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Wednesday Is Indigo Blue
''Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia'' is a 2009 non-fiction book written by Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman documenting the current scientific understanding of synesthesia, a perceptual condition where an experience of one sense (such as sight) causes an automatic and involuntary experience in another sense (such as hearing). The afterword is written by Dimitri Nabokov, a synesthete, and the son of the well-known author and synesthete Vladimir Nabokov. Synopsis The introduction likens the "cross-talk" occurring in the brain producing synesthetic experiences to weather patterns in coastal regions where there are no barriers and all of the elements interact. Normally communication in the brain is like weather in the Rocky Mountain regions, where weather can be isolated in one spot independent of weather systems close by. Chapter 1, "What color is Tuesday?", describes some of the early and still common resistance to the existence and study of syne ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Richard Cytowic
Richard E. Cytowic is an American neurologist and author who rekindled interest in synesthesia in the 1980s and returned it to mainstream science. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his '' New York Times Magazine'' cover story about James Brady, the Presidential Press Secretary shot in the brain during the assassination attempt on President Reagan. Cytowic’s writing ranges from textbooks and music reviews, to his '' Metro Weekly'' "Love Doctor" essays and brief medical biographies of Anton Chekhov, Maurice Ravel and Virginia Woolf. His work is the subject of two BBC Horizon documentaries, “Orange Sherbert Kisses” (1994) and “Derek Tastes of Earwax” (2014). In '' Musicophilia'', Oliver Sacks writes: In the 1980, Richard Cytowic made the first neurophysiological studies of synesthetic subjects... In 1989, he published a pioneering text, ''Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses'', and this was followed by a popular exploration of the subject in 1993, '' The Man ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Introspection
Introspection is the examination of one's own conscious thoughts and feelings. In psychology, the process of introspection relies on the observation of one's mental state, while in a spiritual context it may refer to the examination of one's soul. Introspection is closely related to human self-reflection and self-discovery and is contrasted with external observation. Introspection generally provides a privileged access to one's own mental states, not mediated by other sources of knowledge, so that individual experience of the mind is unique. Introspection can determine any number of mental states including: sensory, bodily, cognitive, emotional and so forth. Introspection has been a subject of philosophical discussion for thousands of years. The philosopher Plato asked, "…why should we not calmly and patiently review our own thoughts, and thoroughly examine and see what these appearances in us really are?" While introspection is applicable to many facets of philosophical tho ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
2009 Non-fiction Books
9 (nine) is the natural number following and preceding . Evolution of the Arabic digit In the beginning, various Indians wrote a digit 9 similar in shape to the modern closing question mark without the bottom dot. The Kshatrapa, Andhra and Gupta started curving the bottom vertical line coming up with a -look-alike. The Nagari continued the bottom stroke to make a circle and enclose the 3-look-alike, in much the same way that the sign @ encircles a lowercase ''a''. As time went on, the enclosing circle became bigger and its line continued beyond the circle downwards, as the 3-look-alike became smaller. Soon, all that was left of the 3-look-alike was a squiggle. The Arabs simply connected that squiggle to the downward stroke at the middle and subsequent European change was purely cosmetic. While the shape of the glyph for the digit 9 has an ascender in most modern typefaces, in typefaces with text figures the character usually has a descender, as, for example, in . The mo ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Daniel Tammet
Daniel Tammet (born Daniel Paul Corney; 31 January 1979) is an English writer and savant. His memoir, ''Born on a Blue Day'' (2006), is about his early life with Asperger syndrome and savant syndrome, and was named a "Best Book for Young Adults" in 2008 by the American Library Association's ''Young Adult Library Services'' magazine. His second book, ''Embracing the Wide Sky'', was one of France's best-selling books of 2009. His third book, ''Thinking in Numbers'', was published in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton in the United Kingdom and in 2013 by Little, Brown and Company in the United States and Canada. His books have been published in over 20 languages. He was elected in 2012 to serve as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Personal life Tammet was born Daniel Paul Corney, the eldest of nine children, and raised in Barking and Dagenham, East London. As a young child, he had epileptic seizures, which remitted following medical treatment. He participated twice in the W ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of People With Synesthesia
