Philomathia: brain stuff

So, my Dictionary.com word of the day the other day was philomath: a lover of learning. It came with a great quote from Aldous Huxley, "It is precisely for the philomaths that universities ought to cater." And, yeah.

I was listening to a story on Science Friday a few weeks ago about a woman who didn't experience fear due to lesions on her amygdala. I guess Nature reported on the story years ago saying she couldn't recognize the facial expression of fear but that's only the tip of the iceberg. 

The Changing World did a series on the mysteries of the brain in December which I'm just now getting around to listening to. They discussed among other things how the brain combines sensory information together without being picky about where it comes from, which is why when you watch a movie in a theatre you think the words are emanating from the screen. And how our sensory input can mislead us according to one researcher who is working on the connection between taste and our other senses. He tricked a group of oenophiles (in fact the more people knew about wine, the more easier they were fooled) by taking a white wine and coloring it red. The wine experts started smelling chocolate and tobacco notes that they didn't smell when the wine was white. And how closely related hearing and taste are, which is kind of freaky. Our experience of how stale a potato chip is as much about mouth feel as about the crunch sound.

What was most interesting though is their discussion of synesthesia, which kind of fascinates me anyways. They spoke to a BBC presenter that had it. A doctor who is studying it believes this condition emanates from a part of the temporal lobe called the fusiform gyrus. I knew Kandinsky (the founder of the Blue Rider) was believed to have synesthesia but apparently Nabokov had it as well. This would be especially useful for a writer as metaphor and synesthesia appear to be closely related. This all makes me think of one of my favorite studies, the bouba/kiki effect. It's no coincidence that there are certain phonological similarities in world languages, such as the word for mother frequently starting with or containing the "m" sound. And the words for small things often containing the "ee" sound (like "tiny" or "little" in English versus "kaleel" in Arabic, for example.)

I switched over to the Trebuchet font because it's more pleasing and round and friendly to my eyes. However, if I were to make my choice based on logic rather than aethetics, I should choose an less visually pleasing font according to recent research that ugly fonts increase the reader's data retention. So, this would have been a better choice.