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New Insights into Synesthesia
regs writes "Synesthesia is a pretty interesting phenomenon to experience and even just contemplate. Those kooky scientists are at it again, with new insights into 'hearing smells', 'seeing sounds', and 'tasting colors'. A recent study seems to shed insight into the brain mechanisms involved in synesthesia. Interesting read."
Why not try it for yourself ?!?
It makes zebra crossings smell like bananas.
Dad's having an antacid trip.
I see music.
My Ass hurts.
What are the benefits of this besides tripping out? Do blind people learn to see art by smelling it? Do deaf people learn concerts as colors?
.. makes me think of full-screen blue. Do I have this?
You should use AdiumX on your Mac.
when I get tired everything in my vision fades to black. I am always so relieved everything is still its proper colour the next morning.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Chris Rice got it right already. Go find the song and have a nice day.
You mean I could have kept on doing Mushrooms and actually have gotten paid for it? And in the process do meaningful research? That is so not fair.
Is that a real poncho? I mean, is that a Mexican poncho or is that a Sears poncho?
'Do deaf people learn concerts as colors?'
That would be impossible. The person with this disorder can still hear, but their brain is wired so that the impulses from your hearing receptors go to your optic part of the brain. Their for they are interpreted as colors. A deaf person would not be able to hear, so would not be able to transmit the impulses for them to see the concert.
Although, being able to "see" a concert would be quite interesting. Probably not unlike tripping on acid.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
The dude in A Beautiful Mind
yep
Seriously, Rez (for PS2 or import DC) is a GREAT example of synesthesia, but I'm not going to even try and explain it here, you're going to have to see/play it for yourself...if you can find a copy anywhere.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
It makes learning some things difficult, but it can also make learning other things easier via association. For example, certain numbers have always had an associated color with me, (and no, they don't correlate with the little plastic refridgerator magnets we all had as kids). Learning those numbers was easy for me, but I remember that basic math came easy while more advanced math was confusing at first because the results did not always correlate with the "right" color.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Actually, maybe everyone could have perfect pitch recognizion based on colors... wow I'd be a way better musician, not to mention if my bass amp made my balls itch or something.
My Ass hurts.
I noticed when my 3 month old boys were talking, they'd wave their hands alot. One of my cow-orkers stated that at that point in development, both the vocalization and the movement were being handled by the same part of the brain.
The point? Two disparate tasks are being run by the same ciruitry, so Synesthesia may just be another manefestation of a similar behavior.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
Rez is an excellent demonstration of synesthesia. It's basically a track-shooter, but set to low-level trance music, and your actions in the world (enemies shot down, powerups gained, progress made) determine how the music is played, and what visual effects are presented.
The experience is really hard to quantify, but you have to sit down with it for a while to realize just how interesting it is.
The game is out of print, but you owe it to yourself to give it a shot if you know a friend with it. It was released on the Dreamcast in Japan and the EU, and later, an enhanced version for the PS2 was released for all three territories.
"Mod, mod, mod...and another troll bites the dust."
Just imagine how handy it would be if musical notes were color-coded. Learning to play an instrument would be a snap. You'd never have to wonder if you were in the right place for a chord, for example. The implications of color-coding digits surely need no description for those who perform their own accounting tasks. And of course, color-coding letters would be handy, especially when typing in those Microsoft product keys...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Do I have Synesthesia if I see dead people?
Trolling is a art,
I gave up reading the article when I hit this line:
Another prevalent idea is that synesthetes are merely being metaphorical when they describe the note C flat as "red"
I am not a musician by any stretch of the immagination, but even I know that C flat is not a notation that is used. It's B sharp (B#). This gives me some serious doubts about Sci-Am's editing staff..
"I'm just here to regulate funkyness." - James Gandolfini, as Winston in The Mexican
>Their for
Whoa, I've seen some good ones but this great.
I think "Therefore" may be what you wanted to use.
Although, you should probably just avoid using big words altogether.
What's really interesting about this story (IMO) is that the angular gyrus (the area of the brain implicated by the study as being involved in metaphor) is also involved in basic mathematical functions such as addition/subtraction/multiplication, etc. Injury to this part of the brain can result in loss of mathematical ability (sometimes even specifically, eg. retention of multiplication but loss of the ability to subtract)
What would be really interesting would be if they can find a patient or two who *used* to have synaesthesia but then suffered a stroke (or other, similar brain injury) to either the colour area in primary visual cortex (V4?), or to the angular gyrys, and now can no longer 'feel' colour...
