I’ve always been sort of fascinated by synthesia. A brain with a predilection to mix colors and letters and days and feelings and smells sounds kinda trippy. I’ve always thought (and I think I may have read somewhere) that it seems like a very rich way to experience life. I mean, confusion is orange? I don’t even have a way to relate to what that means, except through certain experiences from my college days. A recent web article writes about synthesia and some current theories (they still don’t really know what causes it). One interesting theory

All of us are able to perceive the world as a unified whole because there is a complex interaction between the senses in the brain, the thinking goes. Ordinarily, these interconnections are not explicitly experienced, but in the brains of synesthetes, “those connections are ‘unmasked’ and can enter conscious awareness,” said Megan Steven, a neuroscientist at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Because this unmasking theory relies on neural connections everyone has, it may explain why certain drugs, like LSD or mescaline, can induce synesthesia in some individuals.

One thing I’m curious about is how different (and how similar) the experiences of different “synthetes” is. The article mentions this a little bit. For example, a lot of synthetes associate colors with letters. But for some, they see the color in their minds’ eye. Others see the color sort of painted onto the physical letter. One synthete responded via a comment to the article above that the colors he sees associated with letters are completely different from those for others.

One synthete writes:

Not only do the colors vary from person to person, but the associations too. I see not only colors for letters and numbers, but gender too, which isn’t something I’ve seen discussed in articles like these. The letter “A” is not only red for me, but also very strongly female. Also, I see the year as a kind of pie chart around me (its orientation is synchronous), and numbers, especially the first 10 integers, have a very particular spacial position.

And another replies:

For me the colour is only the start – there’s a whole complex series of moods and associations that follow on from the first ‘hit’ of colour. This is particularly strong with peoples names.
An additional observation – often the colour of the word id bizarrely out of whack with the real colour of the object. So, for me, ‘tree’ has no trace of green or brown or any other ‘tree’ colour – it’s a soft grey, fading to creamy yellow at the end.

Interesting stuff, but hard (though not impossible) to study, being based on subjective experience.

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I’ve posted a new episode of my Science Teaching Tips podcast featuring one of our all-time favorite activities at the Exploratorium. Our math enthusiast Lori Lambertson helps us answer the question — what would Barbie look like if she were my height? Some of the answers may surprise you!

Click this link to check it out:
37. Scaling Up Barbie

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This myth appears in a bunch of textbooks, so it’s not surprising that it’s persisted. The myth is that we mostly taste sweetness, bitterness, saltiness, and sourness at different areas of the tongue. While it’s true that we do have different taste sensations on different areas of the tongue, the exact distribution of sensitivity depends on the particular person doing the tasting. Try this out with a few friends — make your own taste maps and see if they coincide or not. The original myth stems back to the early 1900’s when a German reseacher named Hanig published data on taste sensitivity of different areas of the tongue. The differences in sensitivity he reported were real — but they were so slight as to be of no practical significance. Nobody bothered to check or refute it until many years later, when the idea was already firmly rooted in our popular consciousness, and textbooks.

Some other interesting tidbits about taste:

- These four basic “tastes” have been expanded to five. The fifth is called “umami” which loosely translates from Japanese to “deliciousness.” It’s the flavor of amino acides (such as meat broth, aged cheese, or glutamate, as in monosodium glutamate, or MSG; ) which explains why things with MSG taste so good. There’s also some debate about a sixth receptor for fat.

- Your nose plays a huge role in what you taste. If you plug your nose it can be difficult to tell the difference between a potato and an apple. That’s why things taste bland when you have a cold and your nose is stuffed up.

- Taste buds are clusters of taste receptors. The taste buds themselves are too small to see, but they live on the end of little protrusions of tissue called papillae. You can see your papillae easily by dropping a few drops of food coloring on your tongue (blue works best). The pale dots are the papillae. Taste receptors are activated when chemicals in food bind to them, the taste receptor then fires and sends a message to your brain. Within a few seconds the taste receptor adapts to the flavor and fires much less strongly.

- Your taste sensations depend on the temperature of your tongue! That’s why Ben & Jerry’s serves its ice cream slightly warm in its tasting room, to enhance its sweetness.

For more information, see:

Bartoshuk, L. M. 1993. The biological basis of food perception and acceptance. Food Qual. Pref. 4:21-32

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OK, sure, that’s a boring title for a post. But this list represents THE most accepted principles of how people learn. We all learn, even if we’re not in school, and knowing how you can learn better is very useful. And for teachers, this represents the distilled knowledge of how you can help your students. We are very interested in specific ideas of how to use any of these principles in practice in the classroom — that is the challenge!

This list comes from the Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, ©2007, Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence, Carnegie Mellon, http://www.cmu.edu/teaching/
PDF of this document, containing references

The following list presents the basic principles that underlie effective learning. These principles are
distilled from research from a variety of disciplines.

