Hello! This is Everything is Amazing, a newsletter about science and wonder.
1.
Neuroscientist Dr Susan Barry has just been asked a very strange question:
“Do you think you can imagine what it's like to see the world with two eyes?”
Her response, in her own words:
“Yes, of course, I can imagine that. I'm a college professor, I teach about it in class. So, yes, I think I know exactly what it is I'm missing.”
Susan was born cross-eyed, which rendered her stereoblind, unable to see with binocular vision. She eventually had it surgically corrected, but only after the age of two - beyond the point where the brain cells involved in binocular vision have learned to work together. For her, despite her eyes now being aligned, her vision remained depthless, nothing between the near and the far. Her view of the world is as flat as it appears to a binocular-visioned person with one eye scrunched shut.
Three months after giving this reply, she sends her questioner back a letter, which covers 9 single-spaced pages and begins with these words:
“Dear Dr. Sacks, you asked me this question, I gave you this answer, and I was completely wrong.”
What’s happened is this. One morning, after a session with the developmental optometrist she’s been working with, she’s sitting in her car ready to depart - and in front of her, the steering wheel starts floating away from the dash.
“It was in its own three-dimensional space. I had never had that type of perception before and I didn't believe it, cause I knew that this was impossible.”
Her whole life, she’d been told her vision could never correct itself. That was the accepted wisdom, and as a neuroscientist, that’s what she taught her students. Once your vision was set one way, that was just that.
“I could not develop stereo vision, and so I drove home and tried to forget about it.”
But the next day, when she gets into her car again, she finds her rear-view mirror is doing the same thing. It’s hovering in mid-air - not part of the two dimensional view that makes up everything she had ever seen, but somehow above it, and for the first time in her life she doesn’t have to intuit the space behind it, because she can actually see it.
It keeps happening - and one day, she steps out of her college building to find herself not just watching the snow fall, but finding herself inside it:
“…it was one of those late winter snows with big, thick snowflakes coming down very lazily, and I could see each snowflake in its own three-dimensional space, and there was space between each snowflake, and it was like this beautiful, three-dimensional dance, and I had this real sense of being within the snowfall.
Prior to that, before my therapy, if I looked at a snowfall, all the snowflakes fell in one plane, slightly in front of me, and I was not really part of the snowfall, I was looking into the snowfall. And now, I had the sense of being within the snowfall - in the midst of the snowfall - all these beautiful flakes just falling all around me, and I just was completely filled with a sense of joy.
I'd never seen anything like that. I completely forgot about lunch. I just stood there in the middle of the campus watching the snow.”
At the age of 48, Susan Barry had gained a new sense - and in doing so she moved from her world into an entirely new one that was far beyond what even her professionally trained mind could imagine, what Maria Popova calls “the abyss between felt experience and our mental models of it”…
And it’s utterly overwhelming in its everyday wonder.
2.
You cannot tickle yourself. Your brain won’t allow it.
That’s a world you’ll never visit.
Sorry.
(Update: woah!)
3.
“Just sitting quietly, doing nothing at all, your brain churns through more information in thirty seconds than the Hubble Space Telescope has processed in thirty years. A morsel of cortex one cubic millimetre in size - about the size of a grain of sand - could hold 2,000 terabytes of information, enough to store all the movies ever made, trailers included…
Altogether, the human brain is estimated to hold something in the order of 200 exabytes of information, roughly equal to ‘the entire digital content of today’s world’.”
- Bill Bryson, The Body (2019).
4.
What do you hear, when you think?
For most people, it’s a version of themselves, silently voicing their own thoughts. For a rare few, it’s a different voice - such as a bickering Italian couple:
““I have no idea where this has come from,” says Claudia, apologetically. “It’s probably offensive to Italians.” The couple are like the family in the Dolmio pasta sauce adverts: flamboyant, portly, prone to waving their hands and shouting. If Claudia has a big decision to make in her life, the Italians take over.”
And for some tiny percentage of the rest of us - in this case, “us” including myself - there is, as far as we can tell, nothing. No comforting or annoying voice. No hubbub, no chatter, no din. Just silence, if we let it.
In the words of one person without an inner monologue:
“It’s like a tiny island, surrounded by an infinite ocean…there’s nothing there, and I don’t think there ever has been…
When I am alone and relaxed, there are no words at all…there’s great pleasure in that.”
This quote shook me, when I first read it. I realised that one reason I can’t find myself bored is that left to myself, absolute inner silence is the norm. There’s nothing to fear from it, no panicky bubbling shriek that wells up, not even an urge to fidget or give myself electric shocks, which is apparently a thing with other people and explains a lot to me (eg. most of social media). Instead, I can sit there quietly, the sounds of my surroundings turning into thoughts without breaking my inner silence, and I can happily be like that for hours.
