Long dismissed as a product of overactive imaginations or a sign of mental illness, synesthesia has grudgingly come to be accepted by scientists in recent years as an actual phenomenon with a real neurological basis. Some researchers now believe it may yield valuable clues to how the brain is organized and how perception works.
“The study of synesthesia [has] encouraged people to rethink historical ideas that synesthesia was abnormal and an aberration,” says Amy Ione, director of the Diatrope Institute, a California-based group interested in the arts and sciences.
The cause remains a mystery, however.
Institute
People Who Feel, Taste and Hear Color
Time May Not Exist
If time doesn’t exist then why do i keep running out of it ?
No one keeps track of time better than Ferenc Krausz. In his lab at the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany, he has clocked the shortest time intervals ever observed. Krausz uses ultraviolet laser pulses to track the absurdly brief quantum leaps of electrons within atoms. The events he probes last for about 100 attoseconds, or 100 quintillionths of a second. For a little perspective, 100 attoseconds is to one second as a second is to 300 million years.
But even Krausz works far from the frontier of time. There is a temporal realm called the Planck scale, where even attoseconds drag by like eons. It marks the edge of known physics, a region where distances and intervals are so short that the very concepts of time and space start to break down. Planck time—the smallest unit of time that has any physical meaning—is 10-43 second, less than a trillionth of a trillionth of an attosecond. Beyond that? Tempus incognito. At least for now.
Was Timothy Leary Right?
Are psychedelics good for you? Its such a hippie relic of a question that its almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science, including the National Institute of Mental Health NIMH and Harvard, which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics in this case, Ecstasy since the university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open the doors of perception again? Wasnt the whole thing a disaster the first time?
