Indeed, belief is often destroyed by proof.
Among the first things I learned when I was a science student was ideas such as “It’s obvious that…” or “Common sense tells you that…” or “I’m certain that…” usually are misguided. And people’s observations are not always to be relied upon. When I was a marine biologist working in the Orkneys I heard a farmer say, with absolute certainty, that he saw a black-backed seagull carry off a new-born lamb in its feet. This is, of course, quite impossible.
Sounds like a lead in to the infinite improbability drive…
Ah! But what if two gulls gripped it by the husk…
Their flapping wings would get in the way, otherwise it would obviously be common sense for them to do that, I’m quite certain.
Sorry, obscure Monty Python reference…
Or if it was a giant mutant gull and a miniscule premature lamb?
What if a flock of gulls worked in a mutually supporting pyramid formation?
If 5 people watch a car accident with their own eyes, they usually can’t agree on what exactly happened 5 minutes later.
I’d wonder who built a fleet of drones that looked and operated like gulls.
More so, I’d wonder WHY they did it!
I think it’s time we applied Occam’s razor to this story and concluded that, on balance, the farmer was mistaken!
But he may have been drunk, and so not on balance!
That’s no fun!
2 Psychological / biological changes:
This is likely to be involved as no independent reference is being used to maintain organoleptic calibration.
Can you explain @Xanthe ?
Such a controversial topic.
The same set of headphones will sound different if I have used a different sounding pair for a while and then pick up the first pair again. I don’t know why. But it does. Sometimes I think it’s better, sometimes it’s worse.
Just as there are emerging theories on pain, human perception of sound and experiences are a dynamic, evolving process. As such, there are so many confounders that I cannot answer the OP’s question.
“Brain” burn-in is a thing.
I’ll let you know when it arrives whether my Danacable Lazuli cable is better than my stock cable and if it burns in over time.
Organoleptic assessment is the process of quantitatively assessing things using the human senses. Like any other sensor systems that don’t have an absolute calibration (and most don’t), this necessitates routine re-calibration against known reference standards. (But the rate of calibration drift for human senses is a lot faster than for most engineered sensors, hence needing even more frequent re-calibration!)
I used to take part in taste panelling work in a professional context - specifically research work in an institute dedicated to food science. When assessing things either by taste, or smell, the overall process was the same. Initially we were given many sets of samples (typically up to 10 sets) of known references (e.g. known concentrations of a reference substance for the taste or smell we were assessing). From these data the people running the experiments could produce a calibration curve for each of the people being used in the taste panel. During the main phase of the experiment, one time in five the samples we were given were not the samples for assessment, but were again known references to maintain the accuracy of each person’s individual calibration curve since this changes over time; these known reference points could then be used to keep the calibration current. Without these independent references, the person’s internal calibration would quickly become unreliable.
There is a similar effect with the eyes, which I noticed many years ago (though of course, I was far from the first to notice it). I used to do a lot of photography, using different films - Agfa, Ilford and Kodak, particularly Kodak Kodachrome K25 and K64 (some K12 and K6), but including Ektachrome.
I had a very large light table, that I could put hundreds of slides on at a time. If I had a mixture of film types, it was very obvious that the colour balance was different across the selection. But if I had only one film type, the colour balance was consistent. So with a mixture of film types I could be looking at a bunch of slides, and notice that some were very blue, and others very brown or yellow. But put the blue ones (or the brown, or the yellow or whatever) together and just look at them, and the colour ‘cast’ went away.
The brain tends to ‘normalise’ things - both in vision and in hearing.
Whatever we surround ourselves with becomes the norm, and the rest becomes deviations. If we eat a lot of salty food that becomes normal, and less salty food tastes bland. Same for spicy food, what burns in our mouths is just average for someone from Southern Asia.
Our senses slowly adapt, in a real physiological way, but also with real psychological consequences.
If we put someone in a dark anechoic chamber for a year, their eyes will not be able to tolerate full sunlight anymore, and to their ears, a bit of bird chattering may sound like an overwhelming cacophony.
Our senses are not necessarily unreliable, from a subjective standpoint at least, but they are very circumstantially trained to our personal environments.
I liked this, @Beachcomber partly because I like it when you ‘talk dirty’ about different film types. :0)
BTW, I agree with you when viewing colour too.
A phenomenom maybe many will recognise relates to the sense of smell (a sense that can detect some odours at lower levels than very sophisticated (and expensive) analytical instruments): unless using a scent in an overpowering way, many people use some form of scent: aftershave, cologne, eau de toilette, scented body lotion etc etc) and after a short period of time cease to smell it - but it is clear to other people. Or one can walk into a perfume shop and be almost knocked over by the intensity of the scent, but after an hour or two be oblivious to it.
That is due to saturation effect, whatever may be the physiological description. The same happens with feeling (e.g hold something gently without moving for a while and you cease to be aware of the textures you felt when you first took hold) and sight (move from bright light into darkness and it takes quite a while for your eyes to achieve their maximum sensitivity after the light overload. And the same is true with hearing. And that is just one easily demonstrated effect that can be tge cause of hearing things differently at different times even when in fact the sounds may be identical