I read Reith Lecture 4: *Purple Numbers and Sharp Cheese* ¹ following a suggestion by elf on #emacs... Cool: Synethesia! Maybe I have this for weekdays: Monday blue, Tuesday yellow, Wednesday red, Thursday green, Friday brown, Saturday red, Sunday also red, but a bit darker. Strange, eh? But I think I really am, because I’d fail the following test:
What we did was essentially develop a clinical test for discovering closet synesthetes, and how do you do that? First of all we found two synesthetes and these people saw numbers as colour, for example five as red and two as green, so we produced a computerised display on the screen which had a random jumble of fives on the screen and embedded among these fives are a number of twos, and the twos are arranged to form a shape like a triangle or a square or a circle. Now when you and I, anybody here in the audience who is not a synesthete looks at this display, it takes several seconds, as much as twenty or thirty seconds before you say oh I see all the twos, they are arranged to form a triangle or a square. Now when we showed this sample display to the two synesthetes, they immediately or very quickly saw the triangle or the square because the numbers are actually coloured for them, they see them conspicuously popping up from the background so this demolishes the idea that they’re just crazy because if they’re crazy, how come they’re better at it than all of you normals? It also suggests that it’s a genuine sensory effect because if it’s just a memory association or something high level, how come they actually see the triangle? So we know the phenomenon is real and using this test and other similar tests, we are able to show that it’s much more common than people have assumed in the past. In fact people have claimed that it’s one in ten thousand. We find it’s one in two hundred, probably two or three of you here in the audience who don’t want to admit it.
Actually this test is very cool biologoy in action. These ideas are what attracted me to biology in the first place. And here I am, dipl. zool. Alex Schroeder. ;)
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