Presenting the fact and fiction of tomorrow since 2001
Apparently for real, from PC maker Asus:
Floral Blossom is pink with a flowery smell; Musky Black sports graffiti art and emits an earthy musk; Morning Dew comes in pastel green and offers that refreshing early a.m. je ne sais quoi; and Aqua Ocean gives off an aquatic aroma and comes with sky and wave imagery on the cover.
MediaBistro, unimpressed:
I can’t wait to get on a plane in a middle seat in coach surrounded by this stuff.
[Floral by Asus]
Synesthesia is that odd blending-together of senses. Those of us who don’t have it would probably pay to “taste” shapes or “hear” colors, at least temporarily. A new form of synesthesia has been discovered: “hearing-motion.” Cal Tech researchers set out to create a task in which synesthetes would have the advantage.
The researchers presented four self-professed synesthetes and 10 nonsynesthetes with 100 pairs of Morse code–like rhythmic sequences, each composed of either auditory beeps or flashes of white on a black background. The participants judged whether the two sequences in each pair were the same or different.
Both groups judged auditory patterns accurately about 85 percent of the time, the researchers report in the August 5 issue of Current Biology. On the visual trials, nonsynesthetes’ judgments fell to nearly chance levels, a result that corroborates other research showing that most people are better at judging auditory patterns than assessing visual patterns. In contrast, synesthetes—who reported hearing sounds such as beeps or taps in time with the visual signals—distinguished matching from nonmatching rhythms 75 percent of the time.
The writer’s assignment is to invent a job in which synesthesia would be a requirement.
[Story: Scientific American; image: Charkrem]
I’ve got an enduring interest in the use of technology to overcome deficiencies of the human form (as regular readers will doubtless already be aware), but I’m equally fascinated by the ways that the same problems can be overcome with what you might describe as the "vanilla hardware configuration" - in other words, working around the problem without any external assistance. The human body and brain are astonishingly adaptable - witness Ben Underwood, a blind teenager who has taught himself to "see" using echolocation.
