Psychological Study | The Himba Tribe & Perception | Mufti Abu Layth

all right so people how do we see the world now there's some things i wanted to just highlight and just um just present once again and i love speaking about this and it's nested in the conversation on consciousness because consciousness is something that we have no idea what it means to be aware of something like we right so we have some right so we have some we have experiential um [Music] we have

an experience that we can bring so i know what it means to be aware you know what it means to be away to be conscious but there's no way of being able to somehow even map what that feels like there's no actual because consciousness is just so the whole thing is evasive and everything you know consciousness by the way because our conscious thought thought is nested in unconscious thought most of thought is unconscious now this was something that you know

many years ago scientists weren't actually that familiar with they thought maybe some thought was conscious but most of thought is actually unconscious so it's subconscious it's below our conscious kind of so imagine conscious our our kind of our being conscious and i don't mean by that just so like we're as in not being fainted as if somebody has fainted and somebody is conscious i don't mean in that sense consciousness is linked into many things so it's linked into like memory it's linked into attention awareness

uh a unity of consciousness that you know a sense of self all of these things amongst other things there's like a neural binding in the brain that's kind of collectively presenting these things in consciousness and then most of what's happening is underwater and it's only the tip of the iceberg that is our conscious thought but our conscious thought is emerging from us subconscious or unconscious thought so what the hell is going on here and it's crazy so when you think about these things and just to give you an idea

because this the discourse at hand that i'm that i want to speak about is truth because what is truth that's the kind of discourse because and and these are just kind of things feeding into that so imagination so something we now know is that imagination from the the mind brain perspective the brain perspective as well is now we actually know is in many ways indistinguishable

from physicality or physical realities so let me give you an example i see this right now so there's certain parts in my brain in the visual cortex that are lighting up so we've got these neural correlates that are lighting up so let's say i can see an image there or i can see this book over here there's certain parts uh that are lighting up in my brain now let's say i wasn't looking at a book or i wasn't and i start imagining that book whether i daydream it or whether i close my eyes and see it or whether i just imagine it

the same parts that would light up when i see will still light up and let me add to that if i imagine myself walking the same parts of my brain that would be that would go active when i'm walking would go active will go active but the only difference is my brain will be inhibiting certain sensory motor uh you know cortex responses so it's kind of blocking so it's like the same thing it's like the accelerator is pressed it is in gear but you have also pressed the brake

it's not that there's no gear and there's no acceleration there is so you that's what the brain is doing so in many ways imagination is on is quite indistinguishable from what we're calling real as far as the brain is concerned okay so we have to so so let's just let that settle as a thought now the other thing is qualia okay qualia is like like the kind of qualities of things that are subjectively experienced like

let's say taste smell color sound now we can scientifically through neuroimaging and stuff we can see neural correlates so let's say when a person sees something a certain part of the brain fires up so we can have a kind of map of this is happening but what does it feel like to experience the color red what does it feel like to to eat an apple there is no way to even begin at this

stage in explaining that that's honestly quite phenomenal when you think about it so this is all feeding into i wanted to share something that in light of that there was a study now some people had uh had some follow-up questions to it nevertheless i thought it's interesting uh to share right so all right so now this as you can see um there was uh um there was a researcher davidoff who'd

conducted some research with a tribe the the himba tribe in namibia now this was on color now what they were researching was people who right what they were researching was people who don't have

people who don't have certain words for a for a color now sorry let me get that right let me just pause that for a moment a lot of research into color has argued that there's certain colors that develop in a certain order and they seem to be pretty much universal throughout the world so let's say if there's a culture that has no words for color it will definitely have a color the the words for black and white because the as a binary day and night

and darkness and light and it will still have black and white and it may list all the other colors into them if they have a third color that third color will always be red so if let's say cultures and subcultures where they are restricted for words to describe colors if they have none and they just have the very like none whatsoever they will they will still have black and white and if they had a third only that third will almost always be red and if they had a fourth

it would be yellow and then green and then blue so this is almost universal there's some exceptions but this is how they see this evolving in cultures certain kind of uh studies anthropological studies on that so okay now so some researchers had kind of explored that what if you didn't have a word a name for a color like many cultures they mix certain colors together so do you still see the color now this sounds like a bizarre

question okay so if you think to yourself well that doesn't make much sense but of course you see it now it's not actually that obvious you see so what what so what was done was some an experiment was done with the himba tribe where they got these people who don't have they have a different coloring system and they didn't distinguish between certain colors and one of the colors they didn't distinguish was between green and blue

