title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The last position of power retained by Hua Guofeng, chairman of the Central Military Commission, was taken by Deng in 1981. However, progress toward military modernization went slowly. A border war with Vietnam in 1977–1979 made major changes unwise. The war puzzled outside observers, but Xiaoming Zhang argues that Deng had multiple goals: stopping Soviet expansion in the region, obtain American support for his four modernizations, and mobilizing China for reform and integration into the world economy. Deng also sought to strengthen his control of the PLA, and demonstrate to the world that China was capable of fighting a real war. Zhang thinks punishment of Vietnam for its invasion of Cambodia was a minor factor. In the event, the Chinese forces did poorly, in terms of equipment, strategy, leadership, and battlefield performance. China's main military threat came from the Soviet Union, which was much more powerful even though it had fewer soldiers, because it was far advanced in all sorts of weapons technology. In March 1981, Deng deemed a military exercise necessary for the PLA, and in September, the North China Military Exercise took place, becoming the largest exercise conducted by the PLA since the founding of the People's Republic. Moreover, Deng initiated the modernization of the PLA and decided that China first had to develop an advanced civilian scientific infrastructure before it could hope to build modern weapons. He therefore concentrated on downsizing the Army, cutting 1 million troops in 1985 (百万大裁军), retiring the elderly and corrupt senior officers and their cronies. He emphasized the recruitment of much better educated young men who would be able to handle the advanced technology when it finally arrived. Instead of patronage and corruption in the officer corps, he imposed strict discipline in all ranks. In 1982 he established a new Commission for Science, Technology, and Industry for National Defense to plan for using technology developed in the civilian sector.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In 1986, Deng explained to Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes" that some people and regions could become prosperous first in order to bring about common prosperity faster. In October 1987, at the Plenary Session of the National People's Congress, Deng was re-elected as Chairman of the Central Military Commission, but he resigned as Chairman of the Central Advisory Commission and was succeeded by Chen Yun. Deng continued to chair and develop the reform and opening up as the main policy, and he advanced the three steps suitable for China's economic development strategy within seventy years: the first step, to double the 1980 GNP and ensure that the people have enough food and clothing, was attained by the end of the 1980s; the second step, to quadruple the 1980 GNP by the end of the 20th century, was achieved in 1995 ahead of schedule; the third step, to increase per capita GNP to the level of the medium-developed countries by 2050, at which point, the Chinese people will be fairly well-off and modernization will be basically realized.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Improving relations with the outside world was the second of two important philosophical shifts outlined in Deng's program of reform termed "Gaige Kaifang" ("lit." Reforms and Openness). China's domestic social, political, and most notably, economic systems would undergo significant changes during Deng's time. The goals of Deng's reforms were summed up by the Four Modernizations, those of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and the military.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The strategy for achieving these aims of becoming a modern, industrial nation was the socialist market economy. Deng argued that China was in the primary stage of socialism and that the duty of the party was to perfect so-called "socialism with Chinese characteristics", and "seek truth from facts". (This somewhat resembles the Leninist theoretical justification of the New Economic Policy (NEP) in the 1920s, which argued that the Soviet Union had not gone deeply enough into the capitalist phase and therefore needed limited capitalism in order to fully evolve its means of production.) The "socialism with Chinese characteristics" settles a benign structure for the implementation of ethnic policy and forming a unique method of ethnic theory.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: This interpretation of Maoism reduced the role of ideology in economic decision-making. Downgrading communitarian values, but not necessarily criticising the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, Deng emphasized that "socialism does not mean shared poverty". His theoretical justification for allowing market forces was given as such:


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Unlike Hua Guofeng, Deng believed that no policy should be rejected outright simply because it was not associated with Mao. Unlike more conservative leaders such as Chen Yun, Deng did not object to policies on the grounds that they were similar to ones that were found in capitalist nations.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: This political flexibility towards the foundations of socialism is strongly supported by quotes such as:


