Mindframe

  What color is Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run”? For many, the question may sound like word salad, but if you have synesthesia, not only might it make perfect sense, but there’s a chance you already have an answer. The UK Synaesthesia Association describes synesthesia like so: “[s]ensations in one modality (e.g. hearing) produce sensations in another modality (e.g. colour) as well as it's own.” There are many different kinds of synesthesia. A synesthete be able to “taste” a day of the week, or describe the weight or physical texture of a word. There is little consensus about just what those cross-category attributes are: the letter M may appear brown to one person and green to another. It’s also somewhat unclear how common the condition is; estimates range from one percent of the population to twenty percent. Part of this ambiguity stems from synesthesia being a little hard to pin down. A synesthete won’t necessarily even know that the way they process the wor...

    We all want to hang out with the people who really “get” us—our equals, our peers. As it turns out, this even appears to hold true for infants. In some ways, it can be easy to know a baby’s likes and dislikes. They generally like being carried by a parent, and dislike sitting in a dirty diaper, for instance. Yet when it comes to studying some infant preferences, researchers must be very careful and creative in their methodology. You can’t exactly make a baby sit down and take a survey—they’d probably just try to eat the pencil. Recently, McGill University professor Linda Polka and her team hit upon an experiment design to test how babies reacted to various vowel sounds. The infants in question were not just pre-verbal but pre-babbling, too young to even make “ba ba ba” noises.) Five-month-olds were sat at a screen with a checkerboard pattern. By looking at or away from the checkerboard, the babies could activate or mute a sound. The result? The subjects d...

  Can’t get into meditation? It might be time to pick up a coloring book. That’s not meant to sound dismissive; it’s actual advice. Adult coloring books arrived on the market in a big way circa 2012, and as CNN reports , it’s now a full-blown trend, for some very interesting reasons. It’s not art therapy in the traditional sense—filling in pre-drawn shapes isn’t quite the same as a freeform painting exercise, for instance—but coloring demonstrates similar benefits all the same. Research from the American Art Therapy Association shows adults who crack open a coloring book report feeling less stress, more confidence, and an increased sense of serenity. Recent research by psychologist Dr Nicola Holt and her team at the University of the West of England backs this up. In one experiment, 47 freshman undergrads read a chapter on study skills and colored a mandala. They took psychological tests at the start and following each activity. After just 20 minutes of coloring, the st...