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Synesthesia > [...] > If there is an all-powerful god, then he can prevent > stuff like this happening. > Could have prevented the Holocaust, could have > prevented the massacres in Rwanda, could have > prevented the murder of innocent people. > If there is a god, how come he designed the world > with hurricanes and tornadoes and earthquakes; how > come he designed our bodies so that we are subject > to all kinds of horrible diseases. > Either he doesn't exists or he is the biggest jerk of all > time. The arguments regarding God are, from a religious viewpoint, typically admirational towards all of the naturalistic facts which are viewed as positives (for humans). Sometimes, the religious view the positives of naturalism as 'miraculous', and see God as responsible for those positives. When it comes to the negative, the responsi- bility for that shifts to humans and/or satan among believers, typically, although some view even that as a God deal. Even so, quite a few of the religious find some way to blame all the downsides on human 'sin' (standard part of the religious guilt-tripping program), with God viewed as 'innocently' vindictive towards humans. From a strictly naturalistic viewpoint, all that is reflects the physics of nature. The following, from a strictly naturalistic view- point, shows a startling aspect of how evolution has resulted in amazing exceptions to the way multi-cellular creatures (in this case, the species homo sapiens) sense the world. - - - Neurobiologists Discover Individuals Who 'Hear' Movement http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080806140209.htm - - - Excerpts: ScienceDaily (Aug. 7, 2008) - Individuals with synesthesia perceive the world in a different way from the rest of us. Because their senses are cross-activated, some synesthetes perceive numbers or letters as having colors or days of the week as possessing personalities, even as they function normally in the world. Now, researchers ... have discovered a type of synesthesia in which individuals hear sounds ... when they see things move or flash. Surprisingly, the scientists say, auditory synesthesia may not be unusual--and may simply represent an en- hanced form of how the brain normally proces- ses visual information. Psychologists previously reported visual, tactile, and taste synesthesias, but auditory synesthesia had never been identified. Caltech lecturer in computation and neural sys- tems Melissa Saenz discovered the phenomenon quite by accident. "While I was running an experiment at the Cal- tech Brain Imaging Center, a group of students happened to pass by on a tour, and I volunteered to explain what I was doing." ... "As part of the experiment, a moving display was running on my computer screen with dots rapidly expanding out, somewhat like the opening scene of Star Wars. Out of the blue, one of the students asked, "Does anyone else hear something when you look at that?" After talking to him further, I realized that his exper- ience had all the characteristics of a synesthesia: an automatic sensory cross-activation that he had experienced all of his life," says Saenz. A search of the synesthesia literature revealed that auditory synesthesia--of any kind--had never been reported. Intrigued, Saenz began to look for other individuals with the same ability, using the original movie seen by the student as a test. "I queried a few hundred people and three more individuals turned up," she says. Having that specific example made it easy to find more people. That movie just happens to be quite "noisy" to the synesthetes and was a great screening tool. When asked if it made a sound, one of the indi- viduals responded, "how could it not?" I would have been less successful had I just gener- ally asked, "Do you hear sounds when you see things move or flash?" because in the real environ- ment, things that move often really do make a sound," for example, a buzzing bee. ... Saenz and Koch suspect that as much as 1 percent of the population may experience auditory synesthe- sia. ... View the video used to identify auditory synesthetes, in a quiet location, at http://www.klab.caltech.edu/~saenz/movingdots.html - - - end excerpts - - -
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