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Although Deng provided the theoretical background and the political support to allow economic reform to occur, the general consensus amongst historians is that few of the economic reforms that Deng introduced were originated by Deng himself. Premier Zhou Enlai, for example, pioneered the Four Modernizations years before Deng. In addition, many reforms would be introduced by local leaders, often not sanctioned by central government directives. If successful and promising, these reforms would be adopted by larger and larger areas and ultimately introduced nationally. An often cited example is the household responsibility system, which was first secretly implemented by a poor rural village at the risk of being convicted as "counter-revolutionary". This experiment proved very successful. Deng openly supported it and it was later adopted nationally. Many other reforms were influenced by the experiences of the East Asian Tigers.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: This was in sharp contrast to the pattern of "perestroika" undertaken by Mikhail Gorbachev, in which most major reforms originated with Gorbachev himself. The bottom-up approach of Deng's reforms, in contrast to the top-down approach of "perestroika", was likely a key factor in the success of the former.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng's reforms actually included the introduction of planned, centralized management of the macro-economy by technically proficient bureaucrats, abandoning Mao's mass campaign style of economic construction. However, unlike the Soviet model, management was indirect through market mechanisms. Deng sustained Mao's legacy to the extent that he stressed the primacy of agricultural output and encouraged a significant decentralization of decision making in the rural economy teams and individual peasant households. At the local level, material incentives, rather than political appeals, were to be used to motivate the labor force, including allowing peasants to earn extra income by selling the produce of their private plots at free market value.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In the move toward market allocation, local municipalities and provinces were allowed to invest in industries that they considered most profitable, which encouraged investment in light manufacturing. Thus, Deng's reforms shifted China's development strategy to an emphasis on light industry and export-led growth. Light industrial output was vital for a developing country coming from a low capital base. With the short gestation period, low capital requirements, and high foreign-exchange export earnings, revenues generated by light manufacturing were able to be reinvested in technologically more advanced production and further capital expenditures and investments.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: However, in sharp contrast to the similar, but much less successful reforms in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia and the People's Republic of Hungary, these investments were not government mandated. The capital invested in heavy industry largely came from the banking system, and most of that capital came from consumer deposits. One of the first items of the Deng reforms was to prevent reallocation of profits except through taxation or through the banking system; hence, the reallocation in state-owned industries was somewhat indirect, thus making them more or less independent from government interference. In short, Deng's reforms sparked an industrial revolution in China.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: These reforms were a reversal of the Maoist policy of economic self-reliance. China decided to accelerate the modernization process by stepping up the volume of foreign trade, especially the purchase of machinery from Japan and the West. By participating in such export-led growth, China was able to step up the Four Modernizations by attaining certain foreign funds, market, advanced technologies and management experiences, thus accelerating its economic development. From 1980, Deng attracted foreign companies to a series of Special Economic Zones, where foreign investment and market liberalization were encouraged.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The reforms sought to improve labor productivity. New material incentives and bonus systems were introduced. Rural markets selling peasants' homegrown products and the surplus products of communes were revived. Not only did rural markets increase agricultural output, they stimulated industrial development as well. With peasants able to sell surplus agricultural yields on the open market, domestic consumption stimulated industrialization as well and also created political support for more difficult economic reforms.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: There are some parallels between Deng's market socialism especially in the early stages, and Vladimir Lenin's NEP as well as those of Nikolai Bukharin's economic policies, in that both foresaw a role for private entrepreneurs and markets based on trade and pricing rather than central planning. An interesting anecdote on this note is the first meeting between Deng and Armand Hammer. Deng pressed the industrialist and former investor in Lenin's Soviet Union for as much information on the NEP as possible.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: From 1980 onwards, Deng led the expansion of the economy, and in political terms took over negotiations with the United Kingdom to return the territory of Hong Kong, meeting personally with then-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher had participated in the meetings with the hopes of keeping British rule over Hong Kong Island and Kowloon—two of the three constituent territories of the colony—but this was firmly rejected by Deng. The result of these negotiations was the Sino-British Joint Declaration, signed on 19 December 1984, which formally outlined the United Kingdom's return of the whole Hong Kong colony to China by 1997. The Chinese government pledged to respect the economic system and civil liberties of the British colony for fifty years after the handover.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Under pressure from China, Portugal agreed in 1987 to the return of Macau by 1999, with an agreement roughly equal to that of Hong Kong. The return of these two territories was based on a political principle formulated by Deng himself called "one country, two systems", which refers to the co-existence under one political authority of areas with different economic systems of communism and capitalism. Although this theory was applied to Hong Kong and Macau, Deng apparently intended to also present it as an attractive option to the people of Taiwan for eventual incorporation of that island, where sovereignty over the territory is still disputed.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: China's rapid economic growth presented several problems. The 1982 census revealed the extraordinary growth of the population, which already exceeded a billion people. Deng continued the plans initiated by Hua Guofeng to restrict birth to only one child, limiting women to one child under pain of administrative penalty. The policy applied to urban areas, and included forced abortions.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In August 1983, Deng launched the "Strike hard" Anti-crime Campaign due to the worsening public safety after the Cultural Revolution. It was reported that the government set quotas for 5,000 executions by mid-November, and sources in Taiwan claimed that as many as 60,000 people were executed in that time, although more recent estimates have placed the number at 24,000 who were sentenced to death (mostly in the first "battle" of the campaign). A number of people arrested (some even received death penalty) were children or relatives of government officials at various levels, including the grandson of Zhu De, demonstrating the principle of "all are equal before the law". The campaign had an immediate positive effect on public safety, while controversies also arose such as whether some of the legal punishments were too harsh and whether the campaign had long-term positive effect on public safety.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Increasing economic freedom was being translated into a greater freedom of opinion, and critics began to arise within the system, including the famous dissident Wei Jingsheng, who coined the term "fifth modernization" in reference to democracy as a missing element in the renewal plans of Deng Xiaoping. In the late 1980s, dissatisfaction with the authoritarian regime and growing inequalities caused the biggest crisis to Deng's leadership.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, culminating in the June Fourth Massacre, were a series of demonstrations in and near Tiananmen Square in the People's Republic of China (PRC) between 15 April and 5 June 1989, a year in which many other communist governments collapsed.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The protests were sparked by the death of Hu Yaobang, a reformist official backed by Deng but ousted by the Eight Elders and the conservative wing of the politburo. Many people were dissatisfied with the party's slow response and relatively subdued funeral arrangements. Public mourning began on the streets of Beijing and universities in the surrounding areas. In Beijing this was centered on the Monument to the People's Heroes in Tiananmen Square. The mourning became a public conduit for anger against perceived nepotism in the government, the unfair dismissal and early death of Hu, and the behind-the-scenes role of the "old men". By the eve of Hu's funeral, the demonstration had reached 100,000 people on Tiananmen Square. While the protests lacked a unified cause or leadership, participants raised the issue of corruption within the government and some voiced calls for economic liberalization and democratic reform within the structure of the government while others called for a less authoritarian and less centralized form of socialism.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: During the demonstrations, Deng's pro-market ally General Secretary Zhao Ziyang supported the demonstrators and distanced himself from the Politburo. Martial law was declared on 20 May by the socialist hardliner, Chinese premier Li Peng, but the initial military advance on the city was blocked by residents. The movement lasted seven weeks. On 3–4 June, over two hundred thousand soldiers in tanks and helicopters were sent into the city to quell the protests by force, resulting in hundreds to thousands of casualties. Many ordinary people in Beijing believed that Deng had ordered the intervention, but political analysts do not know who was actually behind the order. However, Deng's daughter defends the actions that occurred as a collective decision by the party leadership.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: To purge sympathizers of Tiananmen demonstrators, the Communist Party initiated a one-and-a-half-year-long program similar to the Anti-Rightist Movement. Old-timers like Deng Fei aimed to deal "strictly with those inside the party with serious tendencies toward bourgeois liberalization", and more than 30,000 communist officers were deployed to the task.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Zhao was placed under house arrest by hardliners and Deng himself was forced to make concessions to them. He soon declared that "the entire imperialist Western world plans to make all socialist countries discard the socialist road and then bring them under the monopoly of international capital and onto the capitalist road". A few months later he said that the "United States was too deeply involved" in the student movement, referring to foreign reporters who had given financial aid to the student leaders and later helped them escape to various Western countries, primarily the United States through Hong Kong and Taiwan.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Although Deng initially made concessions to the socialist hardliners, he soon resumed his reforms after his 1992 southern tour. After his tour, he was able to stop the attacks of the socialist hardliners on the reforms through their "named capitalist or socialist?" campaign.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng privately told former Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau that factions of the Communist Party could have grabbed army units and the country had risked a civil war. Two years later, Deng endorsed Zhu Rongji, a Shanghai Mayor, as a vice-premier candidate. Zhu Rongji had refused to declare martial law in Shanghai during the demonstrations even though socialist hardliners had pressured him.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Officially, Deng decided to retire from top positions when he stepped down as Chairman of the Central Military Commission in November 1989 and his successor Jiang Zemin became the new Chairman of the Central Military Commission and paramount leader. China, however, was still in the "era of Deng Xiaoping". He continued to be widely regarded as the de facto leader of the country, believed to have backroom control despite no official position apart from being chairman of the Chinese Contract Bridge Association, and appointed Hu Jintao as Jiang's successor on 14th Party Congress in 1992. Deng was recognized officially as "the chief architect of China's economic reforms and China's socialist modernization". To the Communist Party, he was believed to have set a good example for communist cadres who refused to retire at old age. He broke earlier conventions of holding offices for life. He was often referred to as simply "Comrade Xiaoping", with no title attached.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Because of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests, Deng's power had been significantly weakened and there was a growing formalist faction opposed to Deng's reforms within the Communist Party. To reassert his economic agenda, in the spring of 1992, Deng made a tour of southern China, visiting Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and spending the New Year in Shanghai, using his travels as a method of reasserting his economic policy after his retirement from office. The 1992 Southern Tour is widely regarded as a critical point in the modern history of China, as it saved the Chinese economic reform and preserved the stability of the society.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng died on 19 February 1997 at 9:08 p.m. Beijing time, aged 92 from a lung infection and Parkinson's disease. The public was largely prepared for his death, as there had been rumors that his health was deteriorating. At 10:00 on the morning of 24 February, people were asked by Premier Li Peng to pause in silence for three minutes. The nation's flags flew at half-mast for over a week. The nationally televised funeral, which was a simple and relatively private affair attended by the country's leaders and Deng's family, was broadcast on all cable channels. After the funeral, his organs were donated to medical research, the remains were cremated at Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery, and his ashes were subsequently scattered at sea, according to his wishes. For the next two weeks, Chinese state media ran news stories and documentaries related to Deng's life and death, with the regular 19:00 "National News" program in the evening lasting almost two hours over the regular broadcast time.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng's successor, Jiang Zemin, maintained Deng's political and economic philosophies. Deng was eulogized as a "great Marxist, great Proletarian Revolutionary, statesman, military strategist, and diplomat; one of the main leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, the People's Liberation Army of China, and the People's Republic of China; the great architect of China's socialist opening-up and modernized construction; the founder of Deng Xiaoping Theory". Some elements, notably modern Maoists and radical reformers (the far left and the far right), had negative views, however. In the following year, songs like "Story of Spring" by Dong Wenhua, which were created in Deng's honour shortly after Deng's southern tour in 1992, once again were widely played.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng's death drew international reaction. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan said Deng was to be remembered "in the international community at large as a primary architect of China's modernization and dramatic economic development". French President Jacques Chirac said "In the course of this century, few men have, as much as Deng, led a vast human community through such profound and determining changes"; British Prime Minister John Major commented about Deng's key role in the return of Hong Kong to Chinese control; Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien called Deng a "pivotal figure" in Chinese history. The Kuomintang chair in Taiwan also sent its condolences, saying it longed for peace, cooperation, and prosperity. The Dalai Lama voiced regret that Deng died without resolving questions over Tibet.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Memorials to Deng have been low profile compared to other leaders, in keeping with Deng's image of pragmatism. Rather than being embalmed, as was Mao, he was cremated and his ashes were scattered at sea. There are some public displays, however. A bronze statue was erected on 14 November 2000, at the grand plaza of Lianhua Mountain Park in Shenzhen. This statue is dedicated to Deng's role as a planner and contributor to the development of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. The statue is high, with an additional 3.68-meter base, and shows Deng striding forward confidently. Many CCP high level leaders visit the statue. In addition, in coastal areas and on the island province of Hainan, Deng appeared on roadside billboards with messages emphasizing economic reform or his policy of one country, two systems.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: A bronze statue to commemorate Deng's 100th birthday was dedicated 13 August 2004 in the city of Guang'an, Deng's hometown, in southwest China's Sichuan. Deng is dressed casually, sitting on a chair and smiling. The Chinese characters on the pedestal were written by Jiang Zemin, then General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng Xiaoping's Former Residence in his hometown of Paifang Village in Sichuan has been preserved as an historical museum.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: In Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, there is a six-lane boulevard, wide and long, the Deng Xiaoping Prospekt, which was dedicated on 18 June 1997. A two-meter high red granite monument stands at the east end of this route. The epigraph is written in Chinese, Russian and Kirghiz.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: The documentary, "Deng Xiaoping", released by CCTV in January 1997, presents his life from his days as a student in France to his "Southern Tour" of 1993. In 2014, CCTV released a TV series, "Deng Xiaoping at History's Crossroads", in anticipation of the 110th anniversary of his birth.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng has been called the "architect of contemporary China" and is widely considered to be one of the most influential figures of the 20th century. He was the "Time" Person of the Year in 1978 and 1985, the third Chinese leader (after Chiang Kai-shek and his wife Soong Mei-ling) and the fourth time for a communist leader (after Joseph Stalin, picked twice; and Nikita Khrushchev) to be selected.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: Deng is remembered primarily for the economic reforms he initiated while paramount leader of the People's Republic of China, which pivoted China towards a market economy, led to high economic growth, increased standards of living of hundreds of millions, expanded personal and cultural freedoms, and substantially integrated the country into the world economy. More people were lifted out of poverty during his leadership than during any other time in human history, attributed largely to his reforms. For this reason, some have suggested that Deng should have been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Deng is also credited with reducing the cult of Mao Zedong and with bringing an end to the chaotic era of the Cultural Revolution. Furthermore, his strong-handed tactics have been credited with keeping the People's Republic of China unified, in contrast to the other major Communist power of the time, the Soviet Union, which collapsed in 1991.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: However, Deng is also remembered for leaving in place a communist government that continues to exist, for human rights, and for numerous instances of political violence. As paramount leader, he oversaw the Tiananmen Square massacre; afterwards, he was influential in the Communist Party's domestic cover-up of the event. Furthermore, he is associated with some of the worst purges during Mao Zedong's rule; for instance, he ordered an army crackdown on a Muslim village in Yunnan which resulted in the deaths of 1,600 people, including 300 children.


title: Deng Xiaoping

text: As paramount leader, Deng also negotiated an end to the British colonial rule of Hong Kong and normalized relations with the United States and the Soviet Union. In August 1980, he started China's political reforms by setting term limits for officials and proposing a systematic revision of China's third Constitution which was made during the Cultural Revolution; the new Constitution embodied Chinese-style constitutionalism and was passed by the National People's Congress in December 1982, with most of its content still being effective as of today. He helped establish China's nine-year compulsory education, and revived China's political reforms.


