Entry 10: Red Hot Chili Peppers
![]() I will open
this entry with Ow. I was cooking diner
for my family tonight as a special healthy and homemade dinner. I had decided to make a Thai yellow curry
dish that I had tried at a restaurant and had absolutely loved. The recipe required a yellow curry paste
which I decided to make myself instead of buying it from the store. It all went downhill from there. As part of the curry paste recipe, I had to
seed and slice red hot chili peppers. I
did so with my bare hands, allowing the capsaicin in the peppers to soak into
my skin. Shortly after, my hands started
burning. It was quite painful and is
still very painful (getting better) as I write this journal. After doing some research on how to fix my
hands, I learned about how peppers cause a burning without actually burning the
skin. Nerves in the human body react to
chemicals much in the same way as they do heat (see video above). Although the skin is not being tremendously
damaged by the capsaicin in the peppers, it is still causing pain as the body
recognizes the capsaicin as a foreign substance and is trying to signal the
body to remove itself from the situation to prevent harm from coming to it. Foods such as hot peppers and limes have been
known to cause these reactions. Simple
online remedies include soaking the affected area in milk or vegetable oil to
neutralize the effects caused by the capsaicin.
Next time, I will be sure to wear gloves when dealing with hot peppers, but for now I will type through the pain and relate the issue to TOK. Clearly, this real life situation is very natural science-based. The chemical burn resulting from the exposure to capsaicin is easily understood with knowledge of biology and chemistry. The natural sciences help to explain issues that have no apparent solution. In this issue, the natural sciences not only pinpointed the food causing the burns, but also the chemical causing the burns and explained the body’s reaction to said chemical. This issue, judging by the sensation in my hands, is also centred around sense perception. Sense perception is a way of experiencing the world that can indicate both pleasure and pain. In this instance, my senses alerted me that there was a potential danger in my surroundings by causing me to feel pain, resulting in me trying to remedy the situation by using reason to deduce how best to remove the threat. Thank you Google MD. When considering these two aspects of the issue, the following knowledge question can be made: To what extent does sense perception influence the natural sciences? To put this issue into another context, I will reach way back into history and discuss Galileo. More specifically, I will discuss Galileo’s contributions to astronomy. Before Galileo's telescope, the best telescope that existed could only magnify objects three times. Presumably after looking up at the night sky both with the unaided eye and this telescope, Galileo made improvements to the Telescope allowing it to magnify objects 20 times. The telescope that Galileo was a light refracting telescope. With this telescope, Galileo made various astronomical discoveries, was able to observe the moon in greater detail, and discovered that the earth revolves around the sun, which is the actual center of our galaxy. This innovation in scientific technology and the resulting discoveries were absolutely influenced by sense perception. In this case, though, instead of burning hands that refused to be ignored, these scientific discoveries were driven by what the senses could not observe on their own. Thank you very much for reading my blog! I hope that you enjoyed it and that it provides food for thought! Works used in the development of this argument: http://galileo.rice.edu/bio/narrative_6.html http://www.wikihow.com/Cool-Burns-from-Chili-Peppers https://youtu.be/sBXqDi-jnAc |