Richard Cytowic's Big Book o' Brain Things is beginning to annoy me. All the technical neurology is fascinating and useful, but he keeps poking at things and getting interesting results, then wandering away and forgetting about them again, probably because they're not strictly synaesthesia and therefore not romantic enough.
z. B.: A suspiciously high proportion of synaesthetics report that they have a crap sense of direction and/or some variety of crippling inability to decipher maps. So do I, sort of. I'm neither ignorant nor dyslexic here; I can read the map, and I know perfectly well what it says. My memory isn't pixel-perfect photographic -- pretty much nobody's is -- but it is eidetic, and I can retain thumbnails of stuff I look up on Google Maps just fine. The problem is that I have a hell of a time orienting myself in 3D space using a 2D representation. I have the snapshot image and I know I need to turn east on Main Street, but fuck me if I know whether …
z. B.: A suspiciously high proportion of synaesthetics report that they have a crap sense of direction and/or some variety of crippling inability to decipher maps. So do I, sort of. I'm neither ignorant nor dyslexic here; I can read the map, and I know perfectly well what it says. My memory isn't pixel-perfect photographic -- pretty much nobody's is -- but it is eidetic, and I can retain thumbnails of stuff I look up on Google Maps just fine. The problem is that I have a hell of a time orienting myself in 3D space using a 2D representation. I have the snapshot image and I know I need to turn east on Main Street, but fuck me if I know whether …