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There is a strong link between synesthesia and photographic memory (technically called eidetic memory) or at least heightened memory (hypermnesis). Many synesthetes used their synesthesia as a mnemonic aid.
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Richard E. Cytowic |
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When asked what good the trait does, synesthetes immediately answer, "It helps you remember." They do have measurably high memories,"
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Richard E. Cytowic |
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Michael was silent. "Too often," I said, "technology evokes a sense of wonder instead of understanding, and I think this makes it a corrosive force which sometimes requires opposition."
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Richard E. Cytowic |
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but I always had an incredibly intense sense of smell.
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Richard E. Cytowic |
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People with synesthesia have their senses hooked together," I started to explain. "They can hear colors or feel sounds. Yours is-well, it looks like you taste shapes."
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Richard E. Cytowic |
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For example, the bulk of federal Medicare insurance for the elderly is spent keeping people alive in their last six months, trying to prevent what cannot be prevented. That many recipients of this intervention do not judge the quality of their life in those last months to be satisfactory is a dilemma for which we have no solution.
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Richard E. Cytowic |
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although what is probably common to all religions is nothing more than the claim that something more exists than what we factually receive through our senses.
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Richard E. Cytowic |
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The only action we have to take is to decide whether we are going to stay closed or open up, accept experience as it is or rationalize it to death. This is what Joseph Campbell meant when he said that what we seek is not the meaning of life but the "experience of being alive."
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Richard E. Cytowic |
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Normal persons deprived of sensation progress from having mild to severe hallucinations, starting out with what looks very much like form constants (geometric patterns, mosaics, lines, rows of dots) and building to more developed, dream-like juxtapositions of perceptions the longer they remain in isolation.
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Richard E. Cytowic |
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Many of the Baptists and other thou-shalt-not fundamentalists around me insulated and distanced themselves from whatever opposed their world view. But Clark recognized the presence of evil, and immersed himself in the world while acknowledging its imperfections.
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Richard E. Cytowic |