Nhyiraba Asumadu Addo
Professor Ashley Lyttle
HSS175
28 July 2025
Reflection on podcast
I had a lot of thoughts during the podcast episode 175 Socks and Crocs Part One of
You Are Not So Smart.
In the first few seconds we witness the concept of tribalism, with a media personality
claiming that they are smarter if it's blue.
We just othered our friends and family.
We make up reasons for things we don’t understand, and they just so happen to align to
a group. A Wild jump to ethnocentric thinking. I think that this is one of many divisive
images and phenomena that will come up due to the ubiquity of social media and the
internet in its infinite span. It sure would be interesting to be a neuroscientist in the age
where human interconnectedness hands you your thesis in the form as a meme.
While posed as an epistemic conundrum, is it? Isn’t it more neuroscientific?
I love that the dress got us all thinking, questioning. Today so many people are sucked
into things like careers or their marriage or their classes or bills. But for a second we all
stopped to think. I love that we live in an age where we can explain this and the
knowledge is out there for people to come across even in a podcast.
I suppose I would rather it be epistemic than optical or cognitive in the biological sense.
Not because I don’t think it’s the truth but more in the sense that I don’t think it’s that
simple.
The idea that I flew in the discussion board was that it was something to do with
framing, and a sort of synesthesia:
“I think, although it is unlikely, this is more of a trick of the eye rather than a trick of
words. But what about the possibility that the words spoken are somehow connected to
what you see; something like synesthesia, where what you hear can affect your vision?”
The story of the effect that the image had on the populace and academia is an eyeopening experience that I thoroughly enjoyed, as well as a whole load of thought that I
had been blind to when I first encountered the image at ten years old.