I already have one post talking about my take on the importance of perspectives, but I am writing a second piece to emphasize its importance with an example.
During my time in Europe, for about a week I was traveling with a good friend of mine called Q. We have been good friends and I really like her strong and confident personality. However, very soon into the trip I realized that I really hated to dine with her. Each time we eat together, she would comment with: this is too sweet/salty/sour/bitter etc. Even when I really enjoyed my order and I shared with her, she always had negative comments, which made my dinning experience horrible.
Fast forward to this week. Since I have a free summer before school, I decided to go sit in random lectures at UC Berkeley and learn things. A few days ago I sat in the back of a biological psychology class, and the topic that day was on “taste”. The professor pointed out that normal humans have taste buds ranging from 2000 to 10000, and that there are 3 general classifications of human tasting abilities: non-tasters, tasters and super-tasters. To demonstrate this, the professor handed us strips of papers with the same chemicals for us to taste. It turns out there are some students who tasted nothing, some could taste the sweetness, and a small portion thought it was so sweet that they needed water immediately afterwards to rinse their mouths.
That was the time when I realized Q might be one of the less common super-tasters, they have much more taste buds than the rest of us, and everything they taste is amplified. Now that I realized there is a scientific explanation to why Q always had negative comments on food, I feel bad that I secretly judged her as a really picky person. Sometimes before we make a judgement about someone, we should first try to their perspective of things, and that may include finding out the science behind why someone respond to certain things in certain ways. And this is precisely one of the reasons why I study science, to better understand why and how objects interact with each other, and to construct a better understanding of the world (maybe just a tiny part of it).
The Logical Offering 