From time to time when I walk my dog she'll encounter a smell that just absolutely entrances her, and when we arrive at one of those spots all progress ceases for at least thirty seconds. In those moments I find myself wondering what she perceives with her sense of smell in that particular area. And then I start to think about all the other things happening around me that I don't perceive because of the limitations of my senses, or because I'm simply not paying very close attention to the world around me. And then my mind will begin to wander, and I'll start to imagine what my perceptions would be like as different people or different creatures. How would I experience the world as a female, for instance, or as different types of animals. Whenever I read about developments in virtual reality technology, there's a thought in the back of my mind that I hope it will allow us to not simply be ourselves in exotic environments but to be someone else entirely, and interact with the other world from a completely different perspective than our own.
