The Scottish independence referendum has put some new faces on my TV screen

I’m not sure if ever seen the face of Alex Salmond on TV before, because while his face does look very familiar, that could be because he is a bit of a doppleganger of Perth, Western Australia’s most famous Scotsman, Max Kay.

The face of Lesley Riddoch is another one that isn’t usually featured in Australian TV screens. She lives in Perth, but not our Perth, the other Perth. She is a commentator and a writer and she has expressed support for ‘yes’ case in the referendum, but being a super-recognizer I couldn’t help but be fascinated by her face. To my eye her face is so much the same face and personality as a woman I have known well in the past, except for her jawline and neck, which display definite differences. Riddoch’s lively mind and the spark of intelligence in her eyes are there for all to observe, and I swear are in some non-trivial way the same those of the person from my past, who clearly inherited her long, flat face and sense of humour from her British parent.

Another eureka moment

On Sunday I had one of those fabulous moments of scientific insight as I saw the connections between scientific observations from different sources. It was more exciting than it sounds. Details later if I find the time and motivation for more blogging.

Would you like to follow these steps?

First go the the Internet Archive (Wayback Machine):  https://archive.org/

Then copy and paste the web address of this blog into the search form that you will find there, removing the beginning bit, and click on “BROWSE HISTORY”:   https://superrecognizer.wordpress.com/

The results screen that comes up will show you how many times this blog has been archived by the Internet Archive over the years.

Click on the year 2012, then click on the date June 21st 2012.

The Internet Archive will display to you their archived record of the home page of this blog as recorded on June 21st 2012. You will see a blog coloured in green and blue with stories featuring photos of some sculptures seen around Perth, but the thing that you might (or might not) find interesting is the blog post that is third down the page which was first published on June 7th 2012. This is the blog post where I briefly but clearly published my ideas suggesting causal relationships between the human immune system and synaesthesia, and low levels of some of the complement immune chemicals and synaesthesia, all related to the regulation of developmental synaptic pruning and synaptic plasticity involving the activity of microglia, and in this post I also restated my previously-published speculation that the variety of dementia known as Benson’s syndrome or posterior cortical atrophy could be regarded as the opposite of developmental synaesthesia associated with special abilities in visual perception such as super-recognition ability and exceptional reading ability, a cluster of traits that appears to run in at least one family. Got that? The point I’m trying to make is that I published this stuff in June 2012, I thought of these ideas independently and as far as I can tell no one else had previously published these ideas anywhere, including in scientific journals.

Now take a look at this paper in a neuroscience journal which was published in 2013 and was received by the journal as a draft or manuscript on July 31st 2013:  http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00563/full

Do any of the themes in the paper seem familiar? Does my blog or myself receive any credit or acknowledgement in the paper? Hmm.

Regardless of any issues related to originality or acknowledgement, the important point in all of this is that here we have some ideas about a type of dementia which could conceivably have some medical or scientific use or value. My idea of linking synaesthesia with the immune system is nice but just a step in a possibly much more important sequence of ideas. I’d like to give those ideas another airing, while also restating that I thought of them a long time ago independently and claim all due credit. I hope you don’t mind.