but they did have a lot more names for different shades of green which let's say in english we don't generally or the comment you know it's not uh common uh parlance that people common speak that people use so many maybe nowadays people use you know certain but the common person may not be up to speed with them so they may just think green whereas let's say if you saw pink you won't think red you won't think light red you'd think pink but there were certain cultures like let's say the arabic culture if you went

back arabic language didn't have a didn't have the color pink many colors didn't this kind of evolved later on so with this tribe coming back here they tested them so in this experiment what they did was they put um as you can see all these green squares and one of them had a slightly different shade so now for westerners that was uh quite difficult to kind of distinguish so people had to kind of keep looking

and they had to kind of check well what which one is it now it's so you can see one so there's two green things one with the blue and then the other one just green and it is the same way you find the blue square on the other side where you find that same green is apparently a subtly lighter shade okay so okay now when they had these people from the himba tribe uh take this test and they asked them that which one of the green is the odd one out they very quickly could tell very quickly and we

actually would really struggle because they saw that green as a different color and they could pick it out almost straight away now what's interesting is when they ask them to spot with the blue square that is are any of these squares different if so can you point out which one is different it took them significantly longer to spot out the blue square unlike us like we would see that straight away now that

is incredibly fascinating because what it shows is that the way the language i guess in some ways there's something known as the sapia warfian hypothesis in psychology that the language influences the way we see the world this supports that in a different way about color and perception that having the word for something or not having it can actually influence how you even see it so let me show you here this is the himba classification of color so you can see here that buru the blue and that green is exactly the same and the other two greens are two

different like they'd like totally different colors to them i mean okay i can see that they're different shades of green but to them these are distinct colors they're not just shades they're like distinct but the blue the buru is just like the other green next to it it's like the same thing and and i know i wonder i know in certain cultures i don't in fact it's it's interesting because when i think about it because blue is one of the most re in several cultures blue is a recent adage

in colors and thinking about it i don't know why but i'm pretty sure that even in the indo-pak world like when i was a kid unless i'm imagining this now i'm sure my my mother would refer to the kind of peppers that are the green chili as nearly much like which is actually blue because the nila is actually blue so that's and i never used to think so much about it except it's not i mean they call it uh you know like uh neely march but i

don't know hmm that that's that's interesting so i'm sure that also has something to do with that maybe there wasn't a distinction you know maybe generations back between blue and green but it doesn't mean that just because they use that they don't know they can't see blue they can and even in these tribes many of the people they did see it but it took there was a delay in being able to see it so

right so there was a delay and there was further experiments that were done with europeans so they found italians i believe who had a different name for light blue if if i'm correct and there and they have a different color for dark blue like as different colors not just as so i don't just mean like we would say like navy blue but as different colors all together just as you would have as pink and red so when the experiments were done and let's say english speaking subjects were asked to spot out the the color

that is different there was a delay in comparison to the italian counterparts who would immediately see it so what this goes to show and is that our world even what we're seeing is being influenced like there's this kind of um this dynamic inter exchange between society and us the language which is a social entity feeding into us which is then feeding back

into society which is then this kind of loop that is being created a psychosocial loop that is influencing our reality making it somewhat distinct to the person next to us and and i'll tell you something about color this is interesting there was an experiment done where we

where they had some uh gelatine kind of product like a jelly that was tasteless odorless okay it was just transparent just jelly like gelatine nothing no taste to it and what they did is they dyed it colored it different colors so red yellow green and blue now what was interesting is the participants when they had the red one they described it like sweet because of the the mental link to things

like strawberries when they had the the yellow one they felt that it had somewhat of like a sour wreath and like a lemony kind of taste to it they felt this okay and the green i think they likened the green was second best they liked this so they felt that the most sweetest was red then it was green then yellow and then blue is the is the farthest one they didn't like that most people felt that they didn't like that the taste of that even though all of these were tasteless the blue is interesting by the way

because blue as a food product is the most loathed because it's close to blue is like when meat has gone off and we not evolution have so i'll tell you what's fascinating you see human beings we have certain things well within our psyche so one of the colors worldwide that people feel uh is their favorite color is blue but people feel blue is a favorite color now there may be some evolutionary kind of thing about this and blue actually helps by the way it has a psychosomatic effect on putting people uh to sleep

