with the rhythm, while some participants were not allowed to move aside from making their responses. And what Butler and Trainor found was that allowing the participants to move improved the performance of all the participants across all the three groups.

Club DJ. Google Images.

However, despite these encouraging results, Butler and Trainor wanted to cross out the possibility that the Club DJs and the percussionists performed better because of a pre-musical training enhanced rhythmic ability. That's why in the second experiment they had the help of Craig Brooklyn from Scratchlab Toronto train half of their new set of participants with the kind of training that DJs engage in, while half of the participants had none. They took pre-tests before and post-tests after the period of training or non-training using the same method to test rhythmic ability in the first experiment and found that those who received DJ musical training showed significant improvements in their performance compared to those who had no training.

These results are exciting because they show how movement is intricately linked with how we make and perceive rhythm as human beings. Entrainment, or the ability to physically synchronize with a rhythm involves creating an internal representation of a rhythm. It is the foundation of James Brown's dancing--and all forms of dancing, including your spontaneous bursts of dancing when you hear your favorite song, to unconscious silly foot-tapping or head-banging we humans like to engage in. And for those of us who consider ourselves musicians in our own right, the results of this study are particularly encouraging because it has dared to expand the definition of what makes a musician and has clearly succeeded at finding new frontiers for research and expanding previously set limitations. Anyone can move with as much funk as James Brown! Butler, B. E., & Trainor, L. J. (2015). The Musician Redefined: A Behavioral Assessment of Rhythm Perception in Professional Club DJs. Timing & Time Perception, 3(1-2), 116-132. doi:10.1163/22134468-03002041

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

AWKWARD SILENCE? Not in Music (sometimes)

By Ryza Sollestre

Close your eyes. You could probably hear the air from your fan on its full power in a helpless effort to beat the heat, or your phone ringing as notifications from your social media sites keep on coming, or your mother nagging because you left the dishes unwashed. 

We live in a world full of noise, filling sounds in the background.

But remember when your professor asks a question and no one asks from the class? Total silence. Or even when you talk to an acquaintance, losing words and topics to talk to?

We are uncomfortable in silence but probably, not in terms of music. A research by music theorist, Elizabeth Hellmuth Margulis, tells us that the silence in music is not really silent at all.

In her study, she revealed that context guides listening. Participants without musical training were selected to participate in her experiment wherein they were asked to listen to musical excerpts-- one from commercially available recordings and another with carefully measured and controlled silences. The findings show that they were “highly sensitive to the subtleties of silence in its musical context” and that the same acoustic silence embedded in different musical surroundings produced different perceived silence. For example, the silence before the music starts is hardly the same when it ended. Even two silences with the same duration in different musical contexts seem like they carry different amounts of musical tension and different lengths, Margulis found.

She also pointed out how this parallels silence in speech. The duration of pause could indicate the gravity of the segment and how our expectations follow.

It’s fascinating how silence conveys something even when nothing is heard.

This is more evident and applied in films. In the video below, the silence in Scorsese’s movies was explored and how effective and powerful it is when used in important segments of his films.

Music in films helps to build up the scene and set its tone. It helps for emotions to be fully expressed but amazingly, silence can do it as well. This tells us that hearing is not just a bottom-up process, but also a top-down process. The context and our expectations help us shape and process the sound-- or the silence we hear.

In the end, with our ears attuned to continually hear noise and sound, may we truly learn to listen and appreciate silence and the “sound” it brings.

Margulis, E. H.. (2007). Moved by Nothing: Listening to Musical Silence. Journal of Music Theory,51(2), 245–276. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40283130

University of Arkansas, Fayetteville. (2007, June 24). Exploring The Sounds Of Silence. ScienceDaily. Retrieved April 17, 2016 from www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070622180242.htm

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

MUSIC, MY MOOD, AND EYE?

by Eileen Sarmiento

MUSIC IS LIFE.

