Doritos flavoring fools your senses into thinking they’re nutritious, rhythm perception may help stuttering, and cake icing videos to rest your mind

“We think we experience the aroma of food when we smell it, but it’s actually a bit more complex than that. When you bite into the food, the aroma goes into the back of your throat and through a small hole up into your nose. This is called retronasal olfaction, and is actually a more powerful form of smelling than normal smelling. This is what allows you to experience the richness and nuance of food.

Brain scans reveal the experience of flavor takes up more gray matter than any other sensory experience. Additionally, the largest portion of the human genome involves the creation of your nose. So, from an evolutionary perspective, this chemical-sensing ability appears to be particularly important.”

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Hearing silent images is the most common synesthesia, UCLA transferred snail memories, and I hear “Yanny”

“Up to one in five people may show signs of a synesthesia-like phenomenon in which they ‘hear’ silent flashes or movement, according to a new study from City, University of London.

While the effect is barely known to science, the researchers found that this ‘visually-evoked auditory response’ (vEAR) is far more common than other types of synesthesia – such when certain sounds elicit a specific colour – with flashing lights and motion evoking vivid sounds.

The survival of this association may also explain other links between sound and vision, such as why we like to listen to music synchronised with flashing lights or dance.

…While other typical synesthesias are estimated to have an overall prevalence of 4.4 per cent, the vEAR effect has recently gained some prominence on social media following the rise of ‘noisy GIFs’, and in particular the ‘thudding pylon’ GIF which received thousands of retweets.”

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