Synesthesia

• Synesthesia comes from the Greek words syn and aesthesis, literally meaning together-perception. As commonly defined, people with synesthesia have mixed senses where one sense unconsciously triggers another. Some people can taste colors and feel words. However, the most important thing to remember is that everyone with synesthesia experiences it differently. No two people with synesthesia experience the same thing, even if they have the same form of synesthesia.
  
• The most common form of synesthesia is associating letters and/or numbers with colors. For people without this, letters and numbers in black ink are just plain black. But for people with synesthesia, black letters and numbers are full of color. Patt Duffy explains learning to write: “I realized that to make an R all I had to do was first write a P and then draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line." But other people with synesthesia will disagree with Patt’s colors because the associated colors are different for every person. When Valdimir Nabokov, a famous Russian novelist, was a toddler, the colored letters on his wooden blocks irritated him because they were the wrong colors. For him, “there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. . . . And today I have at last perfectly matched v with “Rose Quartz’ in Maerz and Puls’ Dictionary of Color.” Researchers often have people with synesthesia choose from hundreds of paint tiles to make a list of how they see the alphabet, but letters can change and be shaded differently depending on what letters surround them.
• While certain drugs can trigger an experience like synesthesia, synesthesia is not caused by drugs. Brain imaging has shown that synesthesia is involuntary and cannot be reproduced by a person without synesthesia. Synesthesia also stays mainly consistent over time, and is thus hard to fake. Even though synesthesia is a real phenomenon, many people stay quiet as to not be perceived as weird or on drugs. In my experience, most of the people I have met with synesthesia (fairly mild forms) do not realize that it is unusual or do not realize that there is a name for what they have.
• Another form of synesthesia is linking color and music. This led to disagreements between Liszt and Rachmaninov over what was the correct color for the key they were composing in. Liszt would say to the orchestra, “O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please!” Duke Ellington, who is also recognized as having synesthesia, had his own thoughts on the subject: “If Harry Carney is playing, D is dark blue burlap. If Johnny Hodges is playing, G becomes light blue satin."
• Synesthesia can also involve taste, such as James Wannerton and his dislike for the earwax tasting name “Derek.” One man with synesthesia tastes broccoli every time he hears his girlfriend's name. He doesn’t like broccoli. Richard “tastes like a chocolate bar-warm and melting on my tongue.” Spelling can also effect a word’s taste. For one woman, “‘Lori’ tastes like a pencil eraser, but ‘Laurie’ tastes lemony.”
• For Michael, the senses are mixed a bit differently. He feels shapes on his face and hands in response to flavors and does not like to serve chicken that tastes round instead of pointy. Carol feels guitar music on her ankles, violins on her face and trumpets on the back of her neck. And MW can feel the word mint on his hand as a “cool glass column.”
• Scientists do not know what causes synesthesia. Some theories are that synesthesia is a result of brain "cross talk," a genetic neural connection overabundance or "a reduced amount of inhibition along feedback pathways.” The most fascinating theory is that every one is born with synesthesia, but the brain grows out of it.
• Synesthesia has its own share of mysteries. Synesthesia tends to run in families, but in some pairs of identical twins, only one has synesthesia. A small amount of people have lost their synesthesia at puberty. Roman numerals have no color to people with number-color synesthesia. There was also a colorblind man with synesthesia who could only see color when he looked at numbers.
• Some of my favorite random synesthesia anecdotes: Getting nauseous from the sound of wind chimes. Not being able to eat ice-cream because the vendor’s words sounded like black cinders. Seeing 7 as a man with a mustache. Hearing “oh”’s and “ah”’s from a painting. Every word having a different physical movement, easily demonstrated by a body-pose. Tasting blueberries when seeing a skyline. Feeling acupuncture as layers of colors. Seeing December as a red area to one's left. Feeling a song as a square.