               You must have heard this from other people. Well, it must be really it, as music is there any time and everywhere! You may have accessed it through CDs, radios, streaming – it doesn’t matter. You can just hear your jam in a public transportation, in the four corners of your room, and from the earphones connected to you gadget while crossing a street.

               Music’s purpose is not only to entertain and be part of the industry for profit. But again, as they say that music is life, indeed it is part of one’s life in many aspect.

               Feelings – music are said to arouse positive sentiments and pleasure, and even other various feelings from everyday happenings to non-normative ones. Just notice how upbeat music gets you hyped, and ballads or other slow music makes you sentimental at times. Imagine that you are listening to Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Call Me Maybe” for the first time (disregard habituation please), and the beat and rhythm and perhaps the repetitive lyrics of the chorus just keep you dancing to the beat and feels good. On the other hand, hearing Yiruma’s “Kiss the Rain” during a sensitive movie scene, or perhaps just the song alone, makes you want to cry.

               In one study, music was used to stimulate mood and then these people were asked to do an emotion-face-signal-search task. Mood are said to affect processing focus, wherein negative mood is for local processing, and positive mood is for global processing. At the same time, mood also is said to affect the processing emotional visual stimuli and people have this bias on negative emotions, called negativity bias. But this is counter affected by listening to a positive emotions. The result stated that they have easily detected the visual stimuli that is congruent to their moods. Music then have said to have affected visual processing.

               But not only music affects mood emotions, but as well as to one’s identity. Music is believed to encourage and inspire people. Just for example the way you listen to the music you like while studying – it might bring you to good mood thus keeping you motivated (alive and awake together with your KOPIKO 78 degrees) or even just listening to your favourite band, as if they are serenading you. Thinking about it and listening to their music makes you feel beautiful, right? But more than that, many songs nowadays are for self-empowerment, songs that talks being strong, wonderful, confident, overcoming obstacles, positive projection of self and such. This trend of genre is called the “selfie-pop” and singers like Lady Gaga (“Born This Way”), Katy Perry (“Firework”), and Selena Gomez (“Who Says”) have released such pop songs.

So how about listening to positive-affect inducing music and these “selfie-pop” songs while studying? Yes? Then maybe you should be positive in taking you exams and at the same time you would feel you can conquer your exams with UNO! SELF-EFFICACY, PEOPLE! But then again, music alone won’t save you. You must still study hard, be mentally healthy, have a good balance of positive and negative emotions and moods, and BE THE BEST YOU CAN BE!

References: 

Elvers, P. (2016). Songs for the Ego: Theorizing Musical Self-Enhancement. Frontiers In Psychology, 1-11. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00002

Jolij, J., & Meurs, M. (2011). Music Alters Visual Perception. Plos ONE, 6(4), 1-5. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0018861

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

The Science of Being Perfect Pitched

By Rio Aquino

Walking home, waiting in line, or even taking a shower, some people just love to sing whenever or wherever they are! But among all of the people who loves to sing, there are some who can hit every single note even without a minus one. Most popularly, these people are called Perfect Pitched. Aren’t they amazing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OoJw_hhnZCo

Hopefully by the end of this article, you would be able to appreciate these people more. In addition, you would also be able to learn about the science behind pitch perception. But before anything else, it’s important that we get acquainted with some terms. First and foremost, what is a pitch?

The pitch is the highness and lowness of a sound. For example, the sound of a violin is most commonly considered as a high-pitched instrument while the sound of the double bass is considered as a low-pitched instrument. Your mom’s voice may have a higher pitch compared to your dad’s voice. Furthermore, technically speaking, pitch is related to the frequency of a sound wave. The higher the pitch, the higher the frequency, and the lower the pitch, the lower the frequency. On the other hand, one way to describe pitch is though notes and a scale. These pitches are represented in a musical scales through the position of notes on the staff.

