Brains with tasty words and colorful days.
Plus, a popular drug with a poison in it. And an update on how things are going at Mastodon
No two brains are wired exactly the same way, and therefore everyone’s reality is also different. This week, in my column for Hindustan Times, I talk about synesthesia, which is a state in which two or more senses are connected.
In Synesthesia (published by MIT Press) Dr. Richard E Cytowic writes -
A synesthete, as we call these otherwise-normal individuals, might not only hear my voice but also see it, taste it, or feel it as a physical touch… Because they are often ridiculed or disbelieved, they tend to keep their extraordinary perceptions to themselves.
And now, it is estimated it is estimated that around 4% of the population has the basis for some form of synesthesia.
Seeing days of week in colors seems to be one of the most frequent forms of synesthesia. Along with colorful representations of numbers and letters, these are known as graphemes.
Someone else might experience a voice as a sound or a physical touch. In The Man Who Tasted Words, Dr. Guy Leschiziner describes a man who experiences different tastes at different London Underground stations. Passing through Tottenham Court Road, he tasted eggs, sausage, and toast.
While this form of synesthesia is relatively uncommon, it is not unheard of. The Russian mnemonist Solomon Shereshevsky could not read newspapers while eating breakfast because the taste of words interfered with that of food. Shereshevsky also had an incredible memory, and this inability to forget interfered with his daily life.
As I write in my column —
Synesthesia is not a disease. Rather, those of us who lack this superpower should be thankful for synesthetes for showing the wide range of human experiences that are possible.
Very early in life, many parts of an infant’s brain are connected. Some of these connections will be maintained through life. Others will be pruned. A brain has to be assembled, but in the process, it also disassembles itself. How a brain develops depends not only on the genes that are inherited, but also on experiences. The brain remains hyperconnected, but differences in brains can led to differences in perceptions.
Much remains to be learned about synesthesia, including what purpose these traits serve and why they have been kept in the human gene pool. Cytowic believes that synesthesia in all its manifestations is a genetic embodiment of the human capacity for metaphors. “We all share the same world but a different texture of reality,” he writes.
Acceptance of synesthesia shows how far neuroscience has come. It was thought only a few decades ago, that the brain consisted of distinct modules. Now, we know that there is an enormous amount of cross-connection in the brain. Senses are not all separately formed and disconnected from one another. They are connected in all of us, and in synesthetes they’re connected in exceptional ways.
The common drug with a poison in it
It was one of the world’s most popular drugs. I’ll wager that you or someone you know routinely took ranitidine (better known as Zantac or Zintac, depending on the country) for hyperacidity or peptic ulcer. The drug was well-tolerated and available without a prescription. It was approved for use everywhere.
And then a small analytical chemistry company did some chemical testing on some rantidine that was on the shelf and found that over time the small-molecule drug broke down into a possible cancer-causing compound. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now banned Zantac in the US and it isn’t available in Europe either.
Here’s an incredibly interesting podcast on the small company that made the shocking discovery and the resistance they faced from the FDA. If you have access to Bloomberg, you can also read the full article published yesterday.
After listening, you have to wonder: how many other drugs and personal care products might have potentially unsafe compounds in them?
An update on how my little social media experiment is going
Last week I quit Twitter and joined Mastodon. In a little over a week, I’ve met scientists from multiple disciplines, historians, engineers, and artists who I did not know before.
I had over 17,000 followers on the birdsite, but hardly anyone cared about what I said. With 1% of the followers I’m getting more engagement with 0% obnoxious replies or quote-tweets (I hated that birdsite feature since it was used mainly for performative posturing to show your own followers how you’re better than some stranger you’ve never met).
There is no algorithmic sorting so I see only the posts of those I follow. And I see all of their posts. Posts are only searchable by hashtags so I will not spend 10 minutes blocking rando antivaxxers every time I post vaccine updates.
You’re expected to collapse your threads so you don’t clog timelines. You provide text for readers for your photos so its inclusive. You get 500-characters (which is especially useful for verbose people like me who prefer to write in full sentences with punctuation). It is recommended that posts on mastodon that reference politics, war, disease, crime, and other topics that might cause others anxiety are hidden with a “content warning” label so people can choose to see them or not.
Mastodon is not for everyone. And frankly, I don’t want everyone to head over and overpower the servers (called instances) either. It’s like a tropical island now.
We’re on the beach chilling while cynical and angry people are burning down the other place. Anyway, its only been a week, and things might change soon. But so far I love it. I get the same feeling from when I was on the message boards late at night in college. It finally feels like I’ve found social media that values actual human communication over rage-piling, celebrity chasing, and narcissistic self-promotion.
In the past week, Twitter laid off 3,500 people and Meta 11,000. It kind of shocked me that Mastodon was built by one self-effacing guy.
[Rochko] was a 24-year-old college student, months away from graduating from a university in central Germany. So Rochko decided to build his own social network. He created the framework for Mastodon in his spare time, accepting donations from benefactors from Patreon, who were similarly interested in a Twitter alternative that returned power to the people. In 2016, shortly after graduation, he launched Mastodon to the masses.
You can find my science posts on mastodon @anirban@fediscience.org and my other stuff at @anirbanM@mastodon.social.
What else I’ve read
Meditation is effective against anxiety.
Sports might have a concussion problem that some doctors are hiding under the rug.
The carnivorous plant that became an obsession.