title: Synesthesia

text: Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes. Awareness of synesthetic perceptions varies from person to person. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme–color synesthesia or color–graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, or days of the week elicit precise locations in space ("e.g.," 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may appear as a three-dimensional map (clockwise or counterclockwise). Synesthetic associations can occur in any combination and any number of senses or cognitive pathways.


title: Synesthesia

text: Little is known about how synesthesia develops. It has been suggested that synesthesia develops during childhood when children are intensively engaged with abstract concepts for the first time. This hypothesis referred to as "semantic vacuum hypothesis" could explain why the most common forms of synesthesia are grapheme–color, spatial sequence, and number form. These are usually the first abstract concepts that educational systems require children to learn.


title: Synesthesia

text: Difficulties have been recognized in adequately defining synesthesia. Many different phenomena have been included in the term "synesthesia", and in many cases the terminology seems to be inaccurate. A more accurate but less common term may be "ideasthesia".


title: Synesthesia

text: The earliest recorded case of synesthesia is attributed to the Oxford University academic and philosopher John Locke, who, in 1690, made a report about a blind man who said he experienced the color scarlet when he heard the sound of a trumpet. However, there is disagreement as to whether Locke described an actual instance of synesthesia or was using a metaphor. The first medical account came from German physician Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs in 1812. The term is from the Ancient Greek , 'together', and , 'sensation'.


title: Synesthesia

text: For example, in chromesthesia (sound to color), a "projector" may hear a trumpet, and see an orange triangle in space, while an "associator" might hear a trumpet, and think very strongly that it sounds "orange".


title: Synesthesia

text: Synesthesia can occur between nearly any two senses or perceptual modes, and at least one synesthete, Solomon Shereshevsky, experienced synesthesia that linked all five senses. Types of synesthesia are indicated by using the notation , where x is the "inducer" or trigger experience, and y is the "concurrent" or additional experience. For example, perceiving letters and numbers (collectively called graphemes) as colored would be indicated as grapheme-color synesthesia. Similarly, when synesthetes see colors and movement as a result of hearing musical tones, it would be indicated as tone → (color, movement) synesthesia.


title: Synesthesia

text: While nearly every logically possible combination of experiences can occur, several types are more common than others.


title: Synesthesia

text: In one of the most common forms of synesthesia, individual letters of the alphabet and numbers (collectively referred to as "graphemes") are "shaded" or "tinged" with a color. While different individuals usually do not report the same colors for all letters and numbers, studies with large numbers of synesthetes find some commonalities across letters (e.g., A is likely to be red).


title: Synesthesia

text: Another common form of synesthesia is the association of sounds with colors. For some, everyday sounds can trigger seeing colors. For others, colors are triggered when musical notes or keys are being played. People with synesthesia related to music may also have perfect pitch because their ability to see "and" hear colors aids them in identifying notes or keys.


title: Synesthesia

text: The colors triggered by certain sounds, and any other synesthetic visual experiences, are referred to as "photisms".


title: Synesthesia

text: According to Richard Cytowic, chromesthesia is "something like fireworks": voice, music, and assorted environmental sounds such as clattering dishes or dog barks trigger color and firework shapes that arise, move around, and then fade when the sound ends. Sound often changes the perceived hue, brightness, scintillation, and directional movement. Some individuals see music on a "screen" in front of their faces. For Deni Simon, music produces waving lines "like oscilloscope configurations lines moving in color, often metallic with height, width, and, most importantly, depth. My favorite music has lines that extend horizontally beyond the 'screen' area."


title: Synesthesia

text: Individuals rarely agree on what color a given sound is. Composers Franz Liszt and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov famously disagreed on the colors of musical keys.


title: Synesthesia

text: Those with spatial sequence synesthesia (SSS) tend to see ordinal sequences as points in space. People with SSS may have superior memories; in one study, they were able to recall past events and memories far better and in far greater detail than those without the condition. They can also see months or dates in the space around them, but most synesthetes "see" these sequences in their mind's eye. Some people see time like a clock above and around them.


title: Synesthesia

text: A number form is a mental map of numbers that automatically and involuntarily appear whenever someone who experiences number-forms synesthesia thinks of numbers. These numbers might appear in different locations and the mapping changes and varies between individuals. Number forms were first documented and named in 1881 by Francis Galton in "The Visions of Sane Persons".


title: Synesthesia

text: In auditory–tactile synesthesia, certain sounds can induce sensations in parts of the body. For example, someone with auditory–tactile synesthesia may experience that hearing a specific word or sound feels like touch in one specific part of the body or may experience that certain sounds can create a sensation in the skin without being touched (not to be confused with the milder general reaction known as frisson, which affects approximately 50% of the population). It is one of the least common forms of synesthesia.


title: Synesthesia

text: Ordinal-linguistic personification (OLP, or personification) is a form of synesthesia in which ordered sequences, such as ordinal numbers, week-day names, months, and alphabetical letters are associated with personalities or genders (). Although this form of synesthesia was documented as early as the 1890s, researchers have, until recently, paid little attention to it (see History of synesthesia research). This form of synesthesia was named "OLP" in the contemporary literature by Julia Simner and colleagues although it is now also widely recognised by the term "sequence-personality" synesthesia. Ordinal linguistic personification normally co-occurs with other forms of synesthesia such as grapheme–color synesthesia.


title: Synesthesia

text: Misophonia is a neurological disorder in which negative experiences (anger, fright, hatred, disgust) are triggered by specific sounds. Cytowic suggests that misophonia is related to, or perhaps a variety of, synesthesia. Edelstein and her colleagues have compared misophonia to synesthesia in terms of connectivity between different brain regions as well as specific symptoms. They formed the hypothesis that "a pathological distortion of connections between the auditory cortex and limbic structures could cause a form of sound-emotion synesthesia." Studies suggest that individuals with misophonia have a normal hearing sensitivity level but the limbic system and autonomic nervous system are constantly in a "heightened state of arousal" where abnormal reactions to sounds will be more prevalent.


title: Synesthesia

text: Newer studies suggest that depending on its severity, misophonia could be associated with lower cognitive control when individuals are exposed to certain associations and triggers.


title: Synesthesia

text: It is unclear what causes misophonia. Some scientists believe it could be genetic, others believe it to be present with other additional conditions however there is not enough evidence to conclude what causes it. There are no current treatments for the condition but could be managed with different types of coping strategies. These strategies vary from person to person, some have reported the avoidance of certain situations that could trigger the reaction: mimicking the sounds, cancelling out the sounds by using different methods like earplugs, music, internal dialog and many other tactics. Most misophonics use these to "overwrite" these sounds produced by others.


title: Synesthesia

text: This is a form of synesthesia where individuals feel the same sensation that another person feels (such as touch). For instance, when such a synesthete observes someone being tapped on their shoulder, the synesthete involuntarily feels a tap on their own shoulder as well. People with this type of synesthesia have been shown to have higher empathy levels compared to the general population. This may be related to the so-called mirror neurons present in the motor areas of the brain, which have also been linked to empathy.


title: Synesthesia

text: This is another form of synesthesia where certain tastes are experienced when hearing words. For example, the word basketball might taste like waffles. The documentary 'Derek Tastes of Earwax' gets its name from this phenomenon, in references to pub owner James Wannerton who experiences this particular sensation whenever he hears the name spoken. It is estimated that 0.2% of the synesthesia population has this form of synesthesia, making it the rarest form.


title: Synesthesia

text: Kinesthetic synesthesia is one of the rarest documented forms of synesthesia in the world. This form of synesthesia is a combination of various different types of synesthesia. Features appear similar to auditory–tactile synesthesia but sensations are not isolated to individual numbers or letters but complex systems of relationships. The result is the ability to memorize and model complex relationships between numerous variables by feeling physical sensations around the kinesthetic movement of related variables. Reports include feeling sensations in the hands or feet, coupled with visualizations of shapes or objects when analyzing mathematical equations, physical systems, or music. In another case, a person described seeing interactions between physical shapes causing sensations in the feet when solving a math problem. Generally, those with this type of synesthesia can memorize and visualize complicated systems, and with a high degree of accuracy, predict the results of changes to the system. Examples include predicting the results of computer simulations in subjects such as quantum mechanics or fluid dynamics when results are not naturally intuitive.


title: Synesthesia

text: Other forms of synesthesia have been reported, but little has been done to analyze them scientifically. There are at least 80 types of synesthesia.


title: Synesthesia

text: In August 2017 a research article in the journal "Social Neuroscience" reviewed studies with fMRI to determine if persons who experience autonomous sensory meridian response are experiencing a form of synesthesia. While a determination has not yet been made, there is anecdotal evidence that this may be the case, based on significant and consistent differences from the control group, in terms of functional connectivity within neural pathways. It is unclear whether this will lead to ASMR being included as a form of existing synesthesia, or if a new type will be considered.


title: Synesthesia

text: Some synesthetes often report that they were unaware their experiences were unusual until they realized other people did not have them, while others report feeling as if they had been keeping a secret their entire lives. The automatic and ineffable nature of a synesthetic experience means that the pairing may not seem out of the ordinary. This involuntary and consistent nature helps define synesthesia as a real experience. Most synesthetes report that their experiences are pleasant or neutral, although, in rare cases, synesthetes report that their experiences can lead to a degree of sensory overload.


title: Synesthesia

text: Though often stereotyped in the popular media as a medical condition or neurological aberration, many synesthetes themselves do not perceive their synesthetic experiences as a handicap. On the contrary, some report it as a gift an additional "hidden" sense something they would not want to miss. Most synesthetes become aware of their distinctive mode of perception in their childhood. Some have learned how to apply their ability in daily life and work. Synesthetes have used their abilities in memorization of names and telephone numbers, mental arithmetic, and more complex creative activities like producing visual art, music, and theater.


