the trouble with long blocks- isearch

It’s tough to sit through and stay focused through an entire long block. Because of this, we tend not to get as much out of them as we would if we were one hundred percent focused and engaged. After having read a bit of Spark, a book that discussed the numerous beneficial effects of exercise on the brain, I thought it would be a good idea to use the extra 20 minutes of a long block to do some exercise.

Spark’s author, John Ratey, explains that exercise improves learning on three different levels. The first is by making us more alert, attentive and motivated. The second is by preparing and encouraging nerve cells to bind to one another, which is what allows us to remember information. The third is that it spurts the development of new nerve cells from cells in the hippocampus. Spark also discusses how exercise can improve our mental disposition. Many studies have been performed to prove that exercise ameliorates mood, heightens senses, increases motivation and inspiration, lowers stress and anxiety and helps keep our brain activity under control. These results show how learning and the ability to retain information are heightened by physical activity.

            When I spoke with Mr. Mallory (my math teacher) about this he brought up that some teachers that he knows of in other schools take “brain breaks” by doing a quick four minute workout called Tabata. I looked up Tabata when I got home and found a video on youtube made by Natick High School’s fitness department that went through the four minutes and what is to be done during those four minutes. They were sets of 20 seconds of high intensity 10 seconds rest switching off between exercises, footfire, high knees and squats until the 4 minutes were up.

I think that if teachers could take 4 minutes halfway through class to do this, it could provide a bit of a break for students and allow them to come back into whatever they were doing much more focused and alert. Mr.Mallory noted that we tend to get about the same amount of work done in math class during a long block as we do in a regular block due to kids having a hard time focusing for such a long period of time and being less productive. Being a math teacher, Mr. Mallory also did some calculations to find that we get around the same amount of work done if we’re at 100% for 60 minutes than if we are at 85% (his estimate) for 70, so teachers could even do another tabata session at some point during a long block without worrying about not getting through the material.

            Ms.Sifantus (my anatomy and physiology teacher) expressed some concern over this, saying that although she would like to do it,  some students might not take it seriously and although it provides a much needed break it could disrupt the flow of the class. She also brought up the points that not all long blocks are hard to get through, such as the blocks where students are up on their feet doing activities or labs. For this reason it might be good to do the tabatas for specific classes that involve lots of note taking or deep focus.

Should all sports teams be co-ed?

Running for Office

ethos: I am strict and dedicated  Pathos: assured

Could Taylor Swift have Synesthesia?-idea paragraph

I was driving one of the girls on my team to practice one day during the week where I had begun reading my 10 articles on synesthesia. She pulled out her ipod and plugged it into my music system, playing a new song she had just gotten the night before. The song was "Red" by Taylor Swift and I had never heard it before, so I paid special attention to the lyrics as I always do when I'm trying to figure out if I like a song or not. It was riddled with similie and metaphor (which confused me at first because Tswift songs usually just lay it all out for you so you don't even have to think), but then came the chorus: Losing him was blue like I’d never known Missing him was dark grey all alone Forgetting him was like trying to know somebody you've never met But loving him was red. With my mind in synesthesia mode, I began to wonder if maybe the use of color to describe emotion was not a coincidence. What if Taylor Swift is a secret synesthete? Synesthesia is, after all, very common among artists, so it seemed more than plausible. Could this be a specific manifestation of synesthesia where the synesthete experiences color with emotion?
Upon further reflection, I came to realize that the answer was, probably not. People do experience synesthesia to different degrees but I don't belive she has it. Saying losing him was blue, could literally mean that she felt blue as in sad or melancholy. Describing missing him as being being dark grey, it could just relate to her being gloomy- maybe it's a refrence to how cloudy days (dark grey) make people feel more somber. Lastly mentioning to how loving him was red, could just be referring to the association of red being the color of love. These color-emotion relationships are mostly cultural refrences and are, therefore, most likely not a product of synesthesia. If the song had maybe been something like losing him was baby chick yellow, missing him was lime green and loving him was apricot orange, then we would have had more to talk about, but for now I'll say Tswift does not have synesthesia.

Car Speech- third version

Here's the third version of my car speech...

Synesthesia and ASD

 from: Mirror-touch synesthesia is linked with empathy- Nature Publishing Group

Research done on mirror-touch synesthesia is consistent with the notion that we (non-synesthetes) empathize with others through simulation. The recent discovery of mirror neurons in humans suggests that the existence of mirror systems between humans occurs not only with actions but with emotions and sensations. This system helps us empathize better because it emables us as the observer to simulate another's experience by activating the same areas in the brain that are active if we were to actually be experiencing what we are observing. Even though most of us don't have synesthesia, when we see someone stub their little toe on the edge of a coffee table, most of us will go "oooooof ouch" and for a moment we can almost feel the other person's pain. these  are our mirror neurons at work.
Studies on mirror neurons also provide some insight on Autism. There is some evidence that impaired activity in the action mirror system may be responsible for the deficits in imitation and empathy observed in people with ASD.

