Feeling 'Blah'? by Tanith Carey

Author:Tanith Carey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781801292399
Publisher: Welbeck Publishing Group Limited
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

There’s a link between how I feel and how much I smell. At times, when I feel good, it’s like I can smell things around me more deeply. Even the air smells better.

Alice, 39

Sight

When you are feeling “meh”, you may see the world in more muted shades too. But then colour is not absolute. It’s made in the mind. So, our emotional state will also determine how we see it.

In one experiment by researchers at the UK’s University Hospital of South Manchester, it was found that people with anxiety and depression were more likely to use the colour grey to describe how they felt. The “greying” effect for the people with lower mood was so clear that researchers now suggest it could potentially be used as a test to work out whether someone is depressed, according to the study published in the journal Biological Psychiatry.

Intuitively, you could say we’ve always known this. It’s why filmmakers, artists and writers have always veered toward using greyer tones to create sad scenes. The reasons are not yet completely understood, but one reason may be that the photoreceptors in the retina are the most energy-hungry cells in the body. If brains of people with depression and anhedonia are already running at a low ebb or getting a reduced blood supply, they may not have the processing power to interpret the full range of colour coming into the eye, making the world look more drab. Professor Russell Foster, head of Oxford University’s Department of Ophthalmology, says: “We know that a tired brain can’t process information as effectively, so the complicated task of colour processing might get marginalized.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.