6/12/2023 0 Comments Auditory visual synesthesiaLittle disconnects of this kind started early for Jackson. Without prior social context, his thoughts about a new person sometimes blur-he compares the experience to a nebula instead of a constellation-and that makes it hard to concentrate. Early on, scheduling an interview, he explains that calls with strangers can be difficult. ![]() That’s when he says he’s trying to “translate” his thoughts, from complex mathematics into something he might be able to convey in words. Sometimes, though, as we’re talking, I see his eyes flit to the side or focus elsewhere. He plays guitar and goes for long walks in his free time. He’s clean cut, with an open face that masks a steely, almost stubborn resolve. It’s possible that someone could know Jackson for years without realizing anything is different about him. It also serves as a reminder of the distance between people’s perceptions that can never be fully crossed-and as a testament to just how delicate and strange communication is in the first place. The app, which was rebuilt and re-released in May, helps users view decisions through a mathematical prism. Cold hard numbers no more groping in the darkness. Called ChoiceMap, it helps users weigh the factors in a given decision, using an algorithm to spit out a “perfection score” for each option. In 2014, Jackson, who now lives in Seattle, designed and released an app with the aim of helping others make decisions. He can choose among his options the way others might choose the reddest, glossiest apple from a bowl. When he makes a choice, his gut feelings are visually laid out in front of him. But for Jackson, intuition is anything but blind. Think it through, go with your gut, follow your heart-there’s a reason the English language features so many ways to talk about groping around in the cellar of the conscience to find the light switch of intuition. The lines between them would change depending on how attractive they were to Jackson, creating a unique configuration for each option.įor many people, decision-making is a murky, difficult process. If he were to make a decision about whether to take a new job, for instance, those points might represent salary, location, and cost of living. Every person he meets, every sentence he reads, and every decision he makes are presented as data points on a kind of continuously moving mental scatter plot, creating figures he compares to constellations. But recent research has complicated that definition, exploring where in the sensory process those overlaps start and opening up the term to include types of synesthesia in which senses interact in a much more complex manner. ![]() Some synesthetes see music (known as auditory-visual synesthesia) or read letters and numbers in specific hues (grapheme-color synesthesia). Jackson has synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon that has long been defined as the co-activation of two or more conventionally unrelated senses. “People say, ‘Okay, we need to think about this from a new angle’ all the time!” he says. ![]() I want to see what you’re saying and the shape of your words from a different perspective.’ I was baffled.”įor Jackson, moving physically to think differently about an idea seemed totally natural. “He was like, ‘Andy, I’m listening, I just want to get a different angle. “He got up and jumped over to this much higher rock,” Linscott says. But in the middle of their talk, he did something Linscott found deeply odd. Jackson had always been a particularly good listener. Linscott was, by his own admission, “emotionally spewing” over a girl, and Jackson was consoling him. One spring evening in the mid 2000s, Jonathan Jackson and Andy Linscott sat on some seaside rocks near their college campus, smoking the kind of cigarettes reserved for heartbreak.
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