Hey Beans, how you doing?
It's Steve.
I had to share this with you.
I've been very fortunate, in part from some
of the students of the previous time I taught the MOOC, I won a teaching award.
In fact it's the highest level for teaching in Canada which is kind of heavy,
kind of cool and one of the things they did is brought those of us who won,
there's about seven of us, and brought us together at beautiful Banff Alberta,
Canada, which is just getting into the Rockies, so
what you see behind me are the Canadian Rockies, and it's just a gorgeous area.
All of us are together, talking about teaching and
talking a little bit about you guys, the beans, and other things.
So, I thought I'd use this as a nice opportunity to shoot a little
side dish video.
And I'm going to be taking off one the discussion forums posts about
synesthesia which is a really interesting condition
that kind of tells us a little bit about memory as well.
So here's what synesthesia is.
Some people their brains seem to be sort of cross-wired in weird ways so
that when they see certain numbers or letters or words, those numbers,
letters or words are associated with sounds or tastes or colors.
So let's use this as the example we'll kind of talk about.
There's a synesthete, that's what we call these people, that's been studied a lot at
University of Waterloo by somebody named Phillip Mericle.
And Lance Bolick both worked with him quite a bit, and this individual,
when you presented them numbers, saw the numbers in very specific colors.
So they would say things to you like, if you showed them the number 13,
they would say, 13, that's a red, almost pink.
And for the rest of us, it's kind of confusing.
What do you mean it's a red, almost pink?
And they say, well, that's just what it is.
If you show me 49 that's a dark blue and every number seems to have a unique
color that it literally evokes in their mind and they see that number in a color.
And when people hear about this their like I don't know that sounds a little bizarre.
So one of the neat things that Marigold and
Smellig did with their synesthete, is they had him not just describe these colors but
use a tool, like PowerPoint, you can do this in, for example, to mix red, green,
and blue on a certain occasion in such a way so that it mimicked the color.
So for example, 13, if they said 13 was a reddish-pink,
they would mix colors until they made a little patch.
And I said yeah, that's the color right there, the reddish-pink.
And so they had them do that for a number of different numbers.
You know, what colors are associated with these numbers.
Then they had them go away, and
then they had them come back to the lab again months later and do it again.
And the point of that was, you know, if this was real, if they
really do see those colors, then they should be able to reproduce them later.
because it's the stimulus that's evoking it, not a memory of the stimulus, or
a memory of the color.
So, they did that, the people came back, they did the task again, and, sure enough,
they matched it really, really well.
So, we certainly believe, from studies like that, that this is a real phenomenon.
Some people taste words.
Other people hear faces.
I think I heard of someone hearing faces.