Archive for the ‘neuroscience’ tag
Art and Synesthesia #
I’ve probably noted my fascination with synesthesia — associating numbers with colors, smells with shapes, etc — before, but this stuff is interesting:
Where does synesthesia come from? Maybe synesthetes are just lying. Perhaps they’re under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs — many research subjects are college kids, after all — or happened as children to play with colored alphabet blocks. Or maybe they’re simply good with metaphors.
To Ramachandran, the latter answer gets at the truth — but he stressed that what appears as metaphor is a literal sensory experience for synesthetes. That may explain, he said, why synesthesia is eight times more common among poets, artists and novelists than the general population.
The essence of art is, arguably, metaphor, and its practitioners are especially prolific — and metaphor is just a convenient shorthand for the connection of unlinked cognitive phenomena. That’s exactly what appears to happen in the minds of synesthetes. Far-flung parts of their brain have unusually high levels of cross-wiring.
It’s worth reading the rest of the post, if only for the heartening “we’re all synesthetes” argument at the end.
Dyslexia Varies By Language #
Not terribly surprising, but still interesting:
“In this sense, we may regard dyslexia in Chinese and English as two different brain disorders,” Dr. Tan said, “because completely different brain regions are disrupted. It’s very likely that a person who is dyslexic in Chinese would not be dyslexic in English.”
(via brijit, though I should note that this was on clusterflock a month ago)