Seeing sound, hearing a painting, smelling a color

World Pain! Meaning empathy for the pain of the world.  Internalizing the cruelty of the world.

Japanese term for “pulling away, being confined” “acute social withdrawal” (Wikipedia)

by: Mel Hurtig

by: Malcolm Gladwell

All in all an interesting read.  One of the main concepts is fairly straight forward: As humans, our ability to recall experiential events is not as reliable as we would like to believe.  In fact, in a heisenbergesque way, the act of recalling an event (remembering) forever changes the actual memory of it; causing us to lose some details while we exaggerate others.  The memory essentially becomes denatured.  The resulting meme from successive re-visitations is a reconstructed, reinforced exaggerated approximation of the original. 

A caricature

Thus paradoxically, the best way to cherish a memory is to not remember it at all.  Or at least, visit it as little as possible. 

Who the hell knows…

by: Jhumpa Lahiri

by: Stephen Pinker

By: Patricia Smith Churchland

by: John Locke

by: Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner