I’ve been intrigued by synesthesia since I read The Man Who Tasted Shapes sometime in the second half of the 90s. It seems so bizarrely wonderful: numbers might have colors, musical notes might also have distinct hues - or perhaps shapes… It’s just freaky to imagine, and more significantly, it illustrates how seemingly arbitrary the brain’s powers can be.
Now Kottke points us to this post, which in turn quotes a Scientific American article about a wonderful phenomenon:
We also observed one case in which we believe cross activation enables a colorblind synesthete to see numbers tinged with hues he otherwise cannot perceive; charmingly, he refers to these as “Martian colors.� Although his retinal color receptors cannot process certain wavelengths, we suggest that his brain color area is working just fine and being cross-activated when he sees numbers…
Martian colors! That rules.
Is it wrong to be jealous of an “abnormality”?
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Track o’ the Post: Bright As Yellow from Glow by The Innocence Mission, because I’m a little girl sometimes.
Strange but True: Antibacterial Products May Do More Harm Than Good
Unlike these traditional cleaners, antibacterial products leave surface residues, creating conditions that may foster the development of resistant bacteria, Levy notes. For example, after spraying and wiping an antibacterial cleaner over a kitchen counter, active chemicals linger behind and continue to kill bacteria, but not necessarily all of them.
I friggin’ told you so!
(via Garret)
One of those Newton’s Apple-type trivia bits I tend to trot out with reasonable frequency (and have for as long as I can remember, practically) is that glass is “supercooled liquid”.
Now Garret points me to this article which actually shows us that I was ill-informed:
When glass is made, the material (often containing silica) is quickly cooled from its liquid state but does not solidify when its temperature drops below its melting point. At this stage, the material is a supercooled liquid, an intermediate state between liquid and glass. To become an amorphous solid, the material is cooled further, below the glass-transition temperature. Past this point, the molecular movement of the material’s atoms has slowed to nearly a stop and the material is now a glass. This new structure is not as organized as a crystal, because it did not freeze, but it is more organized than a liquid. For practical purposes, such as holding a drink, glass is like a solid, Ediger says, although a disorganized one.
Good enough. Lesson learned and all that.
“Amorphous solid” it is.
Who Wants to Be a Cognitive Neuroscientist Millionaire? A researcher (from my alma mater, Boston University) uses his understanding of the human brain to advance on a popular quiz show.
Another cognitive process essential for winning on Millionaire is intuition, or more precisely, knowing how to make decisions based on intuition. What if you have a feeling about an answer? What should you do with your hunch? Folk wisdom holds that on standardized tests you should go with your first impulse. Research tends to support this idea: a first impulse is more often correct than a second, revised decision. But what if $250,000 is at stake? “More often correct” does not seem certain enough to serve as a basis for a decision. How can you evaluate the true likelihood of a hunch being accurate?
This is a great read. Especially when you get sentences like this:
My neurohormones whipped from black misery to shining ebullience, saturating my brain in a boiling cauldron of epinephrine and endorphins.
Dork.
Scott Adams, creator of every office worker’s favorite comic strip, lost his voice a while back. Now he’s tricked his brain into giving it back.
My theory was that the part of my brain responsible for normal speech was still intact, but for some reason had become disconnected from the neural pathways to my vocal cords. (That’s consistent with any expert’s best guess of what’s happening with Spasmodic Dysphonia. It’s somewhat mysterious.) And so I reasoned that there was some way to remap that connection. All I needed to do was find the type of speaking or context most similar – but still different enough – from normal speech that still worked. Once I could speak in that slightly different context, I would continue to close the gap between the different-context speech and normal speech until my neural pathways remapped. Well, that was my theory. But I’m no brain surgeon.
The secret (for him) was rhyming!
Proved: Monkey see, monkey do
Monkeys “imitate with a purpose�, matching their behaviour to others’ as a form of social learning, researchers report.
Such mimicry has previously been seen only in great apes – including humans and chimps – but now Italian researchers have recorded wonderful footage of the phenomenon in newborn rhesus macaques.
Oh sure, they “imitate with a purpose” alright: To take us down a notch and move on up the evolutionary scale, I’d say!
Stupid learning monkeys…
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