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"Bring science home" all
Written by | Ah Xian
Quasimodo by the River
The brain, a complex and delicate organ, each of its parts is like an elaborate puzzle piece that together form a coherent and efficient whole. Many scientists are trying to figure out bugs in the brain, such as turning the world upside down and seeing how the brain reacts.
Adapting to the upside-down world
When you were in the second grade of elementary school, you learned that light passing through a convex lens would result in an inverted, zoomed out real image. In other words, our eyes have been giving the brain an upright image, so what if some technology was used to make the eyes see an upright image?
In 1931, Theodor Erismann, a professor at the University of Innsbruck, pioneered the complete reversal of his vision by his assistant and student Ivo Kohler. The two co-produced a documentary, and Kohler later wrote about his findings, so that we could later know what would happen if the world was turned upside down. First, the professor had Kohler put on a special pair of goggles. Inside the goggles, there is a specially arranged mirror that flips the normal light inside Kohler's eyes, making the top a bottom and the bottom a top.
Kohler wearing special goggles
References[5]
At first, Kohler had difficulty trying to grasp the objects handed to him, and often fell when going around a chair or walking down stairs. In a simple fencing match, Kohler would raise his sword high on a low attack and lower it on a high stab. According to Kohler's description, seeing smoke from a match, or a balloon floating up and down on a string, could make him disorient for a moment.
But over the next week, Kohler found himself adapting to the sights on and off. Ten days later, he is accustomed to the forever upside-down world and can do his daily activities in public, such as walking along crowded sidewalks or even cycling around the city limits of Innsbruck.
Upside-Down World in Goggles|References[5]
After Erisman and Kohler, many scholars did similar experiments, all of them with similar results, and the experimenters were eventually able to adapt to the upside-down world in the mirror. These studies demonstrate how well our brains can adapt to change and learn new ways of visual-motor coordination, including the correct processing of sensory inputs (e.g., vision) and the correct execution of movements (muscle movements), but the reasons are not yet known.
Scientists have filed a patent for this inverted goggle, which can be used to prevent motion sickness and even to train space abilities during astronaut training to adapt to space travel in advance. ｜wiki
Hear the color?
Do you see certain letters or numbers and see a certain color at the same time, or do you feel the flavor of a melody when you hear certain music? It sounds like a superpower, but there are such people in the world. This phenomenon of "the phenomenon in which one sense, when stimulated, causes a response from another sense" is called synesthesia.
The first recorded synesthete was Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs, an Austrian physician who recounted his personal experience in 1812 that language and music are colored. With the deepening of the understanding of synesthesia, people began to understand this phenomenon gradually.
Black letters or numbers on a white background seen by the average human eye may be this phenomenon in the eyes of synaesthetes. ｜wiki
In the fields of literature, painting, and music, many people would admit themselves to being "synaesthetes". For example, the painters Claude Monet and Vincent van Gogh have described their own experiences of synesthesia. Physicist Richard Feynman has Grapheme-color synesthesia, which helps him write and memorize equations.
Musician Caitlin Horva claims to have timbre synesthesia, where sound triggers the vision of colors and shapes. "For me, every sound is a color and shape, and it has a place in space," she says, "and I never realized I was different until a music teacher at university mentioned that some people are able to see sound through the naked eye." Until then, she simply thought that everyone could do that.
To help show others her color perception, Khova and her husband designed a 3D-printed violin that emits the colors she sees when each note is played. References[6]
Some people also have mirror-touch synesthesia, which is a true form of "empathy": when a synesthete sees someone being touched, it also evokes their own sense of touch, making them feel like they are being touched. It is estimated that about 1.6~2.5% of people will have mirror tactile synesthesia. Also, people with mirror-touch synaesthetes have a higher level of empathy and richer emotions than those who don't.
Others have a lexical-gustatory synesthesia: this is one of the rarer types of synesthesia, accounting for about 0.2% of the population, and refers to the sense that a synesthete perceives a particular sense of smell or taste when a person hears certain words. For example, words pronounced as "eh" or "mmm" taste minty, while those pronounced as "aye" tend to taste bacon.
A Word-Taste Aesthete, Don made a map of the Toronto subway in which he replaced the station names with the flavors he tasted. Oxford Circus station becomes Oxtail Soup, Waterloo becomes Fizzy Water and Kilburn High Road becomes Rancid Meat. ｜wiki
However, different people experience synesthesia differently – one synaesthete may perceive the letter "A" as red, and another may perceive "A" as blue. Since the sound of a word determines its taste, synaesthetes who speak a non-English language may have completely different word-taste associations.
How to explain the phenomenon of synesthesia, there are many theories in the scientific community. One view is that synesthesia may be related to the differentiation of sensory regions during brain development. Early in life, differentiation between sensory areas of the brain may be incomplete, resulting in some neuronal pathways being preserved when they should be weakened or lost, triggering synesthesia.
It is difficult for the average person to find a "2" from the left image, but in the eyes of a letter-color synesthete, the left image and the right image are just as easy to distinguish. ｜wiki
A team of researchers at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom believes that all people are likely to be synaesthetes at first, but with different levels of strength. From birth to 6 months of age, the various perceptual abilities are fused together, and their nervous system is not yet mature, at this stage, the linkage between the various neurons and brain regions is very strong.
Therefore, for a baby, the mother's voice can be both beautiful colors and warm aromas. This phenomenon will gradually disappear when the function of the nervous system gradually becomes perfect.
Resources:
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/12/learning/hearing-colors-and-tasting-sounds-what-is-synesthesia.html
[2]https://www.theguardian.com/education/2012/nov/12/improbable-research-seeing-upside-down
[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetrachromacy
[4]https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3222625/
[5]https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=2870674376285159
[6]https://www.cbc.ca/natureofthings/features/meet-three-people-who-may-see-the-world-completely-differently-than-you-do