"For people of a poetic bent, this is quite useful: You get to tell your date that her eyes glow like the moon, hair ripples like the ocean and skin is smoother than a friendly corporate takeover. (Fine, I'm not a poet.) But life wasn't always so romantic. The arts are a latter-day human characteristic, one that requires a certain amount of security and stability to flourish.

So how did it develop? To help our ancestors climb trees, said Ramachandran. Doing so requires a vision-informed mental map of the branches before us, as well as a touch-informed mental map of our limbs' positions. Somehow these have to correlate. Which is quite a trick, when you think about it."

My daughter told me last night, "I know that people's voices are yellow-gold." I thought about this. Hmm...

I used to be employed in areas where creative thinking was a requirement, and it spilled over into my personal life quite a bit. I often found that I got fully-formed ideas for projects and problems to solve with no intermediate steps - like having the answer before hearing the entire question. I thought of it as something like playing "Wheel of Forture" with images.