title: Synesthesia

text: Despite the commonalities which permit the definition of the broad phenomenon of synesthesia, individual experiences vary in numerous ways. This variability was first noticed early in synesthesia research. Some synesthetes report that vowels are more strongly colored, while for others consonants are more strongly colored. Self-reports, interviews, and autobiographical notes by synesthetes demonstrate a great degree of variety in types of synesthesia, the intensity of synesthetic perceptions, awareness of the perceptual discrepancies between synesthetes and non-synesthetes, and the ways synesthesia is used in work, creative processes, and daily life.


title: Synesthesia

text: Synesthetes are very likely to participate in creative activities. It has been suggested that individual development of perceptual and cognitive skills, in addition to one's cultural environment, produces the variety in awareness and practical use of synesthetic phenomena. Synesthesia may also give a memory advantage. In one study, conducted by Julia Simner of the University of Edinburgh, it was found that spatial sequence synesthetes have a built-in and automatic mnemonic reference. Whereas a non-synesthete will need to create a mnemonic device to remember a sequence (like dates in a diary), a synesthete can simply reference their spatial visualizations.


title: Synesthesia

text: Dedicated regions of the brain are specialized for given functions. Increased cross-talk between regions specialized for different functions may account for the many types of synesthesia. For example, the additive experience of seeing color when looking at graphemes might be due to cross-activation of the grapheme-recognition area and the color area called V4 (see figure). This is supported by the fact that grapheme–color synesthetes can identify the color of a grapheme in their peripheral vision even when they cannot consciously identify the shape of the grapheme.


title: Synesthesia

text: An alternative possibility is disinhibited feedback, or a reduction in the amount of inhibition along normally existing feedback pathways. Normally, excitation and inhibition are balanced. However, if normal feedback were not inhibited as usual, then signals feeding back from late stages of multi-sensory processing might influence earlier stages such that tones could activate vision. Cytowic and Eagleman find support for the disinhibition idea in the so-called acquired forms of synesthesia that occur in non-synesthetes under certain conditions: temporal lobe epilepsy, head trauma, stroke, and brain tumors. They also note that it can likewise occur during stages of meditation, deep concentration, sensory deprivation, or with use of psychedelics such as LSD or mescaline, and even, in some cases, marijuana. However, synesthetes report that common stimulants, like caffeine and cigarettes do not affect the strength of their synesthesia, nor does alcohol.


title: Synesthesia

text: A very different theoretical approach to synesthesia is that based on ideasthesia. According to this account, synesthesia is a phenomenon mediated by the extraction of the meaning of the inducing stimulus. Thus, synesthesia may be fundamentally a semantic phenomenon. Therefore, to understand neural mechanisms of synesthesia the mechanisms of semantics and the extraction of meaning need to be understood better. This is a non-trivial issue because it is not only a question of a location in the brain at which meaning is "processed" but pertains also to the question of understanding epitomized in e.g., the Chinese room problem. Thus, the question of the neural basis of synesthesia is deeply entrenched into the general mind–body problem and the problem of the explanatory gap.


title: Synesthesia

text: Due to the prevalence of synesthesia among the first-degree relatives of people affected, there may be a genetic basis, as indicated by the monozygotic twins studies showing an epigenetic component. Synesthesia might also be an oligogenic condition, with locus heterogeneity, multiple forms of inheritance, and continuous variation in gene expression. While the exact genetic loci for this trait haven't been identified, research indicates that the genetic constructs underlying synesthesia are most likely more complex than the simple X-linked mode of inheritance that early researchers believed it to be. Further, it remains uncertain as to whether synesthesia perseveres in the genetic pool because it provides a selective advantage, or because it has become a byproduct of some other useful selected trait. Women have a higher chance of developing synesthesia, as demonstrated in the UK where females are 8 times more likely to have it. As technological equipment continues to advance, the search for clearer answers regarding the genetics behind synesthesia will become more promising.


title: Synesthesia

text: Although often termed a "neurological condition," synesthesia is not listed in either the DSM-IV or the ICD since it usually does not interfere with normal daily functioning. Indeed, most synesthetes report that their experiences are neutral or even pleasant. Like perfect pitch, synesthesia is simply a difference in perceptual experience.


title: Synesthesia

text: The simplest approach is test-retest reliability over long periods of time, using stimuli of color names, color chips, or a computer-screen color picker providing 16.7 million choices. Synesthetes consistently score around 90% on the reliability of associations, even with years between tests. In contrast, non-synesthetes score just 30–40%, even with only a few weeks between tests and a warning that they would be retested.


title: Synesthesia

text: Many tests exist for synesthesia. Each common type has a specific test. When testing for grapheme–color synesthesia, a visual test is given. The person is shown a picture that includes black letters and numbers. A synesthete will associate the letters and numbers with a specific color. An auditory test is another way to test for synesthesia. A sound is turned on and one will either identify it with a taste or envision shapes. The audio test correlates with chromesthesia (sounds with colors). Since people question whether or not synesthesia is tied to memory, the "retest" is given. One is given a set of objects and is asked to assign colors, tastes, personalities, or more. After a period of time, the same objects are presented and the person is asked again to do the same task. The synesthete can assign the same characteristics because that person has permanent neural associations in the brain, rather than memories of a certain object.


title: Synesthesia

text: Grapheme–color synesthetes, as a group, share significant preferences for the color of each letter (e.g., A tends to be red; O tends to be white or black; S tends to be yellow, etc.) Nonetheless, there is a great variety in types of synesthesia, and within each type, individuals report differing triggers for their sensations and differing intensities of experiences. This variety means that defining synesthesia in an individual is difficult, and the majority of synesthetes are completely unaware that their experiences have a name.


title: Synesthesia

text: Neurologist Richard Cytowic identifies the following diagnostic criteria for synesthesia in his "first" edition book. However, the criteria are different in the second book:


title: Synesthesia

text: Cytowic's early cases mainly included individuals whose synesthesia was frankly projected outside the body (e.g., on a "screen" in front of one's face). Later research showed that such stark externalization occurs in a minority of synesthetes. Refining this concept, Cytowic and Eagleman differentiated between "localizers" and "non-localizers" to distinguish those synesthetes whose perceptions have a definite sense of spatial quality from those whose perceptions do not.


title: Synesthesia

text: Estimates of prevalence of synesthesia have ranged widely, from 1 in 4 to 1 in 25,000–100,000. However, most studies have relied on synesthetes reporting themselves, introducing self-referral bias. In what is cited as the most accurate prevalence study so far, self-referral bias was avoided by studying 500 people recruited from the communities of Edinburgh and Glasgow Universities; it showed a prevalence of 4.4%, with 9 different variations of synesthesia. This study also concluded that one common form of synesthesia grapheme–color synesthesia (colored letters and numbers) is found in more than one percent of the population, and this latter prevalence of graphemes–color synesthesia has since been independently verified in a sample of nearly 3,000 people in the University of Edinburgh.


title: Synesthesia

text: The most common forms of synesthesia are those that trigger colors, and the most prevalent of all is day–color. Also relatively common is grapheme–color synesthesia. We can think of "prevalence" both in terms of how common is synesthesia (or different forms of synesthesia) within the population, or how common are different forms of synesthesia within synesthetes. So within synesthetes, forms of synesthesia that trigger color also appear to be the most common forms of synesthesia with a prevalence rate of 86% within synesthetes. In another study, music–color is also prevalent at 18–41%. Some of the rarest are reported to be auditory–tactile, mirror-touch, and lexical–gustatory.


title: Synesthesia

text: There is research to suggest that the likelihood of having synesthesia is greater in people with autism spectrum condition.


title: Synesthesia

text: The interest in colored hearing dates back to Greek antiquity when philosophers asked if the color ("chroia", what we now call timbre) of music was a quantifiable quality. Isaac Newton proposed that musical tones and color tones shared common frequencies, as did Goethe in his book "Theory of Colours". There is a long history of building color organs such as the clavier à lumières on which to perform colored music in concert halls.


title: Synesthesia

text: The first medical description of "colored hearing" is in an 1812 thesis by the German physician Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs. The "father of psychophysics," Gustav Fechner, reported the first empirical survey of colored letter photisms among 73 synesthetes in 1876, followed in the 1880s by Francis Galton. Carl Jung refers to "color hearing" in his Symbols of Transformation in 1912.


title: Synesthesia

text: In the early 1920s, the Bauhaus teacher and musician Gertrud Grunow researched the relationships between sound, color, and movement and developed a 'twelve-tone circle of colour' which was analogous with the twelve-tone music of the Austrian composer Arnold Schönberg (1874-1951). She was a participant in at least one of the "Congresses for Colour-Sound Research" (German:"Kongreß für Farbe-Ton-Forschung") held in Hamburg in the late 1920s and early 1930s.


title: Synesthesia

text: Research into synesthesia proceeded briskly in several countries, but due to the difficulties in measuring subjective experiences and the rise of behaviorism, which made the study of "any" subjective experience taboo, synesthesia faded into scientific oblivion between 1930 and 1980.


title: Synesthesia

text: As the 1980s cognitive revolution made inquiry into internal subjective states respectable again, scientists returned to synesthesia. Led in the United States by Larry Marks and Richard Cytowic, and later in England by Simon Baron-Cohen and Jeffrey Gray, researchers explored the reality, consistency, and frequency of synesthetic experiences. In the late 1990s, the focus settled on grapheme → color synesthesia, one of the most common and easily studied types. Psychologists and neuroscientists study synesthesia not only for its inherent appeal but also for the insights it may give into cognitive and perceptual processes that occur in synesthetes and non-synesthetes alike. Synesthesia is now the topic of scientific books and papers, Ph.D. theses, documentary films, and even novels.


