Tuesday, May 16, 2006

Perception

I remember one night I was talking to my mom outside on my cell phone, and I noticed the moon. It was huge and yellow, and I was commenting to my mom how cool it looked. I was in a different state, only about six hours drive from where my mom was, but the moon was out in both places, so she went outside to look at it. She told me the moon she was looking at was small and white like it often is and looked normal to her. And here I was seeing this yellow, larger-than-life moon that was extremely impressive to me. I always thought it was so odd that we were looking at the exact same object at the same moment, but were seeing completely different things because of where we were, the lighting conditions, the weather conditions, the area we were in, etc. But the object itself was still the same object; it just looked different because of our perception of it. The moon was still the same moon. It hadn't changed its chemistry or anything. And yet we were seeing two very different things. I just always thought that was unusual.

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