User:Stevertigo/Grain of salt (philosophical interpretations)
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'Take it with a grain of salt' is a commmon saying often used in the context of advice, and put simply, it means 'digest what it is you have experienced.'
The salt grain image evokes the concept of mixture, as an ingredient. It also evokes a sharp taste response, that is often a charachterised as aware and attention-getting.
But more importantly, the comment makes an analogy between the psychology of assimilated experience, and taste.
Human emotional maturity, in part means a stipulation of that which we think, is to some degree clouded, or affected by other relevant information. Despite how pure the concept is, or how much people may want to isolate themselves from a negative personal experience, they must 'mix' it in at least to a small degree into their charachter.
The comment long precedes a modern scientific understanding of the mind, and can be thought of as derived from an intuitiveunderstanding of the human mind.
In neuroscience, the mind is a complex matrix that can organise related thought ideas in degrees; As near-absolutes, or isolated, pure ideas, or as sharp visceral experiences, and areas more or less in between.
The pure ideal is only conceptual, while realities are not, and in order for a psychological equilibrium to be reached with regard to new or complicated experience, assimilating the nature of such experience with care becomes necessary.
Mixing a new experience into ones current understanding, is a first step toward relating this new, pure, concept with the rest of ones' knowledge and experience.
Sidebar:
There has been extensive study devoted to the psychology of color, and its symbolic language in the human mind, whether or not all humans react the same to color and subsequently, can we extract a universalist sort of 'color ethic'?
