Sound and Touch Collide - Issue 26: Color
▻http://nautil.us/issue/26/color/sound-and-touch-collide-rp
Tony Ro’s research on the brain’s mixing of sound and touch began, appropriately enough, at a mixer. It was the spring of 2000 in Houston, Texas, where he had recently launched his first laboratory at Rice University. The mixer was for new faculty at the school, to help them get to know each other. Ro struck up a conversation with Sherrilyn Roush, a 34-year-old philosopher, who told him all about her work on the reliability and fallibility of science. And Ro told her about his studies on how the human brain merges the torrent of sensory information we see, hear, and feel. “I said to him, ‘Well, you should study my brain!’ ” Roush recalls, laughing. “And then I immediately thought to myself, oh shit, he probably gets this at every party.” Ro gamely asked her why her brain was so unusual. She (...)