What color are these strawberries?  Professor and visual illusionist Akiyoshi Kitaoka provides this mind-bending image. Read more about it here

by Aditi Mishra – All living beings must sense their environments. In order to do so, many of them possess sophisticated sensors (eyes being one of them) and a brain to process the stimulus gathered; humans are no different.

However, the brain is not just a command centre directing what to do next based on the stimulus gathered. It also tells us what we should pay attention to, and what we can ignore. It powerfully determines what should be attended to and what should be ignored into the background. In simpler terms, what we see is not at all objective. Our perception is driven by what our brain decides to focus on.

Here is where things get interesting. All human beings are born naïve with no understanding of the world. Culture and language are very important tools in understanding the unknown. But are they simply tools aiding exploration? Or do they bias our understanding as well? There is some evidence that language might be literally colouring our visual experiences.

How we perceive colours has baffled humans for hundreds of years. Some believe that since we are better adapted to see certain wavelengths, there must be certain colours that all of us can see (not necessarily primary colours, example: black). Another concept, Linguistic preference, says that the inherent nature of languages – their vocabulary and grammar – influence how we think and how we perceive the world. By extension, the language we speak can influence the colours we see.

Studies show that people are better at recalling colours and discriminating between colours when they speak a language that has names for the colours under consideration. The claim is that language functions as an attention directing mechanism. So, if you have a word for a colour you are more likely to remember and differentiate it. Now, to test this hypothesis we would require speakers of languages with different ways of classifying colours, and the language Berinmo spoken in New Guinea provides us with this opportunity.

In the Berinmo language colours are classified as nol (meaning live, it can be used for green, yellow, blue, and purple) and wor (meaning leaves ready to fall, encompassing khaki, brown, yellow and orange). In a study, English speakers were better at discriminating blue from green, correlating with colour boundaries in English, than Bernimo speakers, who were better at distinguishing nol from wor [example: greenish-yellow from orangish-yellow].

So what happens when we learn a new language? It seems that categorization of colours is malleable to change as people learn new languages. When in life they learn it, and how much they use each language, affects this.

In a study (Pav & Berlin-kay, 2016), monolingual Russian speakers pointed out different types of blues more often as compared to bilingual or English speakers observing the same paintings. This can be correlated with the fact that Russian has the words sinij for dark/navy blue and goluboj for light/skyblue as opposed English which simply adds modifiers like light or dark to ‘blue’.

Closer home, the Indian language Hindi doesn’t have any term for the colour grey so how would a monolingual Hindi speaker process grey?

So, it seems that the languages we speak do affect how well we perceive our colours. What does it imply? What about animals without languages with names for colours? Does language affect other senses too? There is some evidence that speakers of languages with ambiguous terms, or no terms, for left and right fare worse in spatial ability².  Since most major languages don’t encode names for smells, does that mean that language might not affect how we smell? So, a rose might look different to people speaking different languages but smell exactly the same?

 

Does a rose by any other name smell equally sweet?

 

References

Pav, T. A., & Berlin-kay, T. (2016). Communicative relevance : Color references in bilingual and trilingual speakers ∗. http://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728916000535

 

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/notrocketscience/2010/06/22/new-nicaraguan-sign-language-shows-how-language-affects-thought/#.WLZwZG-GPIU

 

 

Each Year on February 28, India celebrates “National Science Day” in honor of the Indian physicist Sir Chandrashekhara Venkata Raman who discovered the Raman Effect on 28 February 1928.

This year, Shannon had the honor to travel to Guwahati, Assam, where she discussed science with 50 local and rural schools around Assam as part of a Science Fair to celebrate National Science Day. This wonderful event was sponsored jointly by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study  in Science and Technology and Cotton College State University.

What a privilege it was to meet students from across the state and learn about their ingenious solutions for waste management, soil remediation, water treatment, pollution, and even an automatic pan maker! Bright ideas like these are exactly what this fragile and delicate world needs.  Encouraging creativity and exploration is essential to preserving the future of this planet. One very bright and well spoken student, Nakibul (pictured above), later told Shannon that he wants to be an entomologist and study insects like the NICE Group. We wish Nakibul much success, and are sure with his enthusiasm that he will succeed in anything he sets his mind to!

By Hinal Kharva – Tangled Bank is a symposium organized by the students of NCBS’ Ecology and Evolution labs.  The main agenda is to bring people from different labs together and initiate interactions to discuss our work, ideas, and problems.  This was the second edition of this symposium series. It was a wonderful experience to organize this event along with students from different labs.  Srishti and myself from the NICE lab presented our research projects, where I particularly talked about smell and host preferences in fruit flies (Rhagoletis) and Srishti talked about her recent field work on an Artemisia plantation in Devanahalli, Bangalore.  In addition to the student talks, we had two workshops and a guest lecture. Workshops were conducted by Anand Krishnan on “art of scientific study design” and by Harini Barath on “communicating science through popular media”.

The guest lecture by Prof. Anindya Sinha, from NIAS-Bangalore, was perhaps the best part of this symposium.  For the first time, I was introduced to the beautiful minds of primates (bonnet macaques) through their behavior in the natural environment.  He is one of the scientists who encourages students and provides valuable suggestions on their projects.  I had a chance to meet him and discuss my project as well as how to present scientific work.  I would like to thank Shannon for her continuous encouragement and support in such student activities.

 

Bioindicators are living organisms that respond in a specific way to variations in the environment. The hardy lichens are beneficial bioindicators of air pollution. Lichens are a successful association between a fungus and an alga, each undertaking what it does best, and thriving as an outcome of natural teamwork. They live as one organism, both occupying the same body! Fungal mycelium contributes in absorbing atmospheric moisture for algal photosynthesis and delivers protection to the alga from intense light and UV. Algae can photosynthetically produce organic matter. They live on surfaces of bark, rock, soil and several substrates. Lichens depend on atmospheric moisture, rain, fog and dew for growth and development. Lichens do not harm the substrates they are attached to. They are also sensitive to air pollution. Pollutants in the air or dissolved in atmospheric water are harmful to lichens, and they are differentially sensitive to air pollution. For example, Fruticose: The most sensitive, Foliose: The second and Crustose: The most resistant.

There are two different approaches to use lichens as bioindicators for air pollution: a. Community changes (slow response): changes in species composition at different levels of pollution. b. Physiological changes (fast response): changes in chlorophyll content and photosynthesis at various pollution levels. So, compared with most physical/chemical monitors, lichens are economical to use in measuring air pollution.