title: Synesthesia

text: Since the rise of the Internet in the 1990s, synesthetesia began contacting one another and creating websites devoted to the condition. These rapidly grew into international organizations such as the American Synesthesia Association, the UK Synaesthesia Association, the Belgian Synesthesia Association, the Canadian Synesthesia Association, the German Synesthesia Association, and the Netherlands Synesthesia Web Community.


title: Synesthesia

text: Solomon Shereshevsky, a newspaper reporter turned mnemonist, was discovered by Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria to have a rare fivefold form of synesthesia, of which he is the only known case. Words and text were not only associated with highly vivid visuospatial imagery but also sound, taste, color, and sensation. Shereshevsky could recount endless details of many things without form, from lists of names to decades-old conversations, but he had great difficulty grasping abstract concepts. The automatic, and nearly permanent, retention of every detail due to synesthesia greatly inhibited Shereshevsky's ability to understand what he read or heard.


title: Synesthesia

text: Neuroscientist and author V.S. Ramachandran studied the case of a grapheme–color synesthete who was also color blind. While he couldn't see certain colors with his eyes, he could still "see" those colors when looking at certain letters. Because he didn't have a name for those colors, he called them "Martian colors."


title: Synesthesia

text: Other notable synesthetes come particularly from artistic professions and backgrounds. Synesthetic art historically refers to multi-sensory experiments in the genres of visual music, music visualization, audiovisual art, abstract film, and intermedia. Distinct from neuroscience, the concept of synesthesia in the arts is regarded as the simultaneous perception of multiple stimuli in one gestalt experience. Neurological synesthesia has been a source of inspiration for artists, composers, poets, novelists, and digital artists.


title: Synesthesia

text: Vladimir Nabokov wrote explicitly about synesthesia in several novels. Nabokov described his grapheme–color synesthesia at length in his autobiography, "Speak, Memory", and portrayed it in some of his characters. In addition to Messiaen, whose three types of complex colors are rendered explicitly in musical chord structures that he invented, other composers who reported synesthesia include Duke Ellington, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Jean Sibelius. Daniel Tammet wrote a book on his experiences with synesthesia called "Born on a Blue Day". Joanne Harris, author of "Chocolat", is a synesthete who says she experiences colors as scents. Her novel "Blueeyedboy" features various aspects of synesthesia.


title: Synesthesia

text: Wassily Kandinsky (a synesthete) and Piet Mondrian (not a synesthete) both experimented with image–music congruence in their paintings. Contemporary artists with synesthesia, such as Carol Steen and Marcia Smilack (a photographer who waits until she gets a synesthetic response from what she sees and then takes the picture), use their synesthesia to create their artwork. Linda Anderson, according to NPR considered "one of the foremost living memory painters", creates with oil crayons on fine-grain sandpaper representations of the auditory-visual synaesthesia she experiences during severe migraine attacks. Brandy Gale, a Canadian visual artist, experiences an involuntary joining or crossing of any of her senses hearing, vision, taste, touch, smell and movement. Gale paints from life rather than from photographs and by exploring the sensory panorama of each locale attempts to capture, select, and transmit these personal experiences. David Hockney perceives music as color, shape, and configuration and uses these perceptions when painting opera stage sets (though not while creating his other artworks). Kandinsky combined four senses: color, hearing, touch, and smell.


title: Synesthesia

text: Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis, 1875 – 1911, was a Lithuanian painter, composer and writer. In his short life, he composed about 400 pieces of music and created about 300 paintings, as well as many literary works and poems. He perceived colors and music simultaneously. Many of his paintings bear the names of matching musical pieces: sonatas, fugues, and preludes. Čiurlionis's works have been displayed at international exhibitions in Japan, Germany, Spain, and elsewhere. His paintings were featured at "Visual Music" fest, an homage to synesthesia that included the works of Wassily Kandinsky, James McNeill Whistler, and Paul Klee, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in 2005. Čiurlionis's life was depicted in the 2012 film "Letters to Sofija", directed by Robert Mullan.


title: Synesthesia

text: Alexander Scriabin composed colored music that was deliberately contrived and based on the circle of fifths, whereas Olivier Messiaen invented a new method of composition (the modes of limited transposition) specifically to render his bi-directional sound–color synesthesia. For example, the red rocks of Bryce Canyon are depicted in his symphony "Des canyons aux étoiles..." ("From the Canyons to the Stars"). New art movements such as literary symbolism, non-figurative art, and visual music have profited from experiments with synesthetic perception and contributed to the public awareness of synesthetic and multi-sensory ways of perceiving. Michael Torke is a contemporary example of a synesthetic composer. Ramin Djawadi, a composer best known for his work on composing the theme songs and scores for such TV series as "Game of Thrones", "Westworld" and for the "Iron Man" movie, also has synesthesia. He says he tends to "associate colors with music, or music with colors."


title: Synesthesia

text: British composer Daniel Liam Glyn created the classical-contemporary music project Changing Stations using Grapheme Colour Synaesthesia. Based on the 11 main lines of the London Underground, the eleven tracks featured on the album represent the eleven main tube line colours: Bakerloo, Central, Circle, District, Hammersmith and City, Jubilee, Metropolitan, Northern, Piccadilly, Victoria, and Waterloo and City. Each track focuses heavily on the different speeds, sounds, and mood of each line, and are composed in the key signature synaesthetically assigned by Glyn with reference to the colour of the tube line on the map.


title: Synesthesia

text: The producer, rapper, and fashion designer Kanye West is a prominent interdisciplinary case. In an impromptu speech he gave during an Ellen interview, he described his condition, saying that he sees sounds, and that everything he sonically makes is a painting. Other notable synesthetes include musicians Billy Joel, Andy Partridge, Itzhak Perlman, Lorde, Billie Eilish, Brendon Urie, Ida Maria, and Brian Chase; electronic musician Richard D. James a.k.a. Aphex Twin (who claims to be inspired by lucid dreams as well as music); and classical pianist Hélène Grimaud. Musician Kristin Hersh sees music in colors. Drummer Mickey Hart of The Grateful Dead wrote about his experiences with synaesthesia in his autobiography "Drumming at the Edge of Magic". Pharrell Williams, of the groups The Neptunes and N.E.R.D., also experiences synesthesia and used it as the basis of the album "Seeing Sounds". Singer/songwriter Marina and the Diamonds experiences music → color synesthesia and reports colored days of the week.


title: Synesthesia

text: Some artists frequently mentioned as synesthetes did not, in fact, have the neurological condition. Scriabin's 1911 , for example, is a deliberate contrivance whose color choices are based on the circle of fifths and appear to have been taken from Madame Blavatsky. The musical score has a separate staff marked "luce" whose "notes" are played on a color organ. Technical reviews appear in period volumes of "Scientific American." On the other hand, his older colleague Rimsky-Korsakov (who was perceived as a fairly conservative composer) was, in fact, a synesthete.


title: Synesthesia

text: French poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire wrote of synesthetic experiences, but there is no evidence they were synesthetes themselves. Baudelaire's 1857 ' introduced the notion that the senses can and should intermingle. Baudelaire participated in a hashish experiment by psychiatrist Jacques-Joseph Moreau and became interested in how the senses might affect each other. Rimbaud later wrote "Voyelles" (1871), which was perhaps more important than ' in popularizing synesthesia. He later boasted ""J'inventais la couleur des voyelles!"" (I invented the colors of the vowels!).


title: Synesthesia

text: Some technologists, like inventor Nikola Tesla, and scientists also reported being synesthetic. Physicist Richard Feynman describes his colored equations in his autobiography, "What Do You Care What Other People Think?".


title: Synesthesia

text: Synesthesia is sometimes used as a plot device or way of developing a character's inner life. Author and synesthete Pat Duffy describes four ways in which synesthetic characters have been used in modern fiction.


title: Synesthesia

text: Literary depictions of synesthesia are criticized as often being more of a reflection of an author's interpretation of synesthesia than of the phenomenon itself.


title: Synesthesia

text: Research on synesthesia raises questions about how the brain combines information from different sensory modalities, referred to as crossmodal perception or multisensory integration.


title: Synesthesia

text: An example of this is the bouba/kiki effect. In an experiment first designed by Wolfgang Köhler, people are asked to choose which of two shapes is named "bouba" and which "kiki". The angular shape, "kiki", is chosen by 95–98% and "bouba" for the rounded one. Individuals on the island of Tenerife showed a similar preference between shapes called "takete" and "maluma". Even 2.5-year-old children (too young to read) show this effect. Research indicated that in the background of this effect may operate a form of ideasthesia.


title: Synesthesia

text: Researchers hope that the study of synesthesia will provide better understanding of consciousness and its neural correlates. In particular, synesthesia might be relevant to the philosophical problem of qualia, given that synesthetes experience extra qualia (e.g., colored sound). An important insight for qualia research may come from the findings that synesthesia has the properties of ideasthesia, which then suggest a crucial role of conceptualization processes in generating qualia.


title: Synesthesia

text: Synesthesia also has a number of practical applications, one of which is the use of 'intentional synesthesia' in technology. These applications include sensory prosthetics, as discussed by Chaim-Meyer Scheff in "Experimental model for the study of changes in the organization of human sensory information processing through the design and testing of non-invasive prosthetic devices for sensory impaired people".[SIGCAPH Comput. Phys. Handicap. (36): 3–10. doi:10.1145/15711.15713. S2CID 119242 ]


title: Synesthesia

text: Peter Meijer developed a sensory substitution device for the visually impaired called The vOICe (the capital letters "O," "I," and "C" in "vOICe" are intended to evoke the expression "Oh I see"). The vOICe is a privately owned research project, running without venture capital, that was first implemented using low-cost hardware in 1991. The vOICe is a visual-to-auditory sensory substitution device (SSD) preserving visual detail at high resolution (up to 25,344 pixels). The device consists of a laptop, head-mounted camera or computer camera, and headphones. The vOICe converts visual stimuli of the surroundings captured by the camera into corresponding aural representations (soundscapes) delivered to the user through headphones at a default rate of one soundscape per second. Each soundscape is a left-to-right scan, with height represented by pitch, and brightness by loudness. The vOICe compensates for the loss of vision by converting information from the lost sensory modality into stimuli in a remaining modality.