whereas red wakes you up this is why the red pill and the blue pill because blue is me it's meant to kind of has this effect of kind of putting people to sleep whenever they've done placebo studies now what they did is they asked a bunch of you know heinz uh many years back they asked a bunch of they were changing the color so they asked a bunch of kids what their favorite colors were and they said blue so they thought let's put ketchup as blue now that was an absolute catastrophic failure because blue even though people may like it on clothes or on things they

don't like it in food it just doesn't work so it's an absolute failure because it's deeply embedded in us that we just don't like blue food maybe some cultures adjust to it and they create certain things that's different but this seems to be just as red has this kind of danger appeal to it that's like universal almost so right okay so coming back to this this um this experiment where they had these people try out this jelly or this gelatin that was tasteless and they flavored it and they said that no this was sweet and this was like this and

this was and this one we like the least and this we like the most at the end of the experiment they told the people that this was a placebo that there was actually this was tasteless that there was zero taste in this this is the same jelly here it is without the coloring it's just see-through there's nothing in it the participants could not they do not believe it like they could hear what they're saying but they said that but i actually tasted the sweetness now the question is that

was that true for them because in what they experienced was that true and if it was true then what is the building block of reality because is it the mind or is it the objective materials because the materials there clearly were not corresponding to this person's experience of what is true and i think that's such a profound discussion for what is true and and i think these things tie into a

greater discourse i know in the past some people have spoken and uh with me as well about um some ex-muslims and we've had a discussion on when they've said things like oh when people say is scripture true and i've and i've always said well what kind of truth do you mean because there's many truths they they're all true in their own way one is empirical truth like you want to measure something so empirically speaking that jelly was not empirically it did not contain any kind of

sweetness or anything that should have activated the sweet senses so that's an from an empirical perspective uh experiential truths you've got people will have narutological people will have metaphorical truths people will have symbolic truths people will have uh even psychosocial truths the fact that we believe in things the fact that we believe in laws we believe in rights we believe in ambitions we believe in the these are just psychosocial truths

they're not actually empirical like how how is that that's not a so when we're looking at truth we have to question that what does it mean because at a very simple level one could say well correspondence theory that well if something corresponds to it then it is true but in that case this person's truth did not correspond but to them it was 100 real now you could say well it's real in their mind but it's real but then it comes most of the world is actually just in our mind and even if we have created it

intersubjectively but then it's not a naked sheer objective truth independent of the human perspective so it just shows the complexities in this discussion and discourse that's all i thought that would be interesting to uh to share that but okay let's move on people

trudeau going back and forth between the stream and fresh and fit lol okay i don't know right okay the t i don't know what the it's interesting on that because conditioning by the way can override so you can get conditioned which will then override your cultural um kind of tendencies or sorry maybe you're somewhat of a um i don't know whether it's primordial or just gen so let me give you an example drinking coke

now you'd never think human beings would ever want to drink water that looks black that's like from an evolutionary perspective we i'm sure we would have hated that but we've got so conditioned to it that when coca-cola in the 90s tried to they made a clear coke i've forgotten what they called it now something clear or something and pepsi made one as well and it was a clear failure they just absolutely failed because people were now too conditioned and all of a sudden transparent you see water gives a tasteless effect so

when people this is why people don't like buying drinks that are just see-through because they don't experience the taste as much because the mind the eye sees and i'll tell you what's fascinating in arabic there is a saying it's a proverb that the i is what eats so when you go to like a banquet or you go somewhere and people have got all this food and the arabic proverb is that the eye eats and it's true because when something is made so tantalizingly appealing

it adds to the flavor so when coke and pepsi did make it all of a sudden see-through the sails dropped and it flopped so they had to turn it back to black which was actually the color black is counter or dark brown is counterintuitive for water for a drink because it would be mud and i'm sure you know if if it wasn't for all the advertising that went into coke to condition us all worldwide i i can't remember who was saying they they said that you know where who was it that was saying once that they said they went to a place where they couldn't find water

but they found coke bottle it's like so this is uh and isn't there that old movie as well where whereas the gods must be crazy or something where they throw a coke bottle from the from the helicopter or something and it triggers a series of events but yes so we are now conditioned to accept coke as black so so we're not neutral on that anymore so like it's very easy to get conditioned because once you do and the society accepts it there's an inter subjectivity that kind of endorses it cool let's

move on people