At any given moment in time: how many realities exist?

Wonderings about the perception of humans

Today I feel like sharing with you some situations and experiences I had in my life, that make me believe a certain way about the reality or realities we live in. To be a decent scientist, I will share three experiences with you, so my n = 3 to I make sure that statistical relevance is given ;-). Yet, I can assure you that there have been many more than three situations, so my statistics are actually more robust.

The first one is around me and my disability. It occurred several times, I just pick one as an example. I have a physical disability called Ectrodactyly, or Split-hand & -foot malformation, meaning that I don’t have ten fingers and toes, but only 8,3 fingers and 4 toes in total. In addition to that, they are differently formed.

So my phenotype is clearly not “the norm”, and yet, most people I meet, don’t notice it. I had this colleague and friend of mine who join our lab during my PhD & we had our lab benches next to each other. We did many experiments together, meaning putting gloves on & off, pipetting small liquids into small tubes, labelling, doing all kinds of lab work…

After several months, it was me who made a silly joke I don’t remember anymore, it was around my differently looking hands & she then shared with me “You know, I was sooo surprised when I noticed it, mainly because it was two months after we worked together in the lab. I couldn’t get that I have not noticed it earlier, how blind was I?” She told me that in the end she didn’t ask what/why it is, cos she felt stupid to do it so late & that it actually didn’t really matter anyways.

To me, this has been the case for 90% of the people I meet, they just dont notice my differently looking hands. I have several theories about it, but let’s keep on going, I promised an n=3, so here comes situation No. 2:…