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The Woman Who Sees Time as a Hula Hoop

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

charon writes:

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 jdavidb on Monday December 12 2016, @06:36PM

    by jdavidb (5690) on Monday December 12 2016, @06:36PM (#440497) Homepage Journal
    I think both of them would have a mental model of the calendar. One model would be symbolic; one would be visual.
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Gaaark on Tuesday December 13 2016, @02:53AM

    by Gaaark (41) on Tuesday December 13 2016, @02:53AM (#440648) Journal

    My problem is i'm a scattered thinker: i'm interested in so many different things, and find it hard to concentrate on any one thing (kind of like i have a hard time seeing an individual tree for all the forest.

    I couldn't find a career to focus on because i couldn't decide what "I wanted to be when i grew up". I wanted to be everything, as well as an astronaut, a lawyer, football player, chef, programmer....

    ...so i delve into everything: jack-ass of all trades, master-bator of none, lol.

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