(As far as I can remember, my personal record is about 160 minutes, on a solo wild-camping trip in 2013. I remember this because when I tried to stand up, I found one of my legs had completely gone to sleep, and I tripped and fell into the stream I was camping beside.)
If you have an inner narrator, I wish I could explain to you how endlessly comforting it is to hear absolutely nothing on demand, and also how intensely rage-inducing other people can be when they play their music outside without headphones.
As for why this happens: the current theory is that we narrate thoughts because our brains are always simulating our next action, to try to keep us safe by calibrating the accuracy of that action when it takes place. The same seems true for speech: we internally simulate how we’ll say something, all those muscles we’ll need to employ and how we’ll squeeze that breath out just so.
But when we think, our minds seem to treat thoughts as speech that doesn’t trigger messages sent to our muscles. It’s kept within us, but it’s nevertheless still “speaking”, and visualised as such.
(A fascinating indicator of this: the inner monologues of some deaf people manifest as imagined sign language.)
And while it’s dangerous to rely on subjective self-reporting as your data, it does seem some of us don’t even “speak” inside our heads. It just goes straight through to…something else. Colours, for some people. Images for others. Or emotions.
Perhaps this is why I’ve always loved reading. I read the words, they immediately turn into imagery in my head (rather than having a mini-me translator narrating the whole thing - damn, that must be tiring, I find it bad enough listening to my own voice when I’m being interviewed). I’m instantly lost, wherever I am - unless someone starts playing loud music.
But sometimes it’s so great to not read anything, and allow myself to not think anything, and become that tiny island where nothing ever happens.
5.
In 2010, psychologist Giovanni Caputo of Italy’s University of Urbino published the results of an experiment he ran on 50 individuals between the ages of 21 and 29 years old. Participants sat in front of a large mirror in a quiet, dimly-lit room, and stared fixedly at their own reflection without moving their eyes.
In every case, it didn’t take long for some really crazy sh*t to make an appearance:
At the end of a 10 min session of mirror gazing, the participant was asked to write what he or she saw in the mirror. The descriptions differed greatly across individuals and included: (a) huge deformations of one's own face (reported by 66% of the fifty participants); (b) a parent's face with traits changed (18%), of whom 8% were still alive and 10% were deceased; (c) an unknown person (28%); (d) an archetypal face, such as that of an old woman, a child, or a portrait of an ancestor (28%); (e) an animal face such as that of a cat, pig, or lion (18%); (f) fantastical and monstrous beings (48%).
Caputo recently followed this up with a 2019 study of 90 participants that included 15 portrait artists. This time, the focus on their gaze wasn’t their own reflection but the face of a stranger sat opposite them. And what they saw was as wild as before.
Check out some of the sketches at Scientific American here.
- from "Like Tripping Without The Drugs": The Science Of Extreme Staring”.
6.
“Many of us have seen microscopic images of neurons in the brain — each neuron appearing as a glowing cell in a vast sea of blackness. This image is misleading: neurons don’t exist in isolation. In the human brain, some 86 billion neurons form 100 trillion connections to each other — numbers that, ironically, are far too large for the human brain to fathom.”
- “A New Field of Neuroscience Aims to Map Connections in the Brain,” Catherine Caruso, Harvard Medical School News & Research.
7.
The Milky Way, the mind-bendingly vast galaxy we live in, appears to contain up to 400 billion stars.
8.
In terms of raw connective possibility, you contain - at the very least - 250 Milky Ways.
9.
This is the emotional wallop of entering a whole new world of colour:
{I had a very affecting video here of a gentleman trying the famous ‘EnChroma’ colour-correcting glasses - and I still think it's a genuine reaction because it looks so very real, but the claims that EnChroma can “cure” colour-blindness have now been convincingly called into question in various studies, so at best it could be he's reacting to colours becoming much sharper and more distinct. Video now removed, because I don’t want to suggest they can do more than that. Hat-tip to Mathieu in the comments for this correction!}
(One my dad never got to see.)
But there is one way where the colour-blind seem to have a distinct advantage over us trichromats (standard-visioned folk) - and it takes us back into the military.
The dominant colours for military camouflage are green for vegetation and sandy beige for desert conditions. This seems to apply worldwide, except for a few exceptions (what the actual hell, China). But if you have red-green colour blindness, you don’t see green or beige. You see shades of another colour - with highly unusual sensitivity, it seems.
A study by biologists at Cambridge University and the University Of Newcastle Upon Tyne found that colour-blind men were “extraordinary connoisseurs of khaki.” Many anecdotes exist about the US Army’s preference for colour-deficient snipers and spotters during WW2, because of their ability to spot subtle shades and patterns against a jumbled background. And an article in Nature in 1940 said this:
”Superficially, therefore, it would seem highly improbable that colour-blind persons could detect a camouflaged building that an ordinary observer would miss. This suggestion, however, which has come from the United States recently, is not wholly without foundation, as there are at least three ways in which certain colour-blind observers might see more than the ordinary person. For example, in a building camouflaged with large irregular patches of colour, the actual outline of the building may be lost in the jumble of these patterns. But the colour-blind person may be scarcely conscious of the variegated colours, so that to him the outline of the building may be almost unaffected by the camouflage.“
All this makes me wonder: did the US Army make this guy colour-blind as well? Because it’d certainly make sense.
10.
Can we ever fully understand how our brains works?
"I can’t imagine that we ever will know this for sure. First, we would have to define what it means to understand the brain. There are many different ways of understanding in terms of being able to predict, model, manipulate behaviour. The other aspect is for what purpose are we trying to understand the brain? In law, when we think about offering evidence for a particular proposition, the question is always contextualised: for what purpose?
We clearly understand that certain brain stem functions are essential for the maintenance of life and cessation of those functions is irreversible and leads to death. For the purposes of defining life and death, that is a clearly understood part of the brain. If we’re talking about understanding consciousness, that’s a very different question that also relies on figuring out the constructs. These are not simple questions and we have to come at them from multiple angles.
I don’t think it is going to be within the capability of any single human brain to understand such incredibly complex things. So, the question becomes, how would we express the shared body of knowledge in a way that could be comprehended? Do we do that by analogy, by raw computational power and algorithms?
It is a fun question to think about, but I’m not sure we’ll ever get there. In large part because the system is complex, some of that is a technical problem, but also because of the limitation of our tools to describe it, to analytically parse the questions. This is why we still need philosophers!
Our limits of understanding the brain might be limited not because of the technical expertise but because of the capacity for language to discuss what we’re talking about."
- Professor Emily Murphy, University of California Hastings College of the Law, from this marvellous roundup of neuroscientists shrugging their shoulders, via the always-terrific Whippet newsletter.
11.
In 2015, the podcast Invisibilia featured a woman called Amanda (not her real name) with a very unusual condition.
Whenever Amanda sees someone else experiencing something - for example, sneezing uncontrollably, or getting stung by a wasp, or eating a delicious chocolate profiterole - she physically echoes a milder version of what she thinks they’re feeling.
She feels the sting. She’s doubled up by the sneezing. She tastes the chocolate and cream.
She also reacts in a similar way to the emotional states of people around her, particularly if they’re in distress.
Understandably, this has led to some fairly profound lifestyle changes:
“[I]n Amanda's home, you can actually see strange physical traces of living with this condition. For instance, there's no real dining table in her house because Amanda can't eat around other people.
AMANDA: Gosh. It feels like they're shoving food in my mouth. And I'm trying to eat, and they're shoving their forks in my mouth. And it's like this thing piled on top of itself, and it's terrible.”
Amanda has vision-touch synesthesia (also called “mirror-touch”), first formally described in 2005 in this paper.
Many studies now suggest that we all have synesthesia (an intermingling of the senses) just after we’re born, but in our first few months of life all these connections usually get wired up in a particular way, leading to what most of us experiences as “the senses”. But for a few dazzlingly different souls, their wires remain…what non-synesthetes would think of as ‘crossed’ and they would consider absolutely normal, as in “wait, you mean you can’t hear colours? That’s weird…” for the rest of their lives.
Amanda seems to be of the latter - and it now appears to be visible in her brain as a smaller-than-usual temporoparietal junction, believed to play a major role in developing the capacity to understand other individuals by ascribing mental states to them.
In the words of Michael Banissy, neuroscientist at the University of London, it’s “suggesting that [in Amanda’s case] there might be some breakdown in terms of the way the brain is activating when it's trying to distinguish between the self and somebody else.”
It’s like empathy turned up to a truly maddening level.
12.
“Back in 2008, a team of researchers from the University of Oxford made an intriguing discovery; binoculars can be used to reduce pain.