This is a list of notable people who have claimed to have the neurological condition synesthesia. Following that, there is a list of people who are often wrongly believed to have had synesthesia because they used it as a device in their art, poetry or music (referred to as pseudo-synesthetes). Estimates of prevalence of synesthesia have ranged widely, from 1 in 4 to 1 in 25,000 – 100,000. However, most studies have relied on synesthetes reporting themselves, introducing self-referral bias. Media outlets including Pitchfork have critically noted the considerable numbers of musical artists from the 2010s onwards claiming to be synesthetes, observing that "without literally testing every person who comes out in the press as a synesthete, it’s exceedingly difficult to tell who has it and who is lying through their teeth for cultural cachet" and that claims of experiencing synesthesia can be employed "as an express route to creative genius". Synesthetes Pseudo-synesthetes ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
New Scientist
''New Scientist'' is a magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organisation publishes a monthly Dutch-language edition. First published on 22 November 1956, ''New Scientist'' has been available in online form since 1996. Sold in retail outlets (paper edition) and on subscription (paper and/or online), the magazine covers news, features, reviews and commentary on science, technology and their implications. ''New Scientist'' also publishes speculative articles, ranging from the technical to the philosophical. ''New Scientist'' was acquired by Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT) in March 2021. History Ownership The magazine was founded in 1956 by Tom Margerison, Max Raison and Nicholas Harrison as ''The New Scientist'', with Issue 1 on 22 November 1956, priced at one shilling (a twentieth of a pound in pre-decimal UK ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chromosome 16 (human)
Chromosome 16 is one of the 23 pairs of chromosomes in humans. People normally have two copies of this chromosome. Chromosome 16 spans about 90 million base pairs (the building material of DNA) and represents just under 3% of the total DNA in cells. Genes Number of genes The following are some of the gene count estimates of human chromosome 16. Because researchers use different approaches to genome annotation their predictions of the number of genes on each chromosome varies (for technical details, see gene prediction). Among various projects, the collaborative consensus coding sequence project ( CCDS) takes an extremely conservative strategy. So CCDS's gene number prediction represents a lower bound on the total number of human protein-coding genes. Gene list The following is a partial list of genes on human chromosome 16. For complete list, see the link in the infobox on the right. Diseases and disorders *Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) *Asperger syndr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jonah Lehrer
Jonah or Jonas, ''Yōnā'', "dove"; gr, Ἰωνᾶς ''Iōnâs''; ar, يونس ' or '; Latin: ''Ionas'' son of Amittai, is a prophet in the Hebrew Bible and the Quran, from Gath-hepher of the northern kingdom of Israel in about the 8th century BCE. Jonah is the central figure of the Book of Jonah, which details his reluctance in delivering God's judgement on the city of Nineveh. Subsequently he returns to the divine mission after he is swallowed by a large sea creature and then released. In Judaism, the story of Jonah represents the teaching of '' teshuva'', which is the ability to repent and be forgiven by God. In the New Testament, Jesus calls himself "greater than Jonah" and promises the Pharisees "the sign of Jonah", which is his resurrection. Early Christian interpreters viewed Jonah as a type for Jesus. Jonah is regarded as a prophet in Islam, and the biblical narrative of Jonah is repeated in the Quran. Mainstream Bible scholars generally regard the Book of Jonah ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Spandrel (biology)
In evolutionary biology, a spandrel is a phenotypic trait that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin brought the term into biology in their 1979 paper " The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme". Adaptationism is a point of view that sees most organismal traits as adaptive products of natural selection. Gould and Lewontin sought to temper what they saw as adaptationist bias by promoting a more structuralist view of evolution. The term "spandrel" originates from architecture, where it refers to the roughly triangular spaces between the top of an arch and the ceiling. Etymology The term was coined by Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould and population geneticist Richard Lewontin in their paper "The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" (1979). Ev ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Natural Selection
Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It is a key mechanism of evolution, the change in the heritable traits characteristic of a population over generations. Charles Darwin popularised the term "natural selection", contrasting it with artificial selection, which in his view is intentional, whereas natural selection is not. Variation exists within all populations of organisms. This occurs partly because random mutations arise in the genome of an individual organism, and their offspring can inherit such mutations. Throughout the lives of the individuals, their genomes interact with their environments to cause variations in traits. The environment of a genome includes the molecular biology in the cell, other cells, other individuals, populations, species, as well as the abiotic environment. Because individuals with certain variants of the trait tend to survive and reproduce more than individuals ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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