Bit of a science experiment this one.

A bit of a contextual preamble first.

I love the work of neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, who is (pulling information from his TED.com page) "... the director of the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of California, San Diego, and an adjunct professor at the Salk Institute."

A part of what Mr Ramachandran does is work out how our brains function and mapping the physical characteristics of the brain to human behaviour by studying patients who have very specific brain injuries that effect them in some way.

Now, it's going to take me too long to really go through all these elements, so if you're interested in them in any way, I recommend his TED.com talk "VS Ramachandran on your mind".

(There is a - I feel - better talk somewhere on the internet that ties in evolutionary biology and appreciation of art into the talk, but I cannot find it at the moment. If you know where to find it, I'd love to hear from you.)

So why is this relevant to the comic above? Well,there's an experiment in the talks that I find fascinating and I've tried out on friends and family. And since there are an estimated 20,000 of you...

The experiment is a simple question.

"These are Martian letters. Which letter is Kikii (kick-kee) and which is Boobaa (boo-baa)?".

There is no "correct" answer, and the whole point of the exercise is to see what people say.

If you use twitter, drop me a line at @happymrlocust .
If you're reading this from the website or from an RSS feed, drop me a line at lem [at] frozenreality [dot] co [dot] uk with the subject "martian letters".
If you're reading this via the Livejournal feed, leave a comment.

(If you could leave it in a format of "A is [letter] and B is [letter]" or something like that, I'd appreciate it!)

I'll get back to you all with the results on the next update!

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