Artful abstraction is poetry and you have your local monkey to thank for it

Brandon Keim recounts the essence of a talk by neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran given at the World Science Festival.

The essence of art is, arguably, metaphor, and its practitioners are especially prolific — and metaphor is just a convenient shorthand for the connection of unlinked cognitive phenomena. That’s exactly what appears to happen in the minds of synesthetes. Far-flung parts of their brain have unusually high levels of cross-wiring.