Participants with chronic pain in an arm were asked to look at their hand and perform certain movements under different conditions; no visual manipulation, looking through binoculars that didn’t do anything, looking through functional binoculars that increased the size of the hand, and looking through inverted binoculars that decreased the size of the hand. Remarkably, they found that the inverted binoculars reduced the pain felt in the hand, and even reduced swelling.
They also found that magnifying the hand through normal binoculars increased the pain. They think that this is because pain responses can be influenced by the perception of danger, i.e. the worse it looks, the more your brain does to protect it.”
12A.
That’s Taylor Swift performing with the number 13 on her hand, because it’s her lucky number. ("I was born on the 13th. My first album went gold in 13 weeks. My first No.1 song had a 13-second intro and every time I've won an award I've been seated in either the 13th seat, the 13th row, the 13th section or row M, which is the 13th letter.”)
Meanwhile, many (maybe most) hotels in Britain don’t have a 13th floor, skipping straight from 12 to 14, or relabelling 13 as “12A”. Houses numbered 13 are often cheaper, and some councils have actually banned new housing developments from using the number because residents do not like living there.
A recent survey of people in Britain that found 14% of them believed the number 13 was inherently unlucky, and nearly a fifth of Americans believe Friday the 13th brings bad luck.
14.
Clearly, we are incredibly complicated creatures.
We have wrapped our world in the most fascinating bewildering rules and beliefs and labels and heartfelt convictions, many of them contradictory - which certainly helps keep life interesting.
We also love our technologies. Obsessively.
Apparently Chat GPT 5.0 is now available, and everyone is incredibly excited about its ability to…oh, whoops. Never mind.
The whole internet these days seems to be in an absolute lather about the power of the myriad networks of software we now call “artificial intelligence”. And rightly so - just look at how AI helped design two potential new antibiotics to fight drug-resistant gonorrhoea and MRSA (the so-called “hospital superbug”). That’s astounding. Bring it on, and so much more, please.
But there are also the…let’s uncharitably call them tiresome blowhards.
The ones urging everyone to offload everything currently in their heads into the nearest AI chatbot (the full version of which is available for the low, low subscription price of $$$ a month).
The ones claiming that human intelligence is a pathetically limited thing that will soon be rendered obsolete in maybe 18 months, 2 years max. It’s dead, man. Humans are the new BetaMax. Game over.
Meanwhile, a 1.3kg mass of tissue inside your head with the consistency of an overcooked blancmange & primarily (75-80%) made of common-as-muck water (!) remains what it’s always been: a largely untapped, poorly-understood miracle of complexity with a capacity to repair and rewire itself on the go, to perform feats of information processing that would send tech marketing departments into totally incoherent meltdowns, and to transform your view of the world around you forever, again and again and again, if only you let it.
It’s also in here. You know, here, this place behind your eyes where you’re understanding everything I’m saying to you. It’s in you. Machines are just tools that your mind and body can use at a distance. Your brain is where you are, and hopefully always will be.
Also, you were born with it, so there’s no ongoing monthly subscription to pay. (What a bargain.)
Don’t fall for the hype. Your brain is endless, and your mind is free, in all the ways that matter. (That’s however messy it feels right now. Your baseline is “amazing”.)
Rely on it as standard, and it’ll do things you’ve never dreamed of.
“O God, that men should put an enemy in their mouths to steal away their brains!”
― William Shakespeare, Othello.
Images: Marina Vitale; Eva Rinalde.
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Great post again, Mike!
Re 4, “What do you hear, when you think?”, I first consciously noticed as a teenager that not only did I have a constant monologue in my head, I constantly had dialogues and even scenes in my head. I’ve never been disturbed by it - on the contrary, I meet my friends in my head, especially ones who are far away or long gone.
Additionally, I’ve always had music in my head, at any time of the day or night (if woken up 😎). (I’m a trained classical musician but with far-ranging musical interests.)
The only time the music stopped was when my dad died. It was gone for a good two weeks, possibly longer. I considered that absence a sign to live gently with, if that makes sense. I figured the music would come back when it was ready, and I was right.
You also talked about synesthesia in your post. I don’t believe I have true synesthesia, but I have very vivid sensory experiences when listening to music, involving textures, colors, feelings/emotions, etc.
I expressly do not like - what I consider as - flat descriptions of music as happy, sad, wild, etc. For me, music “contains worlds”, as so many others have said. It’s just hard to convey this.
About the video in #9. Are these reactions genuine ? I always considered them as marketing slop, borderline scam.
I remember reading somewhere these glasses don't bring vivid new colors, but by a clever filtering of some wavelengths, it makes some nuances, usually unseen, noticeable. Also I understood it takes time for the brain to adapt to these glasses and get the potential.