We've posted many times about synesthsia, a fascinating and bizarre neurological condition in which two ore more senses are linked so that someone, for example, might "taste" sounds or "hear" colors. New research is exploring whether synesthesia, which appears to be a heritable physical condition, has survived evolutionarily because it's beneficial. According to the UC San Diego scientists, "ninety-five to ninety-nine percent of synesthetes love their synesthesia and say it enhances their lives." Advanced brain scans are enabling researchers to better see the increased connections between sensory brain regions and learn more about the neural condition. From National Geographic:
The study authors think it's possible such a strange phenomenon has survived in an evolutionary sense because it offers people certain benefits to creative thinking.
Such studies could also help test an idea proposed by some scientists that all humans have the neural mechanism for synesthesia but it's suppressed for some reason…
…Synesthesia is about seven times more common in artists, poets, and novelists than in the rest of the population, and some scientists have hypothesized that synesthetes are better at linking unrelated ideas.
"Why Does Evolution Allow Some People to Taste Words?"
Following up on our earlier story about Roku re-platforming Alex Jones and Infowars, it looks like Roku got so much criticism from users, they’ve reversed course and will remove the Infowars app.
‘Verizon Gaming’ is coming soon to Android, and a beta is already running on the Nvidia Shield, per a report from Chris Welch at Verge.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Sydney Li and Bennett Cyphers explain how to stop people tracking you through email. Read-receipt beacons and other trickery abounds. …third-party email tracking technologies will try to share and correlate your email address across different emails that you open, and even across different websites that you visit, further shaping your invisible […]
Looking for a career in music behind the boards, either as a music producer or DJ? It’s a good bet that you’re going to be working with Ableton Live. Each new iteration of this powerful workstation gives the user more tools to create, and it’s just as well suited for the task of meticulous track […]
The graveyard of failed startups is littered with concepts that just got lost in translation. At its core, that’s what great front-end design is about: Making an app or website usable, translating its best ideas smoothly to the user. It’s a skill so broad there might be no one book or course that covers it […]
Robotics: It’s a field that used to exist only as science fiction. Now it’s science fact, and it’s not just a playground for MIT prodigies. Thanks to the ROS (Robot Operating System) framework, anyone willing to learn robotics can practice robotics. And the easiest way to learn ROS? The Complete Robotics eBook Bundle. Combined, the […]