According to research, people who are Perfect Pitched refer to Absolute Pitch Processors. They have the capacity to sing a certain pitch without any reference tone. Example, if you ask them to sing a C#, they can! Also, aside from pitch production, they can also easily identify isolated tones. Those who are not Absolute Pitch processors really find it difficult to do all of those. To give you an example of an Absolute Pitch processor, watch the video of Dylan.

Absolute pitch has been explored by many researchers. There have been many arguments as to whether being a perfect pitch is a rare, special gift, even among musicians or is it learned through music training? According to Takeuchi  and Hulse, absolute pitch can be learned by anyone but only during a short period of time, up to about six years old. However, being an absolute pitch processor is still a rare skill and has been estimated to happen at least 0.1% of the general population. People who are perfect pitch say that they can identify pitches easily, immediately, and effortlessly. According to Levitin, absolute pitch processors have two distinct component abilities: (1) pitch memory - the ability to encode, store pitch representations for a long period of time and retrieve it whenever needed, and (2), pitch labeling - the ability to put a meaningful label on pitches such as Do sharp or C#.

The question is, how does being perfect pitched become so desirable and amazing? So what if they can perceive pitches better than the rest of us? Well, in my opinion, I honestly believe that being an absolute pitch processor is something to die for. As a musician myself, (I have been playing the piano since I was in the 2nd grade, sang and conducted a chorale since I was in high school, and I took a formal training in playing the violin), pitch perception is something that is not easy. Most especially as a violin player, it takes a lot of practice everyday just to produce the accurate pitch in the violin (fyi: the violin had no frets, therefore it’s difficult to play the desired pitch without memorizing the tone and the corresponding location of you finger on the the fingerboard).

But knowing that you are not an absolute pitch processor, does that mean that you have no chance of being extremely good at perceiving pitches? According to Levitin, there is an evidence to support that everyone (even non musicians) have some extent of being a perfect pitch. In addition, he says that being an absolute pitch processor is not a mysterious ability or an unusual music endowment, rather being pitch perfect is just another form of a memory ability that are distributed over a large number of people. Nevertheless, even when you are absolute pitch processor or not, as long as you love music, and you are ready to endure long hours of practice to improve your pitch perception, you can still become a promising musician.

References

Levitin, D. J. (1994) Absolute memory for musical pitch: Evidence from the production of learned melodies Perception & Psychophysics, 56 (4), 414-423.

Miyazaki, K. I. (1988). Musical pitch identification by absolute pitch possessors. Perception & psychophysics, 44(6), 501-512.

Takeuchi, A. H., & Hulse, S. H. (1993). Absolute pitch. Psychological bulletin,113(2), 345.

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

I Got Chills, They’re Multiplying

by Kyle Lim

It's been a long day. After repeatedly fighting the effects of yesterday's all-nighter, furiously taking down notes, and answering exams with everything you know, it's finally time to head home. With a long commute ahead, you put on your favorite song and hope that it helps you forget about today's troubles.

The first few strums of the guitar automatically put you in a relaxed state. The singer's voice creeps in with the subtle beats of the hi-hats as you hum along to his voice. Slowly, the other instruments enter and take the stage, culminating in a wondrous expression of human creativity. As the music envelops you in its rhythmic patterns, the world around you seemingly deconstructs into strokes of color, and movements align themselves with the beat of the music. It's as if you are transported to a different and unfamiliar place where everything is much more beautiful. Goosebumps.

Music as an aesthetic experience seems to have its fair share of effects on us. Songs can make us feel on top of the world, yet they can also reduce us into sniveling messes. Indeed, music has even been established as a form of therapy for those suffering from emotional or cognitive problems. Music allows us to sing, dance, communicate, love, and forget.

Perhaps one such effect that we are not quite aware of is the chill effect, which comes in the form of goosebumps, hair-raising sensations, or shivers down the spine. Despite its possible unfamiliarity among laypeople, several studies examining the effects of factors like lyrics, melodies, emotional priming, music meaningfulness, personality traits, and music structure on these aesthetic chills already exist, which indicate their prominence in the research world.