title: Library Genesis

text: Library Genesis (Libgen) is a file-sharing based shadow library website for scholarly journal articles, academic and general-interest books, images, comics, audiobooks, and magazines. The site enables free access to content that is otherwise paywalled or not digitized elsewhere. Libgen describes itself as a "links aggregator", providing a searchable database of items "collected from publicly available public Internet resources" as well as files uploaded "from users".


title: Library Genesis

text: Libgen provides access to copyrighted works, such as PDFs of content from Elsevier's ScienceDirect web-portal. Publishers like Elsevier have accused Library Genesis of internet piracy. Others assert that academic publishers unfairly benefit from government-funded research, written by researchers, many of whom are employed by public universities, and that Libgen is helping to disseminate research that should be freely available in the first place.


title: Library Genesis

text: Library Genesis has roots in the illegal underground "samizdat" culture in the Soviet Union. In a society where access to printing was strictly controlled by heavy-handed censorship, dissident intellectuals hand copied and retyped manuscripts for secret circulation. This was legalized under Soviet general secretary Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, and expanded very rapidly at a time of affordable desktop computers and scanners, and very small research budgets.


title: Library Genesis

text: The volunteers moved into the Russian computer network ("RuNet") in the 1990s, which became awash with hundreds of thousands of uncoordinated contributions. Librarians became especially active, using borrowed access passwords to download copies of scientific and scholarly articles from Western Internet sources, then uploading them to RuNet.


title: Library Genesis

text: In the early 21st century, the efforts became coordinated, and integrated into one massive system known as Library Genesis, or LibGen, around 2008. It subsequently absorbed the contents of, and became the functional successor to, library.nu, which was shut down by legal action in 2012. By 2014, its catalog was more than twice the size of library.nu with 1.2 million records. Library Genesis claims to have more than 2.4 million non-fiction books, 80 million science magazine articles, 2 million comics files, 2.2 million fiction books, and 0.4 million magazine issues.


title: Library Genesis

text: In 2020, the project was forked under an alternate domain, "libgen.fun", due to internal conflict within the project. As a result, databases are being maintained independently and content differs between libgen.fun and other Libgen domains.


title: Library Genesis

text: In 2015, Library Genesis became involved in a legal case with Elsevier, which accused it of copyright infringement and granting free access to articles and books. In response, the admins accused Elsevier of gaining most of its profits from publicly funded research which should be freely available to all as they are paid for by taxpayers.


title: Library Genesis

text: In late October 2015, the District Court for the Southern District of New York ordered Libgen to shut down and to suspend use of the domain name (libgen.org), but the site is accessible through alternate domains.


title: Library Genesis

text: Libgen is reported to be registered in both Russia and The Netherlands, making the appropriate jurisdiction for legal action unclear.


title: Library Genesis

text: Libgen is blocked by a number of ISPs in the United Kingdom, but such DNS-based blocks are claimed to do little to deter access. It is also blocked by ISPs in France, Germany, Greece, Belgium (which redirects to the Belgian Federal Police blockpage), and Russia (in November of 2018).


title: Library Genesis

text: Until the end of 2014, Sci-Hub, which provides free access to millions of research papers and books, relied on LibGen as storage. Papers requested by users were requested from LibGen and served from there if available, otherwise they were fetched by other means and then stored on LibGen.


title: Library Genesis

text: In 2019 archivists and freedom of information activists launched a project to better seed and host LibGen's data dumps. The project's spokesperson and coordinator 'shrine' described the effort as a way for a "permanent library card for the world" and reported that the response has been "overwhelmingly positive from everyone". In 2020, the project launched a peer-to-peer digital library of content on Sci-Hub and Library Genesis using IPFS.


title: Memento (film)

text: Memento is a 2000 American neo-noir mystery thriller film written and directed by Christopher Nolan, and produced by Suzanne and Jennifer Todd. The film's script was based on a pitch by Nolan's brother Jonathan Nolan, who wrote the 2001 story "Memento Mori" from the concept. Guy Pearce stars as Leonard Shelby, a man who suffers from anterograde amnesia, resulting in short-term memory loss and the inability to form new memories. He is searching for the people who attacked him and killed his wife, using an intricate system of Polaroid photographs and tattoos to track information he cannot remember. Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano were the co-stars of the film.


title: Memento (film)

text: The film's nonlinear narrative is presented as two different sequences of scenes interspersed during the film: a series in black-and-white that is shown chronologically, and a series of color sequences shown in reverse order (simulating for the audience the mental state of the protagonist). The two sequences meet at the end of the film, producing one complete and cohesive narrative.


title: Memento (film)

text: "Memento" premiered at the 57th Venice International Film Festival on September 5, 2000, and was released in the United States on March 16, 2001. It was acclaimed by critics, who praised its nonlinear structure and motifs of memory, perception, grief, and self-deception, and it earned $40 million over its $9 million budget. "Memento" received numerous accolades, including Oscar nominations for Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing. The film is now widely regarded as one of Nolan's finest works and one of the best films of the 2000s. In 2017, the United States Library of Congress deemed the film "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.


title: Memento (film)

text: The film starts with a Polaroid photograph of a dead man. As the sequence plays backward, the photo reverts to its undeveloped state, entering the camera before the man is shot in the head. The film then continues, alternating between black-and-white and color sequences.


title: Memento (film)

text: The black-and-white sequences begin with Leonard Shelby, a former insurance investigator, in a motel room speaking to an unseen and unknown caller. Leonard has anterograde amnesia and is unable to store recent memories, the result of an attack by two men. Leonard explains that he killed the attacker who raped and strangled his wife Catherine, but a second clubbed him and escaped. The police did not accept that there was a second attacker, but Leonard believes the attacker's name is "John G" or "James G". Leonard investigates using notes, Polaroid photos, and tattoos to keep track of information he discovers. Leonard recalls Sammy Jankis, another anterograde amnesiac, from his insurance industry days. After tests confirmed Sammy's inability to learn tasks through repetition, Leonard believed that his condition was at best psychological (and perhaps faked) and turned down his insurance claim. Sammy's distraught wife repeatedly asked Sammy to administer her insulin shots for her diabetes, hoping he would remember and stop himself from giving her a fatal overdose. However, Sammy continued to administer the injections, and his wife died.


title: Memento (film)

text: The color sequences are shown reverse-chronologically. In the story's chronology, Leonard self-directively gets a tattoo of John G's license plate. Finding a note in his clothes, he meets Natalie, a bartender who resents Leonard because he wears the clothes and drives the car of her boyfriend, Jimmy Grantz. After understanding Leonard's condition, she uses it to get Leonard to drive a man named Dodd out of town and offers to run the license plate as a favor. Meanwhile, Leonard meets with a contact, Teddy, who helps with Dodd, but warns about Natalie. Leonard finds that he had previously annotated his Polaroid of Teddy, warning himself not to trust him. Natalie provides Leonard with the driver's license for a John Edward Gammell, Teddy's full name. Confirming Leonard's information on "John G" and his warnings, Leonard drives Teddy to an abandoned building, leading to the opening where he shoots him.


title: Memento (film)

text: In the final black-and-white sequence, prompted by the caller, Leonard meets with Teddy, an undercover officer, who has found Leonard's "John G", Jimmy, and directs Leonard to the abandoned building. When Jimmy arrives, Leonard strangles him fatally and takes a Polaroid photo of the body. As the photo develops, the black-and-white transitions to the final color sequence. Leonard swaps clothes with Jimmy, hearing him whisper "Sammy". As Leonard has only told Sammy's story to those he has met, he suddenly doubts Jimmy's role in his wife's murder. Teddy arrives and asserts that Jimmy was John G, but when Leonard is undeterred, Teddy says that he helped him kill the real attacker a year ago, and he has been using Leonard ever since. Teddy points out that since the name "John G" is common, Leonard will cyclically forget and begin his search again and that even Teddy himself has a "John G" name. Further, Teddy says that Sammy's story is Leonard's own story, a memory Leonard has repressed to escape feelings of guilt.


title: Memento (film)

text: After hearing Teddy confess all of this, Leonard burns the photograph of dead Jimmy and of himself right after killing the real attacker a year ago, pointing to his chest where he would get a tattoo to document his successful revenge. In a monologue, Leonard explains that he is willing to lie to himself in order to get justice against anyone who has wronged him. He therefore targets Teddy by ordering a tattoo of Teddy's license plate number and writing a note to himself that Teddy is not to be trusted so that he will mistake Teddy for John G and kill him. Leonard drives off in Jimmy's car, confident that, despite this lie, he will retain enough awareness of the world to know that his actions have consequences.


title: Memento (film)

text: The film is structured with two timelines: color sequences are alternated with black-and-white sequences. The latter are put together in chronological order. The color ones, though shown forward (except for the first one, which is shown in reverse), are ordered in reverse. Chronologically, the black-and-white sequences come first, the color sequences come next.


title: Memento (film)

text: Using the numbering scheme suggested by Andy Klein—who took numbers from 1 to 22 for the black-and-white sequences and letters A–V for the color ones in his article for "Salon" magazine—the plotting of the film as presented is: Opening Credits (shown "backward"), 1, V, 2, U, 3, T, 4, S, ..., 22/A, Credits.


title: Memento (film)

text: There is a smooth transition from the black-and-white sequence 22 to color sequence A, which occurs during the development of a Polaroid photograph.


