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Comment by aaron695 | Hacker News Reader

Do people believe this shit?

I get it makes for a great movie, which it is being made into, but a knock on the head a math genius not makes. Nor does it improve maths.

Kudos to him for making money though.

His TEDx talk shows some of his craziness. I guess if you believe this story you'll love the talk.

Again conspiracy theories are interesting, I watch Sci-Fi which is just a conspiracy theory made for TV.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CyYQIcZacvA

He might have brought on synesthesia though, which is actually interesting and perhaps real.

Vibration theory of olfaction which he mentions in the TED talk - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibration_theory_of_olfaction

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I agree with the skepticism expressed in your comment, but the tone of it is a little aggressive, which is probably why it was flagged and buried.

Would you consider rewording your comment to make it less confrontational? I think it's important to challenge dubious stories like this one.

Synesthesia is definitely real, my wife has it. She sees numbers and letters as having colours. We'd been married a few years before either of us realised there was something different about her, she just thought everyone saw the world as she did. I didn't believe her at first, then asked her go through the entire alphabet and tell me the colours she saw for each letter. To this day they've never differed.

Words written in coloured ink are difficult for her to read, and trying to read "rainbow" coloured text is virtually impossible as it makes her feel sick.

Your comment about difficulty reading colored text gave me an idea for diagnosing synesthesia early in children. To what end, I have no idea but it sounds like it could work.

There's a simple test for this. You can generate a page with tons of the same letter or number, and a few outliers. A person with synesthesia will be able to instantly spot the outliers while a neurotypical person won't. Something like https://www.synesthesiatest.org/blog/synesthesia-test-variat...

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