Two weird thoughts in one day. What’s wrong with me?

I have spoken here a few times about the fact that I have syneasthesia. I have the sort of syneasthesia which means that numbers, letters, words and concepts have colour. My syneasthesia also gives numbers personalities and I ‘hear’ sounds that don’t exist. Weird? A little.

To feel the touch that isn’t there

Today I made the discovery that my partner in crime and life suffers from a different form if syneasthesia to me. This is one which might sound strange but isn’t as rare as you might think. I’ve suspected that  he’s had this for a while but today was the first time I’d ever voiced it to him out loud.

He has mirror-pain syneasthesia. Thus can be a temporary condition and he tells me he hasn’t always had it. This type of syneasthesia means that at one end of the spectrum you feel touch when you see someone touch something but at the other end you feel actual pain when you see someone suffer an injury. With him, it is most acute when related to anything to do with feet or legs. It has got to the point that if I say the word ‘paddle’ as I have a few times today as we are by the sea, he winces into actual and real pain.

Paddling hurts

It is like he gets an electric shock if I mention certain keywords. He can’t watch me paddle as that is unbearable to him.

Apparently up to 17% of the population suffer or have suffered from this. It’s not so ‘weird’ after all. Even if it is, it’s wonderful to have something that not everyone does. I’m not sure how this could be used as a super power but until we work that out or how to stop it happening I have to paddle alone.

…married a dentist called Dennis. They had a daughter. When she grew up she fell in love with the local GP, Dr Payne.

Robert Lawless (he’s a real person, by the way) is the co-author of Necessity and Proportionality in International Peace and Security Law. He’s  an Assistant Professor in the Department of Law at the United States Military Academy.

Stanley Finger is the co-author of The Shocking History of Electric Fishes.

Storm Dunlop edited the Oxford Dictionary of Weather.

My eldest two sons’ geography teacher is called Mr North. He’s a lovely guy. He knows which way he is facing.

An educational consultant friend of mine once met a P.E. teacher called Mr Fit. Was he fit? I need to know.

Another friend tells me that she once lived next door to Mr Crook the copper.

This man, Storm Dunlop, knows a lot about the weather

Coincidence? Or not? I used to think it was just a happy coincidence when I came across an apt named person such as Mr North at parents’ evening but I’ve just been pointed towards, by the friend who once met Mr Fit the P.E. teacher, the idea of nominative determinism. And being the curious mind that I am (or used to be – its been a while since I had a weird thought), I became very interested. My brain cried out: there is a word for it! Or, more accurately, there is a phrase for it! Who knew!

Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that we are naturally attracted to employment or situations that befit our names. The term was first coined in a long-running column in the New Scientist and not in an altogether non-light-hearted way (how many double negatives?). The idea of being attracted to a job that suits your name is part of what researchers call implicit egotism. This is the idea that we’re attracted to things that remind us of ourselves, whether it’s marrying a person with the same birthday, or using a Removals Service to move to a place with a name phonetically similar to your own (the large number of Carolines who live in South Carolina).

In 2002, three scientists, Brett Pelham, Matthew Mirenberg and John Jones looked into the concept of implicit egotism even further and found out that the dentistry industry contains a disproportionate number of Denises and Dennises (surely not a coincidence) and the geosciences contain a disproportionate number of Georges and Geoffreys.

As for Mary Berry? What is she well known for? And the weather girl called Amy Freeze?

She likes her cakes sweet

Psychologists have studied this concept even more since and it is indeed a fascinating topic. Perhaps the best known psychologist (or one of the best known), Sigmund Freud is rather well known for his speciality: the psychology of ‘pleasure’. My question now is, what does ‘Freud’ mean? The answer according to the Internet: Joy.

Case closed.

One of my paid jobs now is to check Very Short Introductions online. Very Short Introductions, or VSIs for short, are books which do just what it says on the tin: they provide a very short introduction to a subject. Oxford University Press has been publishing these books since when I worked there. In fact, I was a colleague of the very clever editor who first came up with the idea and I remember it well. There are hundreds of these books now, over a decade later, providing very short introductions to subjects ranging from the Avant Garde to Number Theory (and many things between the two).

This afternoon I was checking the forthcoming Very Short Introduction to Philosophy of Biology online (due to publish this autumn). Anything with the word ‘philosophy’ in the title is going to fascinate me and it wasn’t long before I became distracted by the content of this book rather than checking that it looks good online. As I was scrolling through the text I came across an image which caught my eye. It was very similar to the one below.

The grey bits are spandrels

The caption read: ‘A spandrel is the triangular space between a curved arch and a rectangular frame or dome.’ This occurred to me as an odd image to find in a biology book. Surely, I reasoned, this concept, of the spandrel, related to art, architecture and perhaps even mathematics.