Do you see what they see?

from: DO YOU SEE WHAT THEY SEE?- Discovery Magazine (reprinted on Sirs)- Brad Lemley

The article focuses more on what synesthesia is/ what we have come to understand it as being and a lot of people with specific experiences with synesthesia along with the progress that's been made in researching it-- it's a long article. One of the researchers actually has synesthesia so it must be exciting for her to find all these new things about her condition and having the condition must also give her some sort of direction to take for her research. Not only that, but she has graphene color synesthesia as well as sound- touch synesthesia-- she's a double synesthete! I wonder what happens when she listens to music as she reads or writes, wouldn't that get over whelming? The music plus the sensations brought on by the music plus the reading plus the colors in what she reads- whoa.

One part that particularly stood out for me was: "We tend to assume that reality is the same for everybody," says Peter Grossenbacher, a senior fellow at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) who is widely regarded as the leading American synesthesia researcher. "Synesthesia shows us that it isn't. People all around us may have a very different experience of the world."

It kind of brings forth that same question we all ask ourselves at some point: is the red I see the same red you see? only this time the question is more existential.

Auras and Synesthesia?

from: Synesthesia May Explain Healers Claims of Seeing People's 'Aura'- Science Daily (blog)

This article mentions research from Spain that connects synesthesia to aura reading. It says that people who claim the ablity to read others' auras could actually have a form of color synesthesia. the aura is defined as a supposed energy field of luminous radiation surrounding a person as a halo, which is imperceptible to most human beings." I guess I can understand how one thing relates to another, but my question is how can they even research this?  I see that they are similar- some synesthetes associate colors with something else and those who claim to see auras can see a light above people's heads, but where do they go from there? It's not like there is a solid definition for synesthesia or that we really know all that much about it, and we don't don;t really know the cold hard facts of aura reading so how can researchers compare two things without having a solid base to base the comparisons off of? 

Synesthesia and Math

source: Synesthesia- Why Numbers Have Personalities- Feminspire (blog)- Jessica Bagnall

This post was written by a woman who has ordinal-linguistic personification (OLS): which means she associates numbers, letters, months and so on with distinct and discernible personalities. In it she discusses how she associates people with certain characteristics when she first meets them just because of what letters are in their name but focuses most of the article on her description of the qualities and characteristics of numbers 0-9.
For example: "Three is a woman in her mid-twenties, but she has an aged heart and is consumed with bitterness. She used to be much more like Two, until spurned by once-lover Nine, hence her instant and ongoing dislike of Two."

Math must have been like writing a drama series for her. like, "oops, three and two don't get along because four stole four's boyfriend a year ago, but they're going to have to try to get along for five's sake." She must reach some serious ethical dilemas every once in a division problem.

We tend to think of things, especially things like math, as being either black or white, but once you get into all this synesthesia stuff you really reach unchartered waters. 

Women and Synesthesia

from: Synesthesia- Synesthesia for Kids

I found it interesting that the majority of synesthetes are women and it appears to run in families. The article mentions that this is a dominant gene but it does not say what chromosome it is linked to. Since it appears to be more common in women, I wonder if it is linked to the X chromosome. Since women have two X chromosomes, they would be twice as likely to inherit the synesthesia gene then men who only have one x chromosome, which could explain why it is more often found in women. It is not a recessive gene, so they only need one copy of it to have synesthesia. It must be hard find how many people have synesthesia since so many of them who have it don't know that they do.

Can Synesthesia be Learned?

From: Teach Yourself Synesthesia? I Don’t Think So!- The Fallible Mind (blog on Psychology Today)-Richard E. Cytowic, M.D. 

This blog discusses a study done in Amsterdam trying to prove that Synesthesia could be learned by setting up "synesthesia in reverse," changing the physical world. They did this by giving non synesthetes a book with letters e, s, and t printed in different colors. The result was that the non synesthetes ended up associating those colors with the letters and thus this became the first evidence that synesthesia was something that could be learned. 
I did not agree with how the study approached synesthesia and didn't think it made sense. First of all, color grapheme synesthetes unintentionally associate letters, words or numbers with colors. These colors are not chosen by someone else for them or strategically placed for them to associate.  We can deliberately learn anything whether we have synesthesia or not, that's pretty much all the study proved- it did not prove that we can learn to be synesthetes. synesthesia is a condition possessed only by those born with the synesthesia gene or who have had some sort of brain damage like a stroke and their brain repaired itself and ended up mixing certain regions of perception. 

