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posted by cmn32480 on Monday December 12 2016, @02:41PM   Printer-friendly
from the perception-differential dept.

The Atlantic has an article about people with a type of synesthesia which causes them to see time around them.

The English polymath Francis Galton first described calendar forms in 1880, and the phenomenon has been rarely studied since. But Vilayanur Ramachandran, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego who has been studying synesthesia for a long time, has been slowly amassing and studying people with this odd perceptual quirk.

He met one such person, a 25-year-old woman named Emma, a year ago. Her calendar is a hula hoop, which stretches horizontally in front of her and touches her chest at one point—always December 31st, no matter the actual time of year. Emma uses her calendar to organize her life, attaching events to the various months and zooming around the hoop to access them.

The hoop is anchored to her body; it doesn't move if she tilts or rotates her head. "Obviously, this is a construct in her head, not a real hula hoop stuck to her chest," says Ramachandran. But if she turns her head to the right, the left side of the calendar became fuzzier, as it would be if it was an actual physical object. More bizarrely, the memories that she had appended to those months also became indistinct and harder to recall.


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  • (Score: 2) by jelizondo on Monday December 12 2016, @03:58PM

    by jelizondo (653) Subscriber Badge on Monday December 12 2016, @03:58PM (#440407) Journal

    I was one of those unfortunate souls who had to take drafting and totally sucked at it. I can’t draft anything to save my life and I have always attributed it to my poor vision.

    However, your comment reminded me of the movie “Dead Poets Society” [imdb.com], particularly the scene where Robin Williams stands on the desk. I thought I got to try that and sure enough, you get a very different perspective.

    Perhaps, as you suggest, it is a good idea to stand, move around or even look at something upside down to envision it.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @04:54PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 12 2016, @04:54PM (#440434)

    > I thought I got to try that and sure enough, you get a very different perspective.

    This is something (roomscale) VR is really good at.

    The game Budget Cuts, for example, provides quite a few opportunities to do this sort of thing (stand on desks, peer into a room from above).