I decided to ask more of my friend google. I found out that a spandrel is, originally at least, an architectural term to describe the curved triangular shape between an arch and the outer surface, as indicated in the image in the Philosophy of Biology book. How had I never heard this term before? I asked myself. I delved deeper.

I was right to delve deeper, there is more. A spandrel isn’t just this shape, which is amazing in itself. A spandrel has been adapted to mean something more abstract and more interesting. Those biological philosophers discussed in this book I was checking today also use the term. In their eyes, a spandrel refers to a phenotypic (relating to the observable characteristics of an individual resulting from the interaction of its genotype with the environment) characteristic that is a byproduct of the evolution of some other characteristic, rather than a direct product of adaptive selection. This, as dear reader you can tell, has nothing to do with architecture.

Rather, that is a little sciency. So, basically, in more layman’s terms perhaps, a spandrel is something that has evolved biologically which isn’t directly related to survival, but which ends up being useful for survival. It’s a bit like an afterthought that becomes useful. Just as the triangular shape above an arch is almost the ‘cut out’ from the shape, so the afterthought, as is a biological spandrel an afterthought or ‘cut out’.

An example can be seen with the human brain. Many secondary processes and actions have evolved over time, which come in addition to the main functions of the human brain. These secondary processes and thoughts can eventually turn into an adaptation of some sort, or even provide a fitness advantage to humans. Just because something is a secondary trait or byproduct of an adaptation does not mean it has no use. So we are full of such spandrels! A good example is music. We have learnt to make music. It has no obvious use at first, but it can be used to our advantage: as a language, as a skill and as a form of entertainment or distraction. A better example might be human culture.  We created it to counter-act the anxiety we feel about death. If we feel that we are individuals of importance then we don’t worry so much about death. We have caused ourselves to feel that life has a meaning so therefore preventing ourselves from existing in a constant state of existential crisis (or, perhaps not all of us feel this way).

Again, I feel energised and excited about something I have just learnt at this age I am. How on earth have I managed to avoid spandrels thus far? They are brilliant!

I need to find other examples, perhaps this geeky passion of mine which leads me to investigate something for hours on end is a spandrel. It isn’t obviously necessary for my survival in the big wide world but it is certainly acting as a distraction to life’s anxieties.

I will end here with perhaps my favourite spandrel: a man’s nipples. Why are men’s nipples spandrels? I will leave that to you to work out.

A random man’s hairy nipple – a spandrel

Last night, I started a discussion on Facebook questioning whether the number 1 was a prime number or not and this inspired  the previous blog post which I wrote earlier today. As I was falling asleep last night, I considered numbers further (I have a busy brain). I started to feel sorry for 1 for not being allowed to be a prime number anymore. The number 1 is a pre-teen boy and he wants to be liked. He doesn’t like being alone all the time. He is white (as in colour, not ethnic origin). I then moved on to think about the number 2. She is a slim and elegant young lady, she is bright yellow and always cheerful. I would love to be more like her. She is smooth, symmetrical and even. She is always right.

My little friends

Then I thought to myself: am I bonkers? Do numbers really have personalities? It seems that to me they do. I asked myself: is this normal? I had no idea. So I decided to go through the other numbers and their personalities came readily and vividly to me. Here are the rest:

• 3 is male, early twenties, ambitious, good-looking and a deep green.
• 4 is also male, a bit more serious and geeky. He likes maths. He probably works in IT. He’s a lovely deep navy blue.
• 5 is a middle-aged man, laid back, probably has a manual job and enjoys a pint in the pub with his friends. He’s sky blue.
• 6 is a curvaceous lady, she is orange, jolly, cheerful. She is homely and motherly.
• 7 is a lady too, but a bit spiky. She’s in her forties (not me, honest). She’s a deep orange. She probably works in a library.
• 8 is an older lady, she’s in her sixties, also motherly and homely, like 6. She’s a luscious dark red. She has a bosom you just want to sink into.
• 9 is a man, he’s very serious and very dark. He has no sense of humour at all. He’s tall and solitary.  His black, of course. He’s very intelligent though. He deserves respect.
• 10 is a man too, he’s cream coloured with a hint of beige. That’s all I know about him. He’s good with his hands, he likes DIY.

I could go on, but I won’t, not yet. Should I start on the alphabet next?

I’ve just googled this ‘thing’ I have. It seems this is a real ‘thing’. It is called OLP or ordinal-linguistic personification. I have a new ‘thing’ and I’m not crazy (or, perhaps I am a little) after all. Whoopee. I’m quite excited. I want to learn more.