Mod early, mod often.
This is nothing new. My dog tastes my chilren's colors all of the time. It usually makes a big mess that I have to clean up. Oscar, my dog, then usually gets very sick and I have to clean that mess up too.
:P
10: PRINT "Everything old is new again."
20: GOTO 10
Everytime I see a girl walk by I feel a tingle in my crotch!
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
While I would not suggest anyone try hard drugs I have to say one of the best nights I ever had was ripped off my tits on acid, lying on on the floor listening to the lighting rig of some piss poor band. This was followed by playing Shinobi laughing like a lunatic and I got a stiffy everytime someone got killed. Happy days. Drugs are bad mmmmkay
What are the benefits of this besides tripping out? Do blind people learn to see art by smelling it? Do deaf people learn concerts as colors?
Doubtful, there needs to be a sensory perception of the event to make any link to a different sense. So the blind would not be able to appreciate a painting, the deaf might well be able to gain some appreciation of music through the vibrations, but this is not a form of synesthesia.
Perhaps synesthesia is just a misfiring of other recognitions the brain fires at you, i.e hearing a hiss or seeing red gives me a warning signal, whereas in these peoples cases seeing a symbol has been associated with a colour. Might be a possible explanations
rol7805 writes:
...what if you could?
" What are the benefits of this besides tripping out? Do blind people learn to see art by smelling it? Do deaf people learn concerts as colors?"
Well
We make connections between things and these connections seem obvious. We "smell" watermellon and we know there is some around. If this makes sense then why would "hearing" watermellon -- assuming you could -- be any less valid (assuming the connection had some basis in fact and not merely random).
In other words, why must one know the presence of a thing by only n senses? Because that's all you have now?
My
Limekiller
I smell dead people.
After light reflected from a scene hits the cones (color receptors) in the eye, neural signals from the retina travel to area 17, in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain.
What's 17*3? See. I was right about this and the MLB spy satellite.
If you read any musicians mag, you'll see these full page ads for this Perfect Pitch system, which claims to make you be able to identify notes perfectly, and then play by ear and etc etc.
Apparently it works by you repetitively linking a note with a color, until you hear the colors. An A flat is a red, and a C# is a blue, and so on. So you can hear music as a sequence of colors and makes you super crazy talented.
It's probably just a scam. But I guess it's got a pseudo-scientific base to the scam.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
C Flat *is* used, in situations were a B natural would be notationally incorrect. C Natural is a B#, C Flat is a B-Natural. This is because C and B are only a half step apart, as are E and F
You should use AdiumX on your Mac.
> most have brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and mescaline can produce similar effects) or a mere curiosity.
Yes, God forbid somebody actually do legitimate modern research on psychoactive compounds. ("Shut up you hippie, it's just an artifact of drug abuse")
The attitude of the scientific community with respect to this is pathetic. A community eager to create designer genes and programmable microbes, experiment with cloning, etc, etc, (with REAL moral and legal implications) brushes off what just might be a set of keys to some very interesting knowledge. Why? Because it's taboo? Because 30 odd years ago we learned all there is to learn? Shame on "Modern Science".
Operator, give me the number for 911!
My son (4) has sight/taste synaesthesia, he able to take one look at a plate of food and declare
I don't like It!
Is it legal for them to be selling LSD?
Cuz, I would like to buy some.
[I can picture a world without war, without hate. I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it]
Funny.... numbers always had gender for me.
I wonder what people with this "special ability" would say about the word "synesthesia"?
I'd just say "damn, that's hard to pronounce"...and then think of green meadows...birds sining...ahhhh....
One of the authors, VS Ramachandran, gave this year's Reith lectures on the subject of Neuroscience. You can read or listen to the lectures on the Beeb's website. Well worth taking a look at. Some of it is absolutely fascinating.
I have often wondered if synesthesia is related to the skill that some people can build up in finding thinks. I have personally known a professional golfer and an archaeologist The golfer would notice golf balls just by walking. He said that they stood out and glowed. The archaeologist said the same thing about pottery chards and arrow heads.
I read an article about it once, it said that one of the great classical composers, Mozart I think it was, used to tell the orchestra to make the sound "more pink", or "more blue". They said it might give composers a slight edge because the brain processes visual information better than auditory.
-1, "1337" speak
Synaesthesia isn't reliable, and it isn't necessarily consistent, either. How do I know? I have it. Really. I don't have the graphemes-as-colours thing as is described in the article (and analysed in detail) -- thank goodness! -- but I certainly do have the music-as-colours perception, as well as smells-as-colours, and sometimes even music-as-smells/tastes. Sometimes even tactile sensations manifest as colours, smells, or tastes, or sometimes even sounds.
Synaesthesia is pretty complicated and unreliable at best. I doubt if they'll ever be able to find a way to "turn it on and off." I don't blame you guys for not getting it (although I am getting mad at all the druggie posts, because it's not like that either, and I've never done hallucinogens in my life!), because as far as I know, if you don't have it, I can't explain it without resorting to largely unrepresentative metaphors.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
This synesthesia sounds like a pain in the butt
The article presented some great research findings about the workings of synesthesia, and how they went about finding these facts. What I'm still curious about is how someone with synesthesia goes about their daily life. According to one of my U's profs, synesthesia can actually make life really difficult. For instance, imagine each time you see a dog you get a stinging sensation behind the eyes. It would make it difficult to be a veterinarian. The article also made a reference to a few hallucinogenic drugs; if synesthesia is anything like them, it's gotta be difficult to function.
so anyone know?
Actually, there is such a thing. I can't remember the name off hand, but I can remember one of my music professors in college telling me about it. Basically, certain people perceive different colors when different pitches are played. So in effect you can actually see the notes, and consequently can tune based on what you are seeing. Pretty sweet.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
Yep, my american education coming through loud and clear on that one. I simply forgot to preview my reply. I noticed the mistake, but unfortunately I could not edit the post to correct it.
Thanks for the AC grammar check though. I just don't know what I would have done without it.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
I see what you are saying.
Most people seem to be misunderstanding the benefits one could gain from synesthesia. Although it's definitely interesting and powerful when people encounter this while tripping out some people have this going on all the time. We all represent the world differently in each of our heads. We all have our own primary representation systems. A very visual person who wants to learn music can crossover and learn to see the diferent notes as different colors. A kinesthetic person can feel differently based on what they are hearing.
Synesthesia makes is very possible for people to learn quickly and easily. Some of the most notable cases of people with photgraphic memory owed it all to synesthesia. It's a great trick to learn to be able to do.
I wonder about this. The article clearly stated that a man who was "colorblind" was, nonetheless, able to see a color triggered by his synesthesia. This would imply that as long as *some* input gets to your brain, your brain makes the adjustment and association. Hmmmm....
blue
I had an experience like this, when I was in High School, during a trip to the beach with my classmates.. I remember to be able to hear color green. And the weirdest thing is that it sounded just like green. If I covered it, or looked elsewhere, the sound stopped. And it made complete sense, at least at the moment. I never knew it had a name. By the way, I wasn't doing any kind of hard drugs, in case you might wonder about it, but I was drinking constatly (not too much either) for several days. I haven't RTFA yet, but it sounds really interesting.
please excuse my apathy
In an earlier incarnation (like a decade or so ago).. well.. as the guy below says, ''drugs are bad, mmmkay?'' But if that statement is true, I'm not sure Shrooms could be classified as drugs.
Anyway, in that earlier life, over a period of a few months, I did a half dozen massive doses of shrooms. One of the things I remember, is not only this kind of sense-crossing, but a general dissociation of stimulus and response. One of the best examples was the roaring waterfall of flowers that cascaded in front of me. I was enthralled by the colors, the glints of light and shadow, the ability to see inside to event eh cellular and organizmal events on the flowers an dpetals (all of which I at first believed I saw and felt), the scent floating around me (which I also believed I saw as well as smelled). Anyway the interesting part of this is that while I was deeply involved in my overwhelming response to that amazing event, I suddenly realized I was NOT experiencing any of it. I wasnt seeing it, I wasnt smelling it, I wasnt feeling it, but I WAS having a stunningly strong and deep emotional/intellectual response to as set of events I could describe, but hadnt actually experienced.
Made me wonder at the time if the sense-crossing I experienced was a backwards kind of event. Perhaps the drug had induced emotional/intellectual responses that didnt properly match the stimulus, so my brain supplied the appropriate experience to match that response.
Is that also a symptom of synthaesia?
I think I must have borderline synesthesia or borderline dysliexia...I've always had a strong association with certain numbers with certain letters, and it goes back a while, I found where when I was young I spelled "kirk" as "ki4k"--I think because of the r sound in "four". And 5 is linked to f, again because of the sound (so when I saw a promotional poster for "The Fifth Element" that said "it mu5t be found" I was confused... "muft?")
;-)
I wonder what kind of condition this is. It's not a big deal, rarely interferes with my life. A little worse now that i'm typing quickly
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Well, speaking as a synaesthesiac, there are benefits, but they mostly manifest as an aid to recall. I mean, if you can remember that that piece of music looks like a black background shot through with gold and red threads -- and you know enough about music theory -- you can reconstruct the song by ear without having heard it recently. That's just one example of something you can do with synaesthesiac inputs.
However, I absolutely guaranfuckingtee you can't use it for "tripping out." It doesn't work like that. It's completely not like being on drugs at all, as far as I understand it (I've never done hallucinogens). It is, however, kind of like peripheral vision: It's not really there 100% but it can come in handy sometimes.
I mean, you people seem to think it's like this constant, centre-of-attention thing at all times, which it's really not. The people in the article say the same thing as I'm saying, too. To make another clumsy metaphor, which is about as well as a synaesthesiac can describe it to a non-synaesthesiac, it's sort of like a supplementary sensory background process. You can foreground it if you want to, usually temporarily, but most of the time, you don't even really notice it's there. For us, it's really quite ordinary, sort of like "normal people's" sensory inputs are to them.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
I'm deaf. You're mistaking "deaf" with "profoundly deaf" or "the total lack of hearing". Even the profoundly deaf can experience a concert through the vibrations in the floors and seats (this obviously won't work for quiet classical music.) but most "deaf" people can hear a range of sounds, and some concerts will be in that range of sounds. They'll hear the sounds as sounds, just as different sounds than the rest of the world. For example, my hearing loss is mostly on lower frequencies--so I'll hear everything at a higher pitch.
However. My eyes/ears have a closer bond than is normal, because I use my eyes to hear people talking, and to anticipate when and where sounds should occur when I can't hear them as well as I should. This results in funny cross-wirings like "hearing" closed captioning (I can never remember closed captioning, I always remember that I "heard" a TV show, even though that's an impossibility. I also "see" sounds. Like I'll be listening to a song, and later I'll remember it as colors and things, rather than as tunes or sounds. And when I take out one of my hearing aids and leave the other one in, I have difficulty seeing out of the eye on the side of the hearing aid I took out. If I take both out, I can see fine. When I take off my glasses, sound gets "quieter"--because part of my perception of sound is "a sound should be there because I'm seeing an action that should result in sound".
-Sara
It's not a scam. I've used those types of systems. They work better for some people then others, but you do get out of it what you put in. I used to not be able to tell the difference between notes at all. By linking up colors to the notes over time you do learn to recognize things properly and then you forget all about the colors and just have good pitch. Usually more relative pitch then perfect.
One thing though.. This isn't really synesthesia. It's just crossing over representational systems in a very manual way. If you were prone to synesthesia the senses would really bleed into one another and it would probably be even easier to learn this sort of trick.
Then could I, as a heterosexual male, fuck an eleven?
I remember something like that... got a URL to where he said that?
Or do you say CD nowadays? "Synesthesia" is an excellent album by Peter Himmelman. In the liner notes, it explains what the phenomenon is...
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
OKe. Let me start by saying that i have physical sensation synesthesia more than any other kind, in which one physical sensation can evoke other physical sensations- even in other limbs. It's quite peculiar, really, and very real. In my case, it's because i have a neurotransmitter disorder which makes certain physical sensations- especially pain- transcend the normal 'map' of the body in the brain. Overflow of chemicals, for the most part, coupled with a hyped up sensation system to start with (I've got extra pain centers and have a lot of Restless Limb Syndrome as well.)
For those really interested in how this stuff happens, i would suggest starting out with ramachandran's phantoms in the Brain which is about phantom limb syndrome, and brain mapping in general- it's really very good, and explains a great number of things, from how to cure phantom limb syndrome (trick the brain into trying to use the signal paths that it still has mapped out) to sympathy pain (how your brain can identify with other things- even a wooden table- to the point where it perceives things happening to someone whom you love as also happening to you. It doesn't talk much about synesthesia, but can help give the basics as to how the brain's architecture works for this to happen.