One interesting 2013 study by researchers Emily Nusbaum, Paul Silvia, Roger Beaty, Chris Burgin, Donald Hodges, and Thomas Kwapil sets itself apart from the rest by examining aesthetic chills in everyday music listening instead of the typical laboratory setting. The researchers also utilized an unusual method called experience sampling, which captures people's varying thoughts, behaviors, and feelings as they go through day-to-day living. In this study, experience sampling was conducted by installing a type of software in participants' phones that would randomly ask them several questions multiple times per day.

After seven days of surveying 106 college students from the University of North Carolina, the researchers discovered that the students were listening to music 22% of the time, and around 81% of the sample reported experiencing at least one aesthetic chill while listening to music during the whole data collection period. Additionally, the students were significantly more likely to experience chills when they chose the music, when they were listening to it closely, when they felt happy, and when they felt sad. Strangely enough, listening to music that held a special meaning for the students was only slightly associated with experiencing chills.

I think the biggest problem of this study was the subjectivity of self-report data. While the experiment's results may be more true to life than results obtained in a laboratory setting, participants could have just easily changed the way they responded to the surveys based on their own expectations and ideas of how the experiment should pan out. Although, I cannot think of a reason as to why the participants would lie about their feelings in the first place. I don't think there was any cause for them to alter their responses, especially with something as beloved as music.

Nevertheless, the results of the study appear to indicate that aesthetic chills are largely a result of our own choices. When we choose what to listen to or when we pay more attention to the song, we are more likely to experience chills. In the same way, when we choose to listen to happy or sad songs, we are more likely to get the same 'chilling' experience. Having control over how we want music to affect us is quite a fascinating finding, and I think it further emphasizes music's role in therapy and how choosing the most appropriate music can bring about specific responses in people.

In spite of this study and others that came before it, we still have little to no clue as to why we experience aesthetic chills. Likewise, the research brings up several questions: would different music genres have an effect on the experience of chills? What about changing the elements of music, such as the beat or tempo? Would a musician experience more chills than the average person? How much of the aesthetic experience relies on our perception of music? Personally, aesthetic chills seem to be random, automatic responses of the human body to something pleasurable like music. As opposed to conscious and deliberate processing, our minds also process information unconsciously and involuntarily, and I see aesthetic chills as a result of this process. We may be able to choose the music that gives us chills, but I believe that how our bodies respond to it is chiefly spontaneous. As Oliver Sacks once said, responsiveness to music is intrinsic to our makeup.

The chill effect provides us with a glimpse of the aesthetic experience. While I appreciate all the efforts to better comprehend it, part of me wants us to just look at it as it is: a physical manifestation of the pleasure derived from listening to music. After all, it's one of the things that gives humanity charm and mystery and puts a well-deserved premium on the music experience.

To end, here’s a video of 12-year old Beau Dermott in Britain’s Got Talent that will surely give you the aesthetic chills:

Reference: Nusbaum, E., Silvia, P., Beaty, R., Burgin, C., Hodges, D., & Kwapil, T. (2014). Listening between the notes: aesthetic chills in everyday music listening. Psychology Of Aesthetics, Creativity, And The Arts, 8(1), 104-109. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0034867

Image from: http://www.lgbthealth.org.uk/annual-feedback-survey-open-win-40-of-vouchers-for-waterstones/

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

COLORS IN MY NOTES ARE COLORS IN MY MEMORY by Eileen Sarmiento

Hell week never stops. It doesn’t matter anymore whether it is mid-term week or finals week, as professors nowadays love to give their students tons of exams. Given your black and white handouts, one cannot expect to be fully focused to the readings given and at the same time can’t absorb every word there is. Hence, and during these days, part of your BFF lists are you colored highlighters and pens. What colors do you use?

Nope, highlighting and doodling notes using colored pens is not just for fun. According to the Von Restroff effect or isolation effect, the perceptually most noticeable items enhances memory as they are the ones likely to be remembered. Thus the existence of good use of your “coloring” materials that resulted from your impulsive buying in a stationary store.

In highlighters, it is very common to see a student using a fluorescent yellow kind of color. It is not just because of the norm. Warm colors are said to stimulating to the brain, and yellow is the most effective on that as it helps in remembering. Orange color is said to be alluring. Cool colors, on the other hand, are said to keep you calm. Use blue to something very difficult and green if you want things to even out as it relaxes your eyes. It is rare for people to use red and purple highlighter as they would have a bad contrast with texts (which are usually black), but the former is said to call attention for something important or not right, while the latter makes you a “freedom of expression” (meaning it can mean anything).

So I say, when reviewing notes, ALWAYS use the yellow highlighter to ANY subject (or perhaps all subjects?) and the orange one for your not-so-fun readings to keep you out of boredom. I suggest you use blue for relatively complicated subjects such as Science (eg Bio 11, 12, 102; Chem 31) and perhaps in reviewing for the exam of Perception Psychology under Sir D (Hahaha) and green, if reading tires you out easily. Use red if you’re reviewing for the things you had a lot of mistakes before, and purple if you just want to chill or won’t give a damn anymore but still cares to highlight just in case you would want to remember later.

Perhaps some people use only one color of highlighter to their notes. Nope, they are not cheapstakes in buying more colors of highlighter (or maybe, they are? Hehe). But possibly it’s because that’s how they could effectively review as it was said that color repetition increases memory for its elements. This phenomenon is called color-sharing. Repetition is one of the principle of learnings wherein we maintain information through rehearsal; just for example is the conditioning – on how through it we learn (may it be an observable behavior or knowledge). Same goes to the same use of only one color of highlighter as it was said that this repetition catches attention and gives emphasis, as in one study by Morey and colleagues (2015), their participants tended to have a stare longer to duplicate colors during the presentation of stimuli.

But don’t worry people who are shopaholic to highlighters and coloring pens! You are also learning! Nope, you are not just showing off your extravagance to stationary items. As previously mentioned, if repetition grabs attention, it can also possibly inhibits the awareness. In the same aforementioned, it was noted that as a result of the inhibition, people tended to attend to more non-repetitive and distinctive colors during a retention interval.

So perhaps instead of using one color per reading material per subject, how about using all in one notes? Well, I actually do that. I use pink to keep in mind the important terms, (Pink is at the relative hue of red, so it is relevant to the abovementioned purpose (?) of red). I use green for the overwhelming definition of those terms, and yellow for dates and names as I easily forget those kinds of figures and facts. But in take note of using different colors in one review materials.

One pedagogy developer suggested things that to improve memory performance, color combinations and schemes are to be followed.

1. In highlighting the difference of things, use complementary or opposite colors. This is good when studying different theories about the same issue. For example, comparing Carl Jung’s and Alfred Adler’s personality theories that differs from that of Freud’s. Perhaps a purple for Jung and a yellow for Adler.

2. When we want to make one stand out, analogous makes the harmony. This perhaps will work well with studying History - emphasis on the EVENT using a dark green, a lighter green for the date, and the lightest one for the people involved.

3.  For facts of the same group, monochromatic is the best option. In a quite messed up notes, you could use the same hue with different shades to group them together. This goes best in coding a transcription of research interviews.

Background color is also a good thing to consider with study materials. In one study, using white background resulted to higher retention rates as compared to slides with blue and green. It was also suggested by the pedagogy developer the use of a light background for readability. In a related study, the higher the contrast of the background and text, the higher the readability. As a result, readability performance was highest on the black on white background compared among others -  white on black background, light blue on dark blue background and teal on black background.

Indeed, colors add fun to our lives. And for this matter, may add fun on our studies too, as colors can help boost our learning strategies and memory. But let’s not just go after on how we can color our notes. In getting good results in, DON’T JUST HIGHLIGHT AND USE COLORED PENS, MAKE EFFORT. STUDYING HARD AND UNDERSTANDING WELL YOUR LEARNING MATERIALS WOULD STILL HELP YOU BEST ♥

Sources:

Morey, C. C., Cong, Y., Zheng, Y., Price, M., & Morey, R. D. (2015). The color-sharing bonus: Roles of perceptual organization and attentive processes in visual working memory.Archives Of Scientific Psychology, 3(1), 18-29. doi:10.1037/arc0000014

Dzulkifli, M.A. and Mustafar, M.F. The influence of color on memory performance: A Review. Available from http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3743993/ (17.12.2013)

https://blog.edynco.com/instructional-design/how-colors-can-enhance-memory-performance/

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

Shapely Colors: are our associations between certain colors and shapes natural or just made up?

by Kristina Cabochan You may remember playing with blocks with different letters and colors, or toys made of different shapes that you had to match and fit inside holes shaped in the same way as a young child. Colors are everywhere and so are shapes, but colors, after all, are only different wavelengths of light that carry no intrinsic color, but which, once interpreted by our brains, we perceive as different colors.

Kandinsky's Color Study. Squares with Concentric Circles (1913)

An abstract artist named Kadinsky once claimed that there are certain shapes that we associate with certain colors: circles are blue, squares are red, and triangles are yellow. But are these associations just an artistic preference, or do colors and shapes have a more basic connection that is biologically wired in us?

In 2013, Albertazzi and her colleagues searched for the natural associations between colors and shapes in a group of Italian participants. They found evidence suggesting that the "heat of colors" and the "natural lightness of colors" may explain why triangles were found to be associated with yellow and circles and squares were associated with red in their study.

Yellow-Red-Blue (1925). Kandinsky In 2014, Na Chen and colleagues in the University of Tokyo decided to see whether the associations between color and shape that Albertazzi and her colleagues found in their study will be confirmed in a group of Japanese college students.

The Japanese group was found to have the same tendency to associate colors to shapes that the Italians did, which indicates that these color-shape associations aren't merely preferences. In fact, the color-shape associations we have may be universal, which means they are independent of the culture and language we grew up learning. Semantics--the meanings we attribute to colors and shapes, may help explain the color-shape associations we all seem to have. For example, we describe some colors as warm and others cold, while some shapes are hard and still others we classify as soft. In both Albertazzi and Na Chen's studies, they found warmth as the semantic association that is strongest between certain colors and shapes.

In addition to the congruency they found with the Albertazzi and colleagues' study with Italians, Na Chen and colleagues also found that shapes with curved lines like circles and ovals were more frequently associated with red, orange and yellow; shapes like triangles, pyramids, rhombi and cones which all have sharp apex angles were more often associated with yellow; and hexagons and trapezoids, straight-lined shapes that were more square-like, were more often matched with blue. Kandinsky was neither Italian nor Japanese, but he also thought triangles were yellow. However, he did have a little bit of confusion between squares being red and circles being blue. Since Kandinsky was not a psychologist, we can forgive him for his little blunder. But let's also take these findings with a grain of salt because even though the associations between color and shape were found to be similar across culture, and statistically significant, these associations aren't absolute, and there are some who may disagree with the associations of the majority, like Kandinsky.

Kandinsky (1902) Bei Starnberg - Winter

Exactly what the color-shape associations reveal about the human brain and perception are not exactly clear yet, but these initial findings we have discovered about the connections in our mind between colors and properties of objects in our world do show how much we still cannot properly explain. Albertazzi and Na Chen's findings may be applied in art, marketing, advertising, design, and perhaps even architecture. But in the world of psychology, their findings tie in with the curious phenomenon called synesthesia wherein colors may be seen with musical tones, or experienced with certain letters or numbers. However, what's interesting about the color-shape associations are that they seem to exist even for nonsynesthetic participants.  There is still a lot to be learned about the colors we see in our world and how they affect us. Shapes may be just one of the many properties of objects in our environment that we associate with colors. But one thing for sure is that colors sure make the world a fantastic place to live in.

