Two Minds Blog

  Who are you? Most people answer that question first by stating their name. Once we have done that, we might talk about our occupation, our other important social roles (husband, father, son), our personality, or our values. Sometimes we will pick a group membership that also conveys something about our likely values and beliefs (I'm Lutheran, I teach at a college of nursing). We might state our race or ethnicity, our gender, or our age. Psychologist Carl Rogers said that all of these things make up our "self-image," our mental picture of who we are. If our self-image matches up with who we want  to be, then we have what Rogers first described as "self-esteem." If not, then we probably feel bad, and maybe we come to hide who we "really are" from others. My daughter is a high school senior who was asked to create a podcast for her English class on a topic related to identity. Another psychologist, Erik Erikson , suggested that questions of identity ar...

  Synesthesia is the mental experience of perceiving one type of sense data in terms of another. For example, people might see specific colors when they hear specific sounds ( sound-to-color synesthesia ); associate colors with particular words, letters, or numbers ( grapheme-color synesthesia ); or experience specific tastes when they hear certain words or sounds ( lexical-gustatory synesthesia ). As many as 35 different types of synesthesia have been identified, and individual people might experience just one of them or more than one. The rate of synesthesia in the general population (i.e., people who aren't specifically trying to create the experience with drugs or other methods, but just have it happen to them naturally) is about 1 in 2,000 people , so it's rare but not highly unusual. Famous people who have reported spontaneous synesthesia include the novelist Vladimir Nabokov, the composer Olivier Messiaen, and the physicist Richard Feynman. Nabokov described his synesth...