In my case, i can say this: it makes things bizarre. The sensation of pulling a hair out of, say, my arm, can cause sensations of it happening in other places, and it can also induce completely other sensations. I went through a job interview once- one of the interviews for my current job, in fact- with the distinct sensation that my right arm was burning. It left temporary redness as my body attempted to respond to what it thought was happening- but the arm was fine. And tastes can sometimes cause very bizarre reactions, too. sound very seldom does, but colours and tastes tend to get connected. When i see colours they have flavours attached sometimes. And i know they aren't things that i'm tasting, but the brain goes, mmm- turkey, and it's irrevocably linked to a sort of light cyan colour. Every time i see it there's the sense of roast turkey.
Most people experience some form of synesthesia at some point in their lives. a lot of people, for example, report that when a cat licks their hand, it will make a tingling or prickling somewhere else, like along their hip? That's not just parasthesia, which is usually related to nerve damage- it's a sensation actively invoking another sensation in another area.
From my point of view, it's just the world. Many things- types of rock or surface texture, for example, come up with food textures or physical body experiences in my brain. It's like having one word call up two simultaneous definitions, and one of them is real and the other one is just happening along with it. (Amethysts are crisp, like cucumbers. Marble is sleepy.) It doesn't make me sleepy, i don't go chewing up jewelry. These are just... simultaneous experiences. And they are common, but not nearly as common as when i bump my knee and my arm hurts, or as when my ears get cold and it makes my tongue tingle. And yes, i've tried to find ways to have fun with it, and no, there aren't many, it's just too weird (i have only had the neurotransmitter problems for a couple of years, so it's been extremely weird to get used to.)
Just thought i'd share some perspective from a synesthete's (admittedly bizarre and multi-layered) point of view. Bubbles in soda on my tongue make my back tickle. Dark blue- really dark blue, the kind you get when mixing cobalt with coal black- is kinda like hot fudge, rich and with texture. I think it tends to be tastes with colours just because that's where the overlaps happen. I'm not sure. i know the physical stuff tends to be more predictable, for me. Hell was when i went in to have EMG tests run- you don't need to feel electric current in more than one limb at a time, thankyouverymuch!!! (In soviet russia, the current swims through YOU!)
It's a pecu
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
the internet pr0n industry. Instead of just seeing it, you can feel your pr0n too.
;)
Think about it, you know you wanna try it
Ethereal helps me to sniff packets. They smell like ...... packets of something.
great for all us geeks.
I'm smarter than the average bear.
All the time...
They don't know they're dumb.
One of the more famous case studies amongst brain interested researchers. The Mind of a Mnemonist by Aleksandr R. Luria tracks someone who has significant Synesthesia and is able to leverage that to remember ANYTHING for ANY period of time. He wound up using this great power as a sidshow act.
Synesthesia is just a glitch in the Matrix.
If you have a grid of dots, most of which are red but a few are green, you can instantly detect the shape formed by the green dots. However, if you are shown a grid of tiles, most of which are marked '5' but a few are marked '2', you can't detect the shape formed by the 2s without careful observation. The subjects were shown the latter kind of grid, and they performed as well as normal people would on the former kind, showing that their perception of color in numbers enabled them to detect the shape.
Clever.
From the article ,Chinese or Italians or for that matter against member of any country .
Consider two drawings, originally designed by psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. One looks like an inkblot and the other, a jagged piece of shattered glass. When we ask, "Which of these is a 'bouba,' and which is a 'kiki'?" 98 percent of people pick the inkblot as a bouba and the other one as a kiki. Perhaps that is because the gentle curves of the amoebalike figure metaphorically mimic the gentle undulations of the sound "bouba" as represented in the hearing centers in the brain as well as the gradual inflection of the lips as they produce the curved "boo-baa" sound. In contrast, the waveform of the sound "kiki" and the sharp inflection of the tongue on the palate mimic the sudden changes in the jagged visual shape. The only thing these two kiki features have in common is the abstract property of jaggedness that is extracted somewhere in the vicinity of the TPO, probably in the angular gyrus
German language is rather guttural and so is arabic