Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #synesthesia
Most recents (2)
[1/4] Augustus Owsley Stanley III, aka "Bear," was born OTD in 1935. Perhaps best known for making the LSD that fueled the Summer of Love (thus inspiring the Steely Dan song "Kid Charlemagne"), Bear was much more than that. [📸Amalie Rothschild] 
[2/4] As sound man and mentor to @GratefulDead, Bear began the practice of taping the band every night so they could learn from their own performances. #Deadheads turned that into a global community. Bear's Sonic Journals also captured many other bands with astonishing clarity.
[3/4] Bear's innovative concepts for the @GratefulDead's sound system (based in his experiences of #synesthesia, and culminating in the awesome-sounding but impractical "Wall of Sound" in 1974) transformed modern concert sound for the whole rock-touring industry. [📸Kirk West]
#NeuroThursday is back this week to talk about the #neuroscience of #synesthesia. What does it mean for a letter to have an intrinsic color, for a number to have a distance? And why the heck would this trait evolve in humankind?
Synesthesia is when "stimulation of one sense automatically provokes a secondary perception in another." The secondary perception can be direct ("9's are red") or associative ("9's make me think of red"), either counts.
Synesthesia comes in countless forms, but color-based are the most frequent. The most well-known is "grapheme-color" synesthesia, where a grapheme (written shape, e.g. letter or numeral) has a color - like the opening picture.
