Synesthesia is the blending of senses: where a stimulus for one sense such as sight or hearing, leads to the involuntary activation of another such as smell or touch. (For cognitive pathways in general). It comes in many forms, and the cause is still being debated. The main theory is that we are all born with synesthesia, and eventually lose the connective pathways until we only experience a stimulus in one particular area of the brain. People who experience these later in life are called synesthetes.
I've always been fascinated by this condition. I would think it would add another dimension to the world, and allow for creativity like it did for Kandinsky's art, or Duke Ellington's jazz (both said to have been synesthetes).
There are many different kinds: Grapheme-Color is the connection of numbers and letters to colors, and is the most common. Sound - Color is common as well, and is when people see colors when they hear sounds or music. All types of synesthesia are highly personal; each experiences their synesthesia their own way. For example, the letter P might be Blue to one person, or Purple to another, and it disturbs them to think of it any differently. (Which makes reading colored print difficult.) A girl in my gym class said her favorite number was something like 245 because of the color it was). In sound - color synesthetes, the sound which produces a certain color may vary. Some experience a color for a specific pitch (such as a B flat) or for a certain key of music ("C minor is dark green!") or for a specific instrument (One man describes french horns as an awful color, so refuses to listen to symphonies that feature that instrument.) Other even stranger types include personification (ordered sequences have personalities), and lexical gustatory (words to taste) synesthesia.
The gender stereotypes we associate with worn traditions and out of date policies are not a thing of the past. The roles of male and female are just as pronounced now as they were 100 years ago, and in some ways even more so. Although there are now equal voting rights and supposed equal opportunity, females and males are still placed in different categories for separate strengths and weaknesses simply based on their gender rather than their ability. In her book Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine explains the significance of modern technology and research in pushing the legitimacy of the genetic differences between genders instead of proving them wrong. She lays out facts where science went wrong, and insists that the vast majority of the gender stereotypes are purely a creation of the environment. While Fine can be overly dismissive of many scientific discoveries, her points arguing the prevailing notions of gender uncover the truly sexist society we live in. Although some physical differences of gender are based on genetics, the “mind” cannot be categorized from birth only by innate differences in sex. Such baseless judgment appears as if we are fighting another civil rights battle where “separate but equal is inherently unequal,” even while our society should be far past that.
When I was young, I rejected all the pink flowery dresses and baby dolls my grandmother showered me with. I was what society calls a tomboy, but in my mind I was just a kid. Parents expect children to exhibit gender roles from an early age, and many only encourage behavior that is typical for their child’s sex. A girl plays with dolls because “it’s only natural”, while if a boy played with the same toy, it would be taken away and the child would learn to avoid it. These children are also, like me, only exposed to the toys that associated with our gender. The gender schema theory explains this phenomenon by saying that children learn the concept of male and female from their cultures, and change their behavior to fit those roles. The result is a positive feedback cycle of boys and girls that are exposed to a set of behaviors specific to their gender, who grow up to be adults who act same way. Fine says, “Gender associations are automatically activated and we perceive them through the filter of cultural beliefs and norms. This is sexism gone underground – unconscious and unintended”. In the question of the nature and nurture in raising a child, Fine argues that nurture overtakes nature, and we grow up to become what society expects.
Even if our genes make our bodies different, and our environment tells us who we should be, there is something striking about the fact that we instantly judge someone for the gender we are. There is so much more to being an individual than just being a female, and no person has the right to deny or exclude someone from a position only on the basis of sex, as many people are. We are a product of both nature and nurture, but we are also each our own person. We are stuck in a battle between our conscious politically correct selves and our unconscious sexist ones, yet still trying to find a concrete biological answer to hold on to. I wonder how we can still assume brain type by gender when so many times successful female scientists, or empathetic stay at home fathers have proved us wrong. Unfortunately, unless society can forget centuries of predispositions and stereotypes that have shaped our culture, it will be impossible to raise children who do not adhere to at least some social gender characteristics, and people will always think of you in the context of your gender.
Fine, Cordelia. Delusions of Gender: How our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, 2010
There is something intriguing about the mental hospitals of past times. The curiosity in the people housed there, the disgust at the treatment of patients, or simply the fear that we may be crazy enough to be stuck in one ourselves. The grim notions that are so tied to the idea of an asylum now are stark contrast to the intentions of the people who pioneered the effort to build these facilities. The idea that with special attention and care, they could help the mentally unstable, and make the treatment available to anyone who needed it.
From mid-nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, the United States built hundreds of public institutions for the insane, and thousands of Americans were treated. There were asylums everywhere across the country to remove these "disturbed" people from society, to help them heal and push them to reenter the world. While a noble cause, the scientific knowledge needed to truly help their patients was still not available, and the public started seeing these hospitals as negative places of practice.
Even while in the height of their existence, asylums had bad critics like Ken Kesey who wrote One Flew Over the Cuckoo's nest, a novel primarily focusing on the evils of state hospitals, and the bureaucracy that controls the lives of the patients. He questioned the use of electroshock therapy, lobotomy, and other treatments, and portrayed them as punishment rather than remedy in his novel. This era was the beginning of the end of state-run institutions.
