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Sharing the same root with anesthesia,meaning no sensation, synesthesia means joined sensation.Having one type, such as colored hearing,gives you a 50% chance of having a second, third,or fourth type.One in 90 among us experience graphemes, the written elements of language,like letters,numerals, and punctuation marks,as saturated with color.Some even have gender or personality.For Gail, 3 is athletic and sporty,9 is a vain, elitist girl.By contrast, the sound units of language,or phonemes, trigger synestetic tastes.

Imagine a world in which you see numbers and letters as colored even though they're printed in black,in which music or voices trigger a swirl of moving, colored shapes,in which words and names fill your mouth with unusual flavors.Jail tastes like cold, hard bacon while Derek tastes like earwax.Welcome to synesthesia,the neurological phenomenon that couples two or more senses in 4% of the population.A synesthete might not only hear my voice,but also see it,taste it,or feel it as a physical touch.

Not surprisingly, synesthesia is more common in artists who excel at making metaphors,like novelist Vladimir Nabokov,painter David Hockney,and composers Billy Joel and Lady Gaga.But why do the rest of us non-synesthetes understand metaphors like sharp cheese or sweet person It so happens that sight,sound,and movement already map to one another so closely,that even bad ventriloquists convince us that the dummy is talking.Movies, likewise, can convince us that the sound is coming from the actors' mouths rather than surrounding speakers.So, inwardly, we're all synesthetes,outwardly unaware of the perceptual couplings happening all the time.Cross-talk in the brain is the rule, not the exception.And that sounds like a sweet deal to me!

The amazing thing is that a single nucleotide change in the sequence of one's DNA alters perception.In this way, synesthesia provides a path to understanding subjective differences,how two people can see the same thing differently.Take Sean, who prefers blue tasting food,such as milk, oranges, and spinach.The gene heightens normally occurring connections between the taste area in his frontal lobe and the color area further back.But suppose in someone else that the gene acted in non-sensory areas.You would then have the ability to link seemingly unrelated things,which is the definition of metaphor,seeing the similar in the dissimilar.

For James, college tastes like sausage,as does message and similar words with the -age ending.Synesthesia is a trait, like having blue eyes,rather than a disorder because there's nothing wrong. In fact, all the extra hooks endow synesthetes with superior memories.For example, a girl runs into someone she met long ago. Let's see, she had a green name.D's are green:Debra,Darby,Dorothy,Denise. Yes! Her name is Denise!Once established in childhood, pairings remain fixed for life.Synesthetes inherit a biological propensity for hyperconnecting brain neurons,but then must be exposed to cultural artifacts,such as calendars,food names, and alphabets.

They’re often charismatic individuals who identify themselves as embodying the “will of the people.They make exorbitant promises to their supporters,while casting their opponents as traitors actively undermining the country.But whether these politicians are sincere believers or manipulative opportunists,the dynamics they unleash can be profoundly destabilizing for liberal democracy. Even when modern populist leaders don’t follow through with their most extreme promises,their impact on political discourse, the rule of law, and public trust can long outlast their time in office.

Modern populists argue these institutions are run by a self-serving ruling minority,who seek to control the vast majority of virtuous common people.As a result, politics is no longer about seeking compromise and consensus through tolerant democratic institutions.Instead, these leaders seek to overturn what they see as a broken system.This means that where a liberal democracy has the utmost respect for institutions like courtrooms, free press, and national constitutions,modern populists disparage any establishment that disagrees with the so-called “common will. Modern populist parties have arisen in many places,but the leaders of these movements are remarkably similar.

Growing suspicion and resentment around these politicians primed citizens to look for a new kind of leader who would challenge established institutions and put the needs of the people first.In many ways, this reaction highlights democracy in action: if the majority of a population feels their interests are underrepresented,they can elect leaders to change that using existing democratic systems.But this is where assertive, modern populist candidates can subvert democracy.Modern populists identify themselves as embodying the will of the people,and they place those interests above the institutions that protect individual and social rights.

Taken together, these ideals propose that tolerance and institutions that protect us from intolerance,are the bedrock of a functional and diverse democratic society.Liberal democracies helped bring stability to the nations that adopted them.But like any system of government, they didn’t solve everything. Among other issues, an ever-increasing wealth gap led to underserved communities who distrusted both their wealthy neighbors and their political leaders.In some cases, political corruption further damaged the public's trust.