Disadvantages to Synesthesia

From: Listverse- 10 Disadvantages of Synesthesia
Something I learned from this blog is that people with sound-color synesthesia are more drawn to people with "pretty voices" because they associate the sounds of their voices with colors that can evoke emotions in the synesthetes that make the person appear friendlier than a person with a not so pretty voice that evokes colors that make the synesthete feel uncomfortable or unhappy.
What a "pretty voice" is defined as must be very subjective depending on what sounds the synesthete associates with what colors and what colors rub the synesthete the right or wrong way. I've read that synesthetes don't experience things the same way even if they do have the same type of synesthesia. For example, a sound-color synesthete could see lime green when they hear a sharp sound while another sound-color could see firetruck red when they hear the same exact sound. So if you ever meet a sound-color synesthete who doesn't seem to like you much and you don't know why, it could just be the sound of your voice. But don't worry, there is probably another sound-color synesthete out there who wouldn't mind being friends with you.

Another thing I hadn't realized is how synesthetes' condition hampers their ability to do other things such as math. People with OLP synesthesia (definition from wikipedia:a form of synesthesia in which ordered sequences, such as ordinal numbers, days, months and letters are associated with personalities) might have trouble adding a "mean number" to a "nice number". Likewise, Someone with grapheme-color synesthesia and experience in color theory might have trouble understanding that 2+5=7 because 2= pink, 5=light blue and 7= red and pink+light blue doesn't equal red.

Secret Synesthetes

Source: the Synesthetic Experience- MIT

This website talked mostly about the definition of synesthesia. I was not surprised to learn that a lot of people with synesthesia don't know that they have it. We don't really talk or know all that much about synesthesia yet, so why wouldn't people with synesthesia assume that everybody else experiences certain things in pairs of senses as they do?

Another thing I found interesting was that the site also mentioned how synesthesia wouldn't logically be a product of the human brain, since evolution points towards an increasing separation of function whereas synesthesia is defined as "an involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense... and the additional perception is regarded by the synesthete as real"-- bringing forth the possibility that brain function is more intermingled than what evolutionary studies have found.

Mirror-touch Synesthesia and Empathy

from: Written All over His Face- Michele Solis- Scientific American Mind

 "mirror-touch synesthesia" is a condition where a person is able to feel something others experience as if it were happening to them instead, simply by watching it happen. 

A while ago I read or listened to (i dont really remember) something having to do with mirror neurons and how they activate when an individual is doing a specific activity (like bending down) but also how they activate to a lower level when we are watching someone else performing an activity. Apparently all of our brains do this, but people with mirror-touch synesthesia have more active mirror neurons so the mirror effect when watching someone else experience something is greatly increased and they are able to experience these things as if they were happening to them.

This article talks about a study where they found that people with mirror synesthesia, since they had this heightened ability to simulate someone else's experience were better able to identify emotions from facial expressions. By simulating the experience, they were able to identify what emotion they were feeling, therefore what emotion the subject was feeling.

This article made me think: It must be really awful for someone with mirror-touch synesthesia to watch a horror film. I wonder if they can judge bad acting based on how they experience a film. on the plus side they must be pretty socially adept if they have this facility to be able to understand the thoughts and feelings of others.

Grapheme- color synesthesia

from: Getting a Handle On Why 4 Equals Green - New York Times- Sidnya N.Bhanoo

This article focuses on grapheme- color synesthesia. This is a neurological condition where people see colors when the think about letters numbers or words. If I had grapheme- color synesthesia, I would see, say, the color green whenever I read the word "helicopter". Or maybe I would even see a color that's not read while I'm reading "red." 

Scientists at Oxford have been trying to figure out what is differences in synesthetes' brains that allows for this to happen. They reported that people with this condition experience greater activity in the part of the brain that is associated with vision (the visual cortex). They reached this conclusion by running an experiment where they stimulated different subjects' visual cortex and found that people with grapheme-color synesthesia only required a third of the stimulation that other "normal" subjects had- showing that synesthetes have a more active visual cortex. This research on how the cerebral cortex works could be helpful in treating people who experience hallucinations or unordinary perceptions of things. 

I found this article interesting because Synesthesia is something that I've been curious about for a while. I was listening to a howstuffworks podcast on this topic while I was on a run once, but I only really caught snippets of it. What I was able to catch was that there are other forms of synesthesia as well, such as people who are able to feel others' pain. I wonder if this also relates to the research that was done for grapheme color synesthesia. 

Second Draft of Car Speech

Here's the second draft of my car speech...

Car Speech

Car speech wooo