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THE REAL WORLD - page two July 27 2000 More conventionally, though, the expression is most often used in a rather patronising way by people who wish to emphasise the amount of life experience they have over everyone else. But this is exactly what makes the concept of a 'real world' so ridiculous: we all experience things differently. We're burdened by our own peculiar prejudices and beliefs, driven by individual desires and of course by our cultural and social backgrounds. How can there, then, be one "real world"? The human brain is a kind of filter, processing the millions of signals received by the senses and sorting them in accordance with our upbringing. What we see and experience is a censored version of reality, far from the overwhelming bombardment of information that constitutes the universe. As Alan Watts, author of "The Way of Zen", writes: "there is a ...sense in which man, and every other organism, creates his own environment.... Bees and other insects have, for example, polaroid eyes which enable them to tell the position of the sun by observing any patch of blue sky. In other words, because of the different structure of their eyes, the sky that they see is not the sky that we see." Watching MTV's supposedly true-to-life soap opera "The Real World" or newer shows such as "Castaway 2000" or "Big Brother" provides all the evidence you need that reality can be shaped and twisted. Real life never seemed quite good enough for the MTV programme makers, who insisted on intervening at regular intervals to incite conflict or spice up the storyline. One person's reality is another's fiction so who is anyone to judge what is real and what isn't? Some simple thoughts: what does a sunset look like to a blind person? What's green to someone with colourblindness? David Blunkett, the education secretary and himself blind, was recently asked to describe the colour purple; he likened it to a glass of full rich wine. For most of us, his description seems metaphorical at best. Or perhaps it's a sign of synaesthesia (the condition where sufferers' senses are confused, causing them to "taste" colours or "see" sounds.) But to Mr. Blunkett, with a vastly different set of experiences to most of us, colours must be equated with smells and tastes. That is his reality, borne out of necessity and one that none of us would deny him. We shouldn't bother telling each other what life would be like if we lived in "the real world". There is no real world. We make our own realities. comment on this article e-mail this to a friend start a discussion 
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