This is a bit of an unusual post because I haven't posted a source for every fact like I usually do. (I adapted this post from my research paper on this topic.) While these are not all of my sources, here are a few to prove I'm not fabricating information. If you have any questions, I will do my best to answer them. Source. Source. Source. Source.

Oh. And thank you to I Beati for this award. I will pass it on as soon as I am done hoarding it.

Unrelated topics

Lali was born in Saini Sunpura, India March 11, 2008 with a condition known as craniofacial duplication. This means she has one head but two faces. While her condition often brings serious health complications, doctors say she is doing well. (The most recent article I could find was from April 9th.)
Viewed as a reincarnation of the Hindu goddess Durga, "[u]p to 100 people have been visiting Lali at her home every day to touch her feet out of respect, offer money and receive blessings."
Daulat Ram, the village chief, plans to get governmental money for a temple dedicated to Durga and to assist Lali's family financially.
Lali's father, Vinod Singh says, "At first I was a little bit afraid, but then I accepted whatever God gives. . . . My daughter is fine - like any other child."
To see a video which includes Lali, her parents and villagers, click here.
Source

Mark McGowan is a UK performance artist. Here are some of his works:

• For two weeks, Mark stuck two chips up his nose, strapped 48 sausage to his head and sat in a bath of baked beans in defense of the British breakfast.
• He ate approximately three bites of corgi (the dog breed favored by Queen Elizabeth II) to protest a fox hunt of Prince Phillip.
  
• He crawled through New York on his hands and knees wearing a George Bush mask and a sign on his rear reading, "Kiss my ass."
• He reenacted the Abu Ghraib human pyramid with six teenage girls.
• Dressed as a British soldier, he lay curled up in the Birmingham City Center for one week.
  
• He randomly keyed cars in Glasgow and South East London. 47 cars were keyed in total. Mark said, "I do feel guilty about keying people's cars[. B]ut if I don't do it, someone else will . . . They should feel glad that they've been involved in the creative process."
• To draw attention to the "obesity pandemic," Mark put a 27 pound turkey on his head, walked backwards for eleven miles. Along the way he shouted at obese people.
  
• In July 2005, Mark attempted to leave a tap of cold water running for one year, using 15 million liters of water (aprx. 3,299,539 gallons). Through this he hoped to comment on water waste. Following threats of legal action on the part of Tames Water, the tap was shut off on July 29th.
• From a 2007 interview: "A common misperception of me is that I'm an idiot. Within the art world they definitely think I'm an idiot. I'm not sure if it's a misconception. I am interested in the idea of shame. A teacher told me at school, 'you're an idiot. You're stupid'. I wasn't very good at exams. Part of my art is to be portrayed as an idiot and to be seen as a fool. One of the things about shame is that when you do it in public it has a certain amount of power attached to it and you can use that power."
• Source. Source. Source. Source. Source.

A quiz day and you-facts

• How good are you at spotting fake smiles? "Most people are surprisingly bad at spotting fake smiles. One possible explanation for this is that it may be easier for people to get along if they don't always know what others are really feeling." Take the quiz here. I got 14 right out of 20.
• Burtyic acid is what makes your vomit smell disgusting. It is also found in Parmesan cheese. Take a sense quiz here.
• How does a growth spurt work? First, hands and feet expand. Next, arms and legs. The shins grow before the thighs, and the forearm grows before the upper arm. Clumsiness is caused as the brain tries to adjust to the new center of gravity. "[T]he relationship between growth of the skeleton and puberty is so strong that a teenager's developmental age can be measured by looking at the maturity of the bones in their hand and wrist. Source
• 1. "The average person will shed 40 pounds of skin in his/her lifetime."
• 2. "The human brain is composed of 75% water."
• 3. " A person produces 10,000 gallons of saliva in an average lifetime."
• 4. "A nail takes around 6 months to grow from base to the tip." Source
  

Thankful yet?