In the aftermath of World War Two,many countries wanted to move away from totalitarian ideologies.They sought a new political system that prioritized individual and social rights,aimed at political consensus, and respected the rule of law.As a result, most Western nations adopted a longstanding form of government called liberal democracy.In this context, “liberal” doesn’t refer to any political party,but rather a type of democracy that has three essential components.First, liberal democracies accept that society is full of many, often crosscutting divisions that generate conflict. Second, it requires that society’s many factions seek common ground across those divisions.Finally, liberal democracies rely on the rule of law and the protection of minority rights,as specified in constitutions and legal statutes.

The term populism has been around since Ancient Rome,and has its roots in the Latin word “populus” meaning “the people. But since then populism has been used to describe dozens of political movements,often with counterintuitive and sometimes contradictory goals.Populist movements have rebelled against monarchies, monopolies,and a wide variety of powerful institutions.It’s not possible to cover the full history of this term here.Instead, we’re focusing on one specific type of populism— the kind that describes Papandreou’s administration and numerous other governments over the last 70 years: modern populism.But to understand how political theorists define this phenomenonwe first need to explore what it’s responding to.

He famously declared, “there are no institutions, only the people exist.”Papandreou’s rise to power isn’t a unique story.In many democratic countries around the world,charismatic leaders vilify political opponents,disparage institutions,and claim the mantle of the people.Some critics label this approach as authoritarian or fascist,and many argue that these leaders are using emotions to manipulate and deceive voters.But whether or not this style of politics is ethical, it's certainly democratic,and it goes by the name of populism.

In the mid-1970s, after decades of political turmoil,Greece finally seemed to be on the path to stability.With the introduction of a new constitution and negotiations underway to enter European institutions,many analysts expected Greek politics to follow the pattern of the larger Western world.Then in 1981, a political party called PASOK came to power.Its charismatic leader Andreas Papandreou railed against the new constitution, and accused those in power of “national betrayal.”Opposing Greece’s membership in NATO and the European Economic Community,Papandreou promised to govern for the betterment of the “common peopleabove all else.

So whenever you're considering whether to trust the testimony of some authority,the first question to ask yourself is,What's their track record on this topic?And notice that you can apply the very same lesson to yourself.Your instincts tell you that you've just met Mr. Right,but what sort of track record do your instincts have on topics like this one?Have your instincts proven themselves to be worthy of your trust?Just as we judge other people's testimony by their track record,so, too, we can judge our own instincts by their track record.And this brings us one step closer to an objective view of ourselves and our relation to the world around us.

from those occasions on which we can't.But how do we do that? In order to do that,nothing is more useful than an authority's track record on a particular topic.If someone turns out to perform well in a given situation much of the time,then it's likely that he or she will continue to perform well in that same situation,at least in the near term.And this generalization holds true of the testimony of authorities as much as of anything else.If someone can consistently pick winners in both politics and baseball,then we should probably trust him or her to keep on picking winners in both politics or baseball,though maybe not in other things where his or her track record may be less stellar.If other forecasters have a poorer track record on those same two topics,then we shouldn't trust them as much.

Or maybe they were wrong simply because they were reasoning carelessly from the total body of their evidence.But whatever the reason,they turned out to be wrong and many people who trusted their authority ended up losing lots of money,losing lots of other people's money,on account of that misplaced trust.So while appealing to authority can sometimes provide us with valuable knowledge,it also can sometimes be the cause of monumental errors.It's important to all of us to be able to distinguish those occasions on which we can safely and reasonably trust authority

Even the most highly respected authorities can turn out to be wrong.Occasionally this happens because a highly respected authority is dishonest and claims to know something that she or he really doesn't know.Sometimes it happens just because they make a mistake.They think they know when they don't know.For example, a number of respected economists did not expect the financial collapse of 2008.They turned out to be wrong.Maybe they were wrong because they were overlooking some important evidence.Maybe they were wrong because they were misinterpreting some of the evidence they had noticed.

of the Sun and the Earth,or about your own family history,or about what goes on in the minds of other humans.Instead, these beliefs are mostly based on what you've been told.Without spoken and written testimonies,human beings could not pass on knowledge from one person to another,let alone from one generation to another.We would know much, much less about the world around us.So learning about a topic by asking an expert on that topic, or appealing to authority,helps us gain knowledge,but, it doesn't always.

You believe that the Sun is much larger than the Earth，that the Earth is a roughly spherical planet that rotates on its axis every 24 hours and it revolves around the Sun once every 365 days.You believe that you were born on a particular date, that you were born to two human parents and that each of your human parents was born on an earlier date.You believe that other human beings have thoughts and feelings like you do and that you are not surrounded by humanoid robots.You believe all of these things and many more,not on the basis of direct observation, which can't, by itself, tell you very much about the relative size and motion