title: Memento (film)

text: The chronological order of the story can be viewed as a "hidden feature" on the 2-Disc Limited Edition Region 1 DVD and the 3-Disc special Edition Region 2 DVD. In this special feature, the chapters of the film are put together into the chronological order and is shown: Ending Credits (run in reverse), 1, 2, 3, ..., 22/A, B, ..., V, then the opening title runs "backward" to what was shown (the opening title sequence is run in reverse during the actual film, so it is shown forward in this version).


title: Memento (film)

text: Stefano Ghislotti wrote an article in "Film Anthology" which discusses how Nolan provides the viewer with the clues necessary to decode the plot as we watch and help us understand the chronology. The color sequences include a brief overlap to help clue the audience into the fact that they are being presented in reverse order. The purpose of the fragmented reverse sequencing is to force the audience into a sympathetic experience of Leonard's defective ability to create new long-term memories, where prior events are not recalled, since the audience has yet to see them.


title: Memento (film)

text: In July 1996, brothers Christopher and Jonathan Nolan took a cross-country road trip from Chicago to Los Angeles, as Christopher was relocating his home to the West Coast. During the drive, Jonathan pitched the story for the film to his brother, who responded enthusiastically to the idea. After they arrived in Los Angeles, Jonathan left for Washington, D.C., to finish college at Georgetown University. The mysterious killer character known only as "John G." was actually an homage to Jonathan's Georgetown University screenwriting professor at the time, John Glavin. Christopher repeatedly asked Jonathan to send him a first draft, and after a few months, Jonathan complied. Two months later, Christopher came up with the idea to tell the film backwards, and began to work on the screenplay. Jonathan wrote the short story simultaneously, and the brothers continued to correspond, sending each other subsequent revisions of their respective works. Christopher initially wrote the script as a linear story, and then would "go back and reorder it the way it is on screen to check the logic of it." Nolan was also influenced by the short story "Funes the Memorius" by Jorge Luis Borges. "I think "Memento" is a strange cousin to 'Funes the Memorious'—about a man who remembers everything, who can’t forget anything. It’s a bit of an inversion of that."


title: Memento (film)

text: Jonathan's short story, titled "Memento Mori," is radically different from Christopher's film, although it maintains the same essential elements. In Jonathan's version, Leonard is instead named Earl and is a patient at a mental institution. As in the film, his wife was killed by an anonymous man, and during the attack on his wife, Earl lost his ability to create new long-term memories. Like Leonard, Earl leaves notes to himself and has tattoos with information about the killer. However, in the short story, Earl convinces himself through his own written notes to escape the mental institution and murder his wife's killer. Unlike the film, there is no ambiguity that Earl finds and kills the anonymous man.


title: Memento (film)

text: In July 1997, Christopher Nolan's girlfriend (later wife) Emma Thomas showed his screenplay to Aaron Ryder, an executive for Newmarket Films. Ryder said the script was, "perhaps the most innovative script I had ever seen", and soon after, it was optioned by Newmarket and given a budget of $9 million. Pre-production lasted seven weeks, during which the main shooting location changed from Montreal, Quebec to Los Angeles, California, to create a more realistic and "noirish" atmosphere for the film.


title: Memento (film)

text: Brad Pitt was initially slated to play Leonard. Pitt was interested in the part, but passed due to scheduling conflicts. Other considered actors included Aaron Eckhart (who would later work with Nolan on "The Dark Knight") and Thomas Jane, but the role went to Guy Pearce, who impressed Nolan the most. Pearce was chosen partly for his "lack of celebrity" (after Pitt passed, they "decided to eschew the pursuit of A-list stars and make the film for less money by using an affordable quality actor"), and his enthusiasm for the role, evidenced by a personal phone call Pearce made to Nolan to discuss the part.


title: Memento (film)

text: After being impressed by Carrie-Anne Moss's performance as Trinity in the 1999 science fiction film "The Matrix", Jennifer Todd suggested her for the part of Natalie. While Mary McCormack lobbied for the role, Nolan decided to cast Moss as Natalie, saying, "She added an enormous amount to the role of Natalie that wasn't on the page". For the corrupt police officer Teddy, "comedian Denis Leary was mentioned, though proved unavailable". Moss suggested her co-star from "The Matrix", Joe Pantoliano. Although there was a concern that Pantoliano might be too villainous for the part, he was still cast, and Nolan said he was surprised by the actor's subtlety in his performance.


title: Memento (film)

text: The rest of the film's characters were quickly cast after the three main leads were established. Stephen Tobolowsky and Harriet Sansom Harris play Sammy Jankis and his wife, respectively. Mark Boone Junior landed the role of Burt, the motel clerk, because Jennifer Todd liked his "look and attitude" for the part (as a result he has re-appeared in minor roles in other productions by Nolan).


title: Memento (film)

text: Filming took place from September 7 to October 8, 1999, a 25-day shooting schedule. Pearce was on set every day during filming, although all three principal actors (including Pantoliano and Moss) performed together only on the first day, shooting exterior sequences outside Natalie's house. All of Moss' scenes were completed in the first week, including follow-up scenes at Natalie's home, Ferdy's bar, and the restaurant where she meets Leonard for the final time.


title: Memento (film)

text: Pantoliano returned to the set late in the second week to continue filming his scenes. On September 25, the crew shot the opening scene in which Leonard kills Teddy. Although the scene is in reverse motion, Nolan used forward-played sounds. For a shot of a shell casing flying upwards, the shell had to be dropped in front of the camera in forward motion, but it constantly rolled out of frame. Nolan was forced to blow the casing out of frame instead, but in the confusion, the crew shot it backwards. They then had to make an optical (a copy of the shot) and reverse the shot to make it go forward again. "That was the height of complexity in terms of the film", Nolan said. "An optical to make a backwards running shot forwards, and the forwards shot is a simulation of a backwards shot."


title: Memento (film)

text: The next day, on September 26, Larry Holden returned to shoot the sequence where Leonard attacks Jimmy. After filming was completed five days later, Pearce's voice-overs were recorded. For the black-and-white scenes, Pearce was given free rein to improvise his narrative, allowing for a documentary feel.


title: Memento (film)

text: The Travel Inn in Tujunga, California, was repainted and used as the interior of Leonard's and Dodd's motel rooms and the exterior of the film's Discount Inn. Scenes in Sammy Jankis' house were shot in a suburban home close to Pasadena, while Natalie's house was located in Burbank. The crew planned to shoot the derelict building set (where Leonard kills Teddy and Jimmy) in a Spanish-styled brick building owned by a train company. However, one week before shooting began, the company placed several dozen train carriages outside the building, making the exterior unfilmable. Since the interior of the building had already been built as a set, a new location had to be found. An oil refinery near Long Beach was used instead, and the scene where Leonard burns his wife's possessions was filmed on the other side of the refinery.


title: Memento (film)

text: David Julyan composed the film's synthesized score. Julyan acknowledges several synthesized soundtracks that inspired him, such as Vangelis's "Blade Runner" and Hans Zimmer's "The Thin Red Line". While composing the score, Julyan created different, distinct sounds to differentiate between the color and black-and-white scenes: "brooding and classical" themes in the former, and "oppressive and rumbly noise" in the latter. Since he describes the entire score as "Leonard's theme", Julyan says, "The emotion I was aiming at with my music was yearning and loss. But a sense of loss you feel but at the same time you don't know what it is you have lost, a sense of being adrift." Initially, Nolan wanted to use Radiohead's "Paranoid Android" during the end credits, but he was unable to secure the rights. Instead, David Bowie's "Something in the Air" is used, although another of Radiohead's songs, an extended version of "Treefingers", is included on the film's soundtrack.


title: Memento (film)

text: The film gained substantial word-of-mouth press from the film festival circuit. It premiered at the 2000 Venice Film Festival, where it received a standing ovation, and afterwards played at Deauville American Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. With the publicity from these events, "Memento" did not have trouble finding foreign distributors, opening in more than 20 countries worldwide. Its promotion tour ended at the Sundance Film Festival, where it played in January 2001.


title: Memento (film)

text: Finding American distributors proved more troublesome. "Memento" was screened for various studio heads (including Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein) in March 2000. Although most of the executives loved the film and praised Nolan's talent, all passed on distributing the picture, believing it was too confusing and would not attract a large audience. After famed independent film director Steven Soderbergh saw the film and learned it was not being distributed, he championed the film in interviews and public events, giving it even more publicity, although he did not secure a distributor. Newmarket, in a financially risky move, decided to distribute the film itself. After the first few weeks of distribution, "Memento" had reached more than 500 theaters and earned a domestic total of $25 million in its box-office run. The film's success was surprising to those who passed on the film, so much so that Weinstein realized his mistake and tried to buy the film from Newmarket.


title: Memento (film)

text: Jonathan Nolan designed the film's official website. As with the marketing strategy of "The Blair Witch Project", the website was intended to provide further clues and hints to introduce the story, while not providing any concrete information. After a short intro on the website, the viewer is shown a newspaper clipping detailing Leonard's murder of Teddy. Clicking on highlighted words in the article leads to more material describing the film, including Leonard's notes and photographs as well as police reports. The filmmakers employed another tactic by sending out Polaroid pictures to random people, depicting a bloody and shirtless Leonard pointing at an unmarked spot on his chest. Since Newmarket distributed the film themselves, Christopher Nolan edited the film's trailers himself. Sold to inexpensive cable-TV channels like Bravo and A&E, and websites such as Yahoo and MSN, the trailers were key to the film gaining widespread public notice.