• aquagenic urticaria: allergy to water. If water touches Nineteen-year-old Ashleigh Morris's skin, she breaks out in "sore, itchy red lumps" that last for two hours. She can only take one minute showers, often crying from the pain. Even sweat will make her skin break out. Doctors believe that a heavy dose of penicillin at age 14, caused this. Source

• Kleine-Levin Syndrome: a neurological disorder that causes the need to sleep. Arielle Farber, began sleeping 23 hours a day in 1994 at age 13. Approximately a year later, Arielle had "been sleeping a little less excessively than in her past bouts, but has yet to leave the second floor of her home, or see or speak to anyone beside her parents." However, as of March 2007, she has been "incident-free" for the past three years. There is no cure. Source. Source.

• trimethylaMinuria: the person smells strongly of dead fish due to a faulty enzyme and build up of TMA, triggered by the majority of foods. Camille, a teacher and former model, grew up smelling like dead fish, no matter how much she showered or how much perfume she used. It led to a very painful life. While there is no cure, Camille manages the smell with a very strict diet, chlorophyll tablets and frequent showering. She says, "I wash with several different products, and I scrub very hard. I use two different kinds of deodorant and a lot of perfume. Before I actually leave the house, I spray all of my clothes with Febreze just all up and down, and I also spray my feet and my socks with the deodorant for my feet." Source.

• chimerism: a person is their own twin. Lydia Fairchild's children were going to be taken away from her by the Department of Social Services when her DNA did not match theirs. Knowing her children to be hers, she fought a court battle, eventually discovering that she had chimerism. In essence, "in her blood, she [is] one person, but in other tissues, she ha[s] evidence of being a fusion of two individuals." This occurs when two fertilized eggs with unique DNA, fuse in the womb. She won the battle for her children. Source.

• Human echolocation: Blind people using echolocation to "see." Ben Underwood and Daniel Kish both went blind from cancer at the age of two. However, both men learned to make a clicking sound every half second for echolocation. Kish explains: "I have mental images that are very rich, very complex. They simply do not possess the visual element." Underwood can ride his bike, play basketball and "hear" walls. Kish founded World Access for the Blind, a foundation to teach echolocation to other blind people. Source. Source

To be a scientist!

At the University of California, scientists helped the fight against alcoholism by plying hundreds of thousands of worms with alcohol. They succeeded in finding the gene responsible for drunkenness in worms and hope this will help the study of alcoholism in people.
The alcohol seemed to affect the worms much like humans: " The drunken worms moved slower and more awkwardly than sober ones, and laid fewer eggs." However, as neurobiology professor Steven Treistman of the University of Massachusetts Medical School commented, "'Humans are a lot more complicated than the worm." Source

sniff sniff

• Lynda and David Taylor were separating after three years of marriage, and Lynda was upset when David refused to give her half of the money and the house. So she took her revenge. She sprayed perfume on herself and her daughter. She sprayed Lysol and bug killer around the house. She burned scented candles. She plugged in scented air fresheners. And she emptied lavender sachets. While this may not seem all that severe, Lynda was arrested and charged with aggravated battery. You see, David had multiple chemical sensitivity, and her actions caused him to be "very ill with severe brain fog, headache, numbness and trembling and pain throughout [his] body so severe [he] could barely move." Before this incident, his condition had earned him $150,000 in worker's compensation. Source.

And a big Thank you to the ever-gracious Rusin Roundup for this award. I have to admit, I really like it because I like pirates, and the pictures has a bit of a pirate-y air. I always have a hard time trying to decide who to pass awards on to, so I chose people I hadn't awarded or tagged before. Thus, I would like to pass this award on to:

• Grillman and Luna for flattering my vanity with a lovely welcome to their blog, and teaching me about Santa.
  
• AY@tes for making me double-check every time I write his screen-name and earning an impressive 99% nerd score. (I only scored an 80%).
  
• And I Beati because I was not feeling very cheerful today, and the cute pictures on her blog made me melt into a pile of simpering goo.