Eventually new drugs and a shift in policy helped lessen the patient population in these hospitals, and they soon lost funding and importance in American society. After the peak of the 50's, the era of deinstitutionalization saw very few of these asylums survive. Many of the beautifully built, immense buildings are still standing, but are of no use to us because of the distinctive nature in which they were structured, and the stigma attached to their history. Now, with peeling paint and rotting machinery, they are scarier than ever, and remind us of a place that nobody wants to end up.
Payne, Christopher; Oliver Sacks. Asylum: Inside the closed world of State Mental Hospitals. Cambridge MA: MIT press, 2009.
The more we know about human mannerisms, the easier it is to make technology perform the same feats. A simple blink of an eye, a tilt of the head, or vocal sound is interpreted by humans in an instant, even though we consciously aren't aware of it. This makes programming computers to understand nearly impossible, however we are getting closer. Golan Levin, a self-described artist and engineer, describes his work in art that works with the simplest of human movement and speech.
"No - yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever - or else swoon to death."
- John Keats, from "Bright Star."
This sonnet was Keats' last, written while traveling to Italy where he died at the young age of 25. It was written about the love he had for Fanny Brawne, whom he had just bid goodbye for the last time. While tragic, the poem shows hope for a lasting love, something that would live beyond himself.
After watching the portrayal of Keats' love and death in the movie Bright Star, I wondered about the true nature of love after death, how that such earthly connection stay so strong when those attached are so far away. I wondered, of course, but thats still a little to heavy for me. Its enough to wonder what love is in general. For me, as well as nature's purpose for the strong emotion.
There are explanations that have been tested, of course. Formulas, chemicals, and results that define love to a science. One of the more famous being Harry Harlow's monkeys, showing the need for touch in a young animal's childhood.
He explained the connection created between a mother and child through not only basic needs, but through a deeper attachment that lives longer than the young's need for food and protection.
Is it the same for mates as well as familial connections though? The touch cannot be the only thing holding us together. Not even Harlow's monkeys could survive through a normal life after being subjected to only touch. He added motion to the equation, and the monkeys got slightly better, but could not function well with others of their kind. They would not reproduce. Did they lack some basic requirement for farther love, love that could translate to real monkeys, not some stuffed dummy. And this poses another question, if these factors are the requirements for a connection to form, how do we still love those who have died? Those who have moved away? If we can't see them, or touch them, we can still love them. Brawne was said to have mourned Keats' death for 6 years, much longer than the touch could stay on the skin. The human mind is shaped by much more than a simple set of rules. We call upon our memories, and we still love just the same.
And although we can find the pieces of the puzzle, we will all still asking "what is love?" (baby don't hurt me...)
In 1968 during the Vietnam War, American soldiers shot at, raped, and killed villagers in a suspected Viet Cong stronghold without warning, and without any resistance from the vietnamese. The My Lai massacre wasn't heard of in America for over a year, but when word spread back to the homeland, the public was in outrage. How could our own soldiers be so heartless to shoot harmless villagers? They didn't fight back, couldn't they see the horrors they were committing? Didn't these men have morals?
The issue, however, is not with the soldiers' morals, but with the force of their authority. A soldier is trained to fire when their officers tell them to, but this action is already imbedded deep within our minds. We have the unwavering desire to obey, even if we "know" what we are doing is wrong.
In 1961, even before the My Lai massacre occurred, professor of psychology at Yale Stanley Milgram wanted to study this fascinating human need to obey the commands of authority. He wanted to see if there was any correlation between gender, race, or background and the desire to follow orders. He created a fake 'shock machine' and hired an actor to feign death after a certain shock level. Then, he found volunteers to participate in what they thought was a test of learning. Instead, they were being tested on their ability to rebel.
When brought into a room, they were told by who they thought was the doctor running the experiment, to shock the man on the other side of the glass with an increasing voltage each time they answered a question incorrectly. They heard the screams coming from across the glass, the man in pain telling them to stop. However, the doctor assured them that the man would be fine, and urged them to continue. After a certain level, the man behind the glass slumped over, seemingly dead.
62%-65% in Milgrams experiment followed orders of credible authority to the point of lethally harming someone. Even those who answered that they would never kill another, that they knew it was wrong, were among those who 'murdered' that man. That is how susceptible to orders humans are.
That is what happened to the men at My Lai. Officers told the men to shoot at the enemy, so they shot. Any rebellion, if it occurred, was repressed, "when one soldier refused to fire, his commanding officer, Lieutenant William Calley, threatened to report him for disobeying an officer's order." The atmosphere was prime for human nature to be revealed.
There is some hope, however. Individuals who had participated in Milgram's experiment reported back that they had in fact learned from the experience, and now checked themselves instead of simply following orders. While the names of the participants in the experiment have not been released, there is a story that one man ended up being a soldier at My Lai, and was one of the few to refuse to shoot.
What does this mean for us? Are we slaves to our awful human nature, or do we have a chance to choose to be good? 35% of unknowing participants did refuse. If we don't ever doubt our beliefs, can we always do good? Or is that not enough? All we can do now is learn from our past mistakes, and see to it another tragedy such as My Lai can't occur again.
Patrick Rothfuss: The Name of the Wind (Kingkiller Chronicles, Day 1)
Christopher Payne: Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals
Lauren Slater: Opening Skinner's Box: Great Psychological Experiments of the Twentieth Century
Daniel J. Levitin: This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
