Is reality real?

Have you ever noticed that we often take technological things for granted?

This thought occurred to me when I was listening to The Red Hot Chili Peppers self titled album. (specifically 'Grand Pappy du Plenty')  I was wearing a decent set of scavenged headphones and noticed the way the different instruments sounded as though they were coming from different directions.  Yeah, yeah, yeah, stereo headphones are hardly new.  Get over it.  I can see how you could get the music to sound as though it was to the left, right or even somewhere in between.   But what really struck me was the way they managed to make certain instruments sound as though they were behind me.  Again, it's obviously mature technology that's been around for a while but still cool when you think about it.

It leads me to back to some well trodden mental paths questioning reality...

We perceive the world around us with our senses and everyone's senses are 'tuned' slightly differently.  It's not just a matter of something like a "normal" person and someone who is colorblind.  Too often that is simply viewed as black or white;  One can see color and the other can't.  (Don't you love puns?!?!)  However, I think it's deeper than that.  Ask any woman picking out clothes and they'll tell you that men are colorblind.  Science tells us that some people can simply discriminate light waves more finely than others so that they will see color variations that many people cannot.

Moving outside the human race, animals can smell and hear more acutely than we can.  So we naturally take it for granted that they can smell or hear things that "don't exist" to our senses.  Again though, this difference is seen as a matter of degrees.

Science tries to come up with unbiased evidence of things.  How do we know what the temperature is outside?  Some poor sod had to take a flask of mercury in a bucket of water outside in the winter and freeze his butt off until the water froze and make a mark on the flask.  Voila!  The freezing point of water.  We learned about light waves from prisms splitting white light into colored bands.  Unfortunately even the much more sophisticated instruments of today tend to center around our own senses.  What do we do with radio telescope data?  Why, we convert it to pretty pictures of course! 

What else is out there though?  For that matter what else is right here around us that we just can't perceive?  I'm reminded of the movie From Beyond adapted from an HP Lovecraft story.  The gist of which is that a scientist creates a "Resonator" that stimulates the pineal gland and...  blah, blah, blah.  Anyway, this device causes those exposed to it to perceive things that we cannot normally see.  Naturally those things don't like it and lots of people are killed.  (It is an HP lovecraft story after all!)

Despite the silliness of this example I still wonder what is all around us that we cannot taste/touch/see/feel/hear?  What is waiting to be discovered that no one has ever thought of a way to look for?  God? Angels?  Demons? Voices in people's heads?  Sock eating monsters?  Magic?