A couple of people I know recommended Bill Bryson to me.
So out of respect I picked up his A Short History of Almost Everything and The Body.
They’re interesting enough, but so far nothing new.
Apart from this following passage which has left me puzzled.
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Extract from The Brain, chapter 4 of The Body p56.
"In a similar way, the brain manufactures all the components that make up our senses. It is a strange and non-intuitive fact of existence that photons of light have no colour, sound waves no sound, olfactory molecules no odour.
As British doctor and author James Le Fanu has put it, ’whilst we have the overwhelming impression that the greennes of the trees and the blueness of the sky are streaming through our eyes as through an open window, yet the particles of of light impacting on the retina are colourless, just as the waves of sound impacting on the eardrum are silent and scent molecules have no smell. They are all invisible, weightless, subatomic particles of matter travelling through space.’
All the richness of life is created inside your head. What you see is not what is, but what your brain tells you it is, and that’s not the same thing at all."
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Even if everything is all interpretation, surely sound waves cannot be silent?
Or can they?
Can someone please help me out here?