Miracle Fruit (Part I)

I'd like to thank DoseNation for cross-posting my National Coming Out Day story. I've been following them for quite a while and it's nice to have finally contributed something. I really admire their open posting format; drawing from the collective minds of everybody who surfs the Internet, it provides a great variety of perspectives.

Read their article on Miracle Fruit. It demonstrates a fact known to anybody familiar with psychedelic drugs. The senses, our interface to the world around us, are not static. Although we do have a normative level of consciousness, it is subject to a great deal of things, and our senses can be fooled (and altered) rather easily. This can be done by many things, not the least of which, but certainly not the only, being drugs.

"The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum, is native to West Africa and has been known to Westerners since the 18th century. The cause of the reaction is a protein called miraculin, which binds with the taste buds and acts as a sweetness inducer when it comes in contact with acids, according to a scientist who has studied the fruit, Linda Bartoshuk at the University of Florida’s Center for Smell and Taste."

However, our perceptions can be altered in far more routine, but no less fascinating, ways. Check out Illusion Sciences to see what I mean.

I find these things so interesting because I believe that, at least in many ways, perception dictates reality. This may seem like an odd concept, because, one might argue, consensus reality operates regardless of the state of one's consciousness (e.g. even if I'm on PCP and believe I can fly, it's still not smart to jump off the room of my house). However, to use a simple example, say that you're not really listening to somebody and you mishear something that they say. You react to what you heard, say a perceived slight, and respond with something not too delicate, resulting in an argument. You perceived argumentativeness and made it a reality. This can be extrapolated to a grander scale by considering the philosophical implications of Chaos Theory, particularly the Butterfly Effect (no, not that awful Ashton Kutcher movie)--summed up best by Ian Malcolm in Jurassic Park.