title: Memento (film)

text: "Memento" was released on DVD and VHS in the United States and Canada on September 4, 2001, and in the United Kingdom on January 14, 2002. The UK edition contains a hidden feature that allows the viewer to watch the film in chronological order. The Canadian version does not have this feature but the film chapters are set up to do this manually or through DVD programming. The original US release does not have the chronological feature nor are the chapters set up correctly to do it.


title: Memento (film)

text: The film was later re-released in a limited edition DVD that features an audio commentary by Christopher Nolan, with four different endings; the original short story by Jonathan Nolan on which the film was based; and a Sundance Channel documentary on the making of the film. The limited edition DVD also contains a hidden feature that allows the viewer to watch the film in chronological order.


title: Memento (film)

text: The Limited Edition DVD is packaged to look like Leonard's case file from a mental institution, with notes scribbled by "doctors" and Leonard on the inside. The DVD menus are designed as a series of psychological tests; the viewer has to choose certain words, objects, and multiple choice answers to play the movie or access special features. Leonard's "notes" on the DVD case offer clues to navigating the DVD. Some of the "materials" seem designed to induce paranoia and uncertainty (a picture of one person whispering to another is captioned, "They know what you did"), alluding to Shelby's mental state.


title: Memento (film)

text: "Memento" was re-released in the UK on a 3-disc Special Edition DVD on December 27, 2004. This release contains all the special features that are on the two US releases in one package plus a couple of new interviews. The menus appear as tattoos on Leonard's body and are more straightforward than the US 2-disc limited edition DVD.


title: Memento (film)

text: "Memento" was released on Blu-ray on August 15, 2006. This release lacks the special features contained on the Limited Edition DVD, but does include the audio commentary by director Christopher Nolan. The single-layer disc features an MPEG-2 1080p transfer and PCM 5.1 surround audio. The film was also released on iTunes as a digital download.


title: Memento (film)

text: The film was re-released on the Blu-ray and DVD in the US on February 22, 2011, by Lionsgate following the 10th anniversary of the film. Both the Blu-ray and DVD have a new transfer that was also shown in theaters. Aside from the transfer, the Blu-ray contains a new special featurette by Nolan on the film's legacy.


title: Memento (film)

text: "Memento" was a box office success. In the United States, during its opening weekend, it was released in only 11 theaters, but by week 11 it was distributed to more than 500 theaters. It grossed over $25 million in North America and $14 million in other countries, making the film's total worldwide gross some $40 million as of August 2007. During its theatrical run, it did not place higher than eighth in the list of highest-grossing movies for a single weekend.


title: Memento (film)

text: "Memento" was met with critical acclaim. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film received an approval rating of 93% based on 179 reviews, with an average rating of 8.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Christopher Nolan skillfully guides the audience through "Memento" fractured narrative, seeping his film in existential dread." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 80 out of 100 based on 34 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Memento (film)

text: Film critic James Berardinelli gave the film four out of four stars, ranking it number one on his year-end Top Ten list and number sixty-three on his All-Time Top 100 films. In his review, he called it an "endlessly fascinating, wonderfully open-ended motion picture [that] will be remembered by many who see it as one of the best films of the year". Berardinelli praised the film's backwards narrative, saying that "what really distinguishes this film is its brilliant, innovative structure", and noted that Guy Pearce gives an "astounding ... tight, and thoroughly convincing performance". In 2009, Berardinelli chose "Memento" as his #3 best movie of the decade. William Arnold of the "Seattle Post-Intelligencer" writes that "Memento" is a "delicious one-time treat", and emphasizes that director Christopher Nolan "not only makes "Memento" work as a non-linear puzzle film, but as a tense, atmospheric thriller". Rob Blackwelder noted that "Nolan has a crackerjack command over the intricacies of this story. He makes every single element of the film a clue to the larger picture ... as the story edges back toward the origins of [Leonard's] quest".


title: Memento (film)

text: Not all critics were impressed with the film's structure. Marjorie Baumgarten wrote, "In forward progression, the narrative would garner little interest, thus making the reverse storytelling a filmmaker's conceit." Sean Burns of the "Philadelphia Weekly" commented that "For all its formal wizardry, "Memento" is ultimately an ice-cold feat of intellectual gamesmanship. Once the visceral thrill of the puzzle structure begins to wear off, there's nothing left to hang onto. The film itself fades like one of Leonard's temporary memories." While Roger Ebert gave the film a favorable three out of four stars, he did not think it warranted multiple viewings. After watching "Memento" twice, he concluded that "Greater understanding helped on the plot level, but didn't enrich the viewing experience. Confusion is the state we are intended to be in." Jonathan Rosenbaum disliked the film, and commented in his review of "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" that "Memento" is a "gimmicky and unpoetic counterfeit" of Alain Resnais's 1968 film "Je t'aime, je t'aime".


title: Memento (film)

text: In 2005, the Writers Guild of America ranked the screenplay #100 on its list of 101 Greatest Screenplays ever written. In 2012, the Motion Picture Editors Guild listed the film as the fourteenth best-edited film of all time based on a survey of its membership. "Memento" was considered "culturally, historically or aesthetically significant" by the US Library of Congress and was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry in 2017, the first narrative feature of the 2000s to be honored.


title: Memento (film)

text: Many medical experts have cited "Memento" as featuring one of the most realistic and accurate depictions of anterograde amnesia. Caltech neuroscientist Christof Koch called "Memento" "the most accurate portrayal of the different memory systems in the popular media", while physician Esther M. Sternberg, Director of the Integrative Neural Immune Program at the National Institute of Mental Health, identified the film as "close to a perfect exploration of the neurobiology of memory."


title: Memento (film)

text: Since its release, "Memento" has been a widely noted topic of film discussion, both for its unique narrative structure and themes. Those searching for explanations of the film's plot have either resorted to online forums, message boards or scholarly material, or have ignored the film's official website and forums to maintain their own personal hypotheses. In an article for "The Dissolve" analyzing Nolan's work, Mike D'Angelo cites "Memento" as "a masterful study in deliberate self-delusion," alluding to Leonard's own actions towards the end of the film and his role as an unreliable narrator. On the same topic of self-deception, James Mooney of filmandphilosophy.com notes that the film suggests how "our memories deceive us, or rather, sometimes we deceive ourselves by 'choosing' to forget or by manipulating our memories of past events." This is much in line with a psychological analysis of the film, specifically the act of confabulation. Leonard's use of confabulation poses the dilemma, as explained by SUNY Downstate Medical Center Professor John Kubie for BrainFacts.org: "In "Memento" we are faced with the question of how much of Leonard's memory of the past is real and how much constructed from beliefs and wishes."


title: Memento (film)

text: Author Chuck Klosterman has written in-depth about "Memento" in his essay collection "", specifically on the diner scene with Leonard and Natalie.


title: Memento (film)

text: Because Jonathan Nolan's short story was not published before the film was released, it was nominated for Original Screenplay instead of Adapted Screenplay and both Christopher and Jonathan received a nomination.


title: Memento (film)

text: AMBI Pictures announced in November 2015 that it plans to remake "Memento", one of several film rights that AMBI acquired from its acquisition of Exclusive Media. Monika Bacardi, an executive for AMBI Pictures, stated that they plan to "stay true to Christopher Nolan's vision and deliver a memorable movie that is every bit as edgy, iconic and award-worthy as the original". As of April 2018, the film was still in the works.


title: Russo brothers

text: Anthony Russo (born February 3, 1970) and Joseph Russo (born July 18, 1971), collectively known as the Russo brothers (), are American directors, producers, and screenwriters. They direct most of their work together. They are best known for directing four films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU): "" (2014), "" (2016), "" (2018), and "" (2019). "Endgame" grossed over $2.798 billion worldwide, becoming one of the highest-grossing films of all time. Owing to their successes in the MCU, the Russo brothers are the second most commercially successful directors of all time, behind Steven Spielberg.


title: Russo brothers

text: The brothers have also worked as directors and producers on the comedy series "Arrested Development" (2003–2005), "Community" (2009–2014), and "Happy Endings" (2011–2012). They won a Primetime Emmy Award for "Arrested Development".


title: Russo brothers

text: Anthony Russo (born February 3, 1970) and Joseph Russo (born July 18, 1971) were born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio, the sons of Patricia Gallupoli and attorney and judge Basil Russo. Their parents were both of Italian descent. Their paternal and maternal families emigrated from Sicily and Abruzzo, respectively, fleeing poverty and settling in Ohio to work in steel mills. They attended Benedictine High School. Joe graduated from the University of Iowa and majored in English and writing, while Anthony graduated from the University of Pennsylvania and majored in business before switching to English.


title: Russo brothers

text: The Russo brothers were graduate students at Case Western Reserve University (where Anthony studied law and Joe studied acting) when they began directing, writing, and producing their first feature, "Pieces." They financed the film with student loans and credit cards. After viewing "Pieces" at the Slamdance Film Festival, Steven Soderbergh approached the duo and offered to produce their next film, along with his producing partner George Clooney. This project was the crime comedy "Welcome to Collinwood", starring William H. Macy, Sam Rockwell, and Clooney.


title: Russo brothers

text: FX network executive Kevin Reilly hired the Russos to direct the pilot for the series "Lucky", having liked the pair's work on "Collinwood". Ron Howard was a fan of the pilot, and he had a hand in hiring the brothers to direct the pilot for Fox's "Arrested Development". The brothers won a Primetime Emmy Award for their work on the episode, and would go on to direct episodes on the first few seasons of the series.


title: Russo brothers

text: In 2006, the Russo brothers returned to film, directing the Owen Wilson comedy "You, Me and Dupree." The film grossed $130 million worldwide. For the 2007–08 TV season, the Russos joined the crew of the ABC series "Carpoolers" as executive producers and directors. The brothers served as executive producers and directors on the first several seasons of the NBC sitcom "Community" and the ABC series "Happy Endings".