Main reference: Chen, N., Tanaka, K., Matsuyoshi, D., & Watanabe, K. (2015). Associations between color and shape in Japanese observers. Psychology Of Aesthetics, Creativity, And The Arts, 9(1), 101-110. doi:10.1037/a0038056

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

A Whole New World: When Bilinguals Perceive Color Differently

By Ryza Sollestre

Bilinguals are up to a magic carpet ride as they see “a whole new world” compared to monolingual speakers. What sorcery is this!? 

Panos Athanasopoulos of Newcastle University studied Japanese bilingual speakers. They found that Japanese monolingual speakers discriminated more between light and dark blue colors than English speakers. In line with this, Japanese bilingual speakers who use Japanese more frequently than English also distinguish blue and light blue colors more. This was attributed to the fact that Japanese language holds basic and different words for light blue (mizuiro) and dark blue (ao), unlike in English where it’s just blue-- and descriptive words are just added to it to differentiate its different shades (eg. sky, cyan, dark).

As a bilingual speaker, I don’t know how would I fare in this experiment since both of the languages I know just hold one term for blue. In Filipino, any blues would fall under the term bughaw or asul, as far as I know. 

This tells us that the color we see, the world even, may not be the same as others perceive it.

Linguistic relativity or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis tells us that an individual’s language affects his/her cognition. Thought varies with language. We pay more attention to the things around us that is encoded in our “word bank” than to those that are not.

So, without a word for it, can you perceive something you don’t know or identify?

I found this video online (https://www.facebook.com/techinsider/videos/481949642003397/) that shows Ancient people not knowing blue until the present times.Language historian shows that the Egyptians were the first ones to have the word blue and were also the ones who produced blue dye. Could it be possible that since they produced the blue dye, they were able to perceive the color blue and differentiate it with other colors? People can identify it once they coin a term for it. This doesn’t mean that they don’t see the color blue or that the color blue wasn’t present before, it’s just that, as the video presented, without the word for the color, it is much harder for us to see the distinction.

Colors perception lies on light that enters our eyes and how it is perceived and processed by our brain. It doesn’t mean that the sky is really blue or the sea is really blue. It just appears to be blue because the wiring in our brain tells us that it is. And since it’s all in our brains, memory, language and other factors pitch in to the perceptual process. Therefore the saying “kinukulayan ng ating pag-iisip” must be true in some way.

Language, therefore, doesn’t just open our eyes to culture but literally to a way of perceiving things around us, seeing the world in a different “light” than other speakers. 

References:

Athanasopoulos, P., Damjanovic, L., Krajciova, A., & Sasaki, M. (2010). Representation of colour concepts in bilingual cognition: The case of Japanese blues. Bilingualism Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 14(01), 9-17. doi:10.1017/s1366728909990046

Do you see what I see? (2011, August 08). Retrieved April 03, 2016, from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14421303

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

Color is a construction of the nervous system. ...light rays are simply energy, so there is nothing intrinsically 'blue' about short wavelengths or 'red' about long wavelengths...we perceive color because of the way our nervous system responds to this energy.

E. Bruce Goldstein, Sensation and Perception

[theperceptioninceptionus-blog]

You may have already wondered about the true nature of color. As a kid, many of us may have experienced wondering why we see red, or blue, or green. You may have had a favorite color too. But what is color, really?  In this short 4 minute video, Dianna Cowern, the woman behind Physics Girl on YouTube, explains how color has multiple identities as a wavelength of light, a reflection, a signal, and a perception.