SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by FatPhil on Monday December 12 2016, @05:22PM
I will admit I've still not read Oliver Sachs's /The Man who Mistook his Wife for a Hat/, so I can't claim to be even particularly knowledgeable in the field of fucked up brains, but I do have some experience of synaesthesia - years back I got some really trippy hash cookies, and noticed that the balls on the snooker table I was watching were making notes as they rolled around the screen. Being a scientist, I investigated further and discovered that I could play controllable tunes with my vision by passing my outspread fingers between my eyes and the telly. My g/f thought I was a bit of a doofus when she discovered me doing this, but she knew synesthesia is a thing, so it didn't take long to explain what I was doing and why - I may have been trippin' snooker-balls, but I was perfectly lucid.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday December 14 2016, @10:42AM
(The repeated title-capitalised phrase comes from /The Greasy Strangler/, a film all fans of John Waters or Troma should see, even if deep down it's a terrible movie.)
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves