The Brain by five degrees
medicine | (0)
The human brain simply may not be wired up to deal with lots of different levels of value. A series of psychological experiments, many dating back to the 1950s, shows that we cannot distinguish between more than about five degrees of, well, almost anything: sweetness in a solution; saltiness; the pitch of a note; brightness; the intensity of an electric shock; the length of a line; or the pungency of a smell. The details vary, but the level of consistency is surprising.
Practice does not help. Neither, surprisingly, does varying the gaps in the scale: it’s no easier to distinguish five ...