Tag Archives: synaesthesia

Sleeping on the job

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Decorative image onlyAt the end of 2023, following my visit to IBM [see ‘Chirping while calculating probabilities‘ on November 22nd, 2023], I spent a significant amount of time trying to understand quantum computing and exploring its potential applications in my research.  It was really challenging because, as one article I read stated, quantum-mechanical phenomena appear to be weird and the mathematical tools used to model them are complex and abstract.  Just to make it harder you have to learn a new language or at least new terminology and mathematical notation.  I have always found that my unconscious mind is capable of solving mathematical problems given sufficient time and sleep.  However, the mathematics of quantum computing took many nights of unconscious thought to assemble into some sort of understanding and left me with mild headaches.  Around the same time I was reading one of Cormac McCarthy’s new novels, Stella Maris, which consists entirely of a psychologist interviewing a mathematician who is a patient in a hospital. They discuss that mathematical work is performed mostly in the unconscious mind and we have no notion as to how the mind goes about it.  They find it hard to avoid the conclusion that the unconscious mind does not use numbers.  I suspect that it does not use mathematical notation either; perhaps it is more a form of synaesthesia using three-dimensional shapes [see ‘Engineering synaesthesia‘ on September 21st, 2016].  A couple of pages before discussing the unconscious mind’s mathematical work, one of the protagonists comments that ‘If we were constructed with a continual awareness of how we worked we wouldn’t work’.  So, perhaps I should not probe too deeply into how I have acquired a rudimentary understanding of quantum computing.

BTW in case you missed my last post at the start of January [‘600th post and time for a change‘ on January 3rd 2024] and have been wondering what has happened to my weekly post – I have decided to switch to posting monthly on the first Wednesday of each month.

Source:

Cormac McCarthy, Stella Maris, Picador, 2022.

Walking the hills

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daffodils at moel famauA regular reader of this blog commented last week on the enjoyment she gained during the pandemic from their daily walk around a local lake which reminded me about a recent experience on one of our regular weekend hikes around Moel Famau, which have been real rather than virtual for some months now [see ‘Virtual ascent of Moel Famau‘ on April 8th, 2020].  It was an unseasonally warm day and there was a strong scent from the daffodils in the broad verge next to the farm track that we were walking down.  The impact of the scent on my sense of well-being was almost like a form of synaesthesia [see ‘Engineering synaesthesia‘ on September 21st, 2016].  I am on vacation this week, hoping to slow down [see ‘Slow down, breathe your own air‘ on December 23rd 2015], climb some hills and feed my consciousness some different sensory experiences [see ‘Feed your consciousness with sensory experiences‘ on May 22nd 2019].

Carmen induces happiness but no recall

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Philharmonic hall set up for a social-distanced orchestraThe day after England was released from its second national lockdown we went to a concert at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall. It was a socially-distanced event attended by about 400 people in a hall with a capacity of 1700. Even members of orchestra sat two metres apart and wore face coverings until they had taken their seats. Nevertheless, it was an uplifting occasion with the conductor of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Vasily Petrenko welcoming us back at the start of the concert. We listened to three pieces Variaciones concertantes by Ginastera; Il Tramonto by Respighi; and Carmen Suite for percussion and strings by Bizet and arranged by Shchedrin. I really enjoyed the first piece by Ginastera which I had not heard before; however, while listening to Jennifer Johnston singing Il Tramonto, I realised that I had no recall of the previous piece of music.  As I sit writing, I cannot reproduce any of the sounds from the concert in my head, except for a few fuzzy sequences of Carmen that I had heard many times before, whereas I can ‘see’ the layout of the orchestra with Jennifer Johnston and Vasily Petrenko stood in front of them.  My inability to recall sounds might explain why I struggle to speak any foreign languages or to remember the pronouncation of unfamilar words in English.  Despite the fact that I cannot recall the music, the feelings of enjoyment remain as a memory and made me smile as I wrote this post.

 

Logarithmic view of the world

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Politicians and the media are fond of dazzling us with big numbers: $62m, £35bn, $1.1 tn.  All of these are unimaginable sums of money – uncountable and, for most us, unspendable.  They are respectively: the launch cost for SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket, the anticipated ‘divorce cost’ to the UK for leaving the EU and the predicted US government annual deficit for next year based on the additional spending approved in the budget bill early this month.  For most of us, winning $62m in a lottery would be a life-changing event that we might dream about but there’s only about a 1 in 14 million chance of it happening – oops, there’s another unimaginable number.

We seem quite happy handling numbers over a limited interval, from perhaps 1 in 100 [1% or 0.01] to maybe 100,000 but beyond this range our perspective ceases to be linear and probably becomes logarithmic (as in the graphic), or something similar.  In other words, we don’t perceive £35bn as being about 500 times larger than $62m, or $1.1tn being about 18 million times larger.  Instead, we concertina our mental picture into something more manageable, such as the image shown in the graphic.  Does this have the side-effect of lessening the impact of large numbers so that we are less alarmed by costs of £35bn or deficits of $1.1tn? Maybe we would take more notice of a cost of £500 per person in the UK or a deficit of $3600 per person per year in the USA?

At the other end of the scale, something similar happens.  Nanotechnology is a popular buzz word at the moment but few people can conceive of something 2.5 nanometres in diameter – that’s the diameter of a strand of DNA.  It doesn’t help much to tell you that a human hair is 40,000 times thicker!

Maybe, all of this only applies to those of us who ‘see’ numbers in pictorial patterns, and to the rest of you it is nonsensical.  See my post on Engineering Synaesthesia on September 21st, 2016.

Sources:

http://time.com/money/5135565/elon-musk-falcon-heavy-rocket-launch-cost/

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/dec/31/tough-2017-what-does-next-year-hold-theresa-may

Financial Times, Weekend 10 February/11 February 2018.