Irises come in every colour. Yesterday's visit to the Laking garden at Royal Botanical Gardens was a tumultuous gathering of colours. How many flowers were blooming? There are over 1,000 types of irises in the collection. There likely are least 20 stems on every planting. Each stem has at least one flower in bloom. So we were looking at something in the range of 20,000 flowers yesterday. It is satisfying to see so many flowers.
There are lots of theories on why humans love flowers. One article says this:
One clue is that flowers stimulate the same sensory apparatus that humans use for assessing the quality of fruits. Fruits often have colors similar to flowers, and one theory suggests that trichromatic color vision in primates has evolved to better detect and evaluate edible fruits. From an olfactory perspective, floral volatiles are chemically similar or even identical to those emitted by fruits, and thus smelling a flower may possibly bring to mind a ripe, sweet fruit.
Psychology Today's article says it more simply: dopamine.
Dopamine is triggered by the expectation of a reward. Flowers were a huge reward signal in the world our brain evolved in because they marked the coming of abundance after a hungry winter. Today we have enough to eat all year round so we don’t consciously link flowers with food. But the blossoming of a flower triggers the sense that something special is coming because it triggers dopamine.
Isn't it nice to know we can look at flowers and get the same effect as a physical fitness class.
No comments:
Post a Comment