1. Prior knowledge can help or hinder learning. Prior knowledge is the lens through which we view
all new information. If that lens is inaccurate, incomplete, or nai?ve, it can interfere with or distort the
integration of incoming information (Clement, 1982; NRC, 2000). Consequently, it is important for us to
know and address the misconceptions students hold, and to connect new information to accurate
information they already possess.

2. Motivation generates, directs, and sustains learning behavior. Motivation influences the amount of
time and effort students devote to learning and supports their continued engagement when difficulties
arise. Motivation may be influenced by a number of factors, such as students’ interests, goals, and
expectations (Hidi and Renninger, 2004; Bandura, 1989; Carver and Scheier, 1990), students’ beliefs
about learning (Schommer, 1994, Dweck, 2002), and emotional experiences surrounding the learning
context. In addition, students learn best when the classroom environment provides a balance between
support and challenge (Kuh et.al., 2005). Finally, knowledge itself can be a powerful motivator – the
more students know, the more they want to know.

3.The way students organize knowledge determines how they use it. Knowledge representations that
accurately reflect the concepts, the relationships among them and the contexts of use, enable students to
retrieve and apply knowledge both effectively and efficiently. Our knowledge representations in turn
shape further learning (diSessa, 1982; Holyoak, 1984; NCR, 2000). When knowledge is organized
according to superficial features, when the connections are inaccurate, or if the representation is a set of
disconnected and isolated concepts, students can fail to retrieve or appropriately apply their knowledge.
We need to help students learn to organize knowledge the way experts do, around core concepts or big
ideas that guide expert thinking about our domain, and we need to identify and correct students’
disconnected information and inaccurate links.

4. Meaningful engagement is necessary for deeper learning. Meaningful engagement, such as posing
and answering meaningful questions about concepts, making analogies, or attempting to apply the
concepts or theories to solve problems, leads to more elaborate, longer lasting, and stronger
representations of the knowledge (Craik and Lockhart, 1972). By forming more connections to related
ideas, these activities increase the likelihood that students will be able to retrieve and use the concepts and
skills when they are relevant.

5. Mastery involves developing component skills and knowledge, and synthesizing and applying
them appropriately. Many activities that faculty believe require a single skill (for example, writing or
problem solving) actually involve a synthesis of many component skills Anderson et al. (1989). To
master these complex skills, students must practice and gain proficiency in the discrete component skills
(for writing this may involve identifying an argument, enlisting appropriate evidence, organizing
paragraphs, etc; for problem solving it may require defining the parameters of the problem, choosing
appropriate formulas, etc.) To perform complex tasks, students must also practice and gain proficiency in
synthesis, in other words organizing and integrating component skills into a coherent whole. Finally,
students must understand the conditions and contexts of application and must practice applying skills and
knowledge appropriately in new contexts, otherwise they may have difficulty transferring knowledge and
skills learned in one context or another (Singley, 1989).

6. Goal-directed practice and targeted feedback are critical to learning. Goal-directed practice
involves working toward a specific level of performance and continually monitoring performance relative
to clearly define goals. When these goals are explicitly communicated to students, they guide and support
students’ purposeful practice and help students monitor their progress. In addition, students’ practice is
more effective when instructors (a) provide feedback that explicitly relates students’ performance to the
criteria, (b) ensure that the feedback is timely, frequent, and constructive, and (c) provide opportunities
for them to incorporate that feedback into further practice. (NRC 2001; Wiggins 1998). Instructor
feedback can come via formal (e.g., quizzes, papers, exams) and informal (e.g., classroom activities)
assessments.

7. Students must learn to monitor, evaluate and adjust their approaches to learning to become self-
directed learners. In other words, students must become conscious of their thinking processes. This is
called metacognition (Matlin, 1989; Nelson, 1992). One way to do this is to require students to explicitly
monitor, evaluate, and reflect on their own performance, and provide them with feedback on these
processes. To help students develop these skills we can model the process for students, by showing them
how we approach problems, question our strategies, and monitor our performance. Alternatively, we can
provide a series of explicit prompts or questions that ask them to monitor and evaluate their performance.
With sufficient practice students should eventually internalize these processes and use them without the
need for external aids.

8. Students develop holistically and their learning is affected by the social and emotional aspects of
the classroom climate. Students are not only intellectual but also social and emotional beings, and all
these dimensions interact to impact learning and performance (Pascarella & Terenzini, 2005). The social
and emotional aspects of the classroom climate affect some students in ways that enhance or hinder
learning (Ford, 1992). For example, students will be more likely to take intellectual and creative risks if
they feel supported and respected. By the same token, when students fear ridicule or persecution, or feel
marginalized or stereotyped (Steele & Aronson, 1995; Walton & Cohen, 2007), they may disengage from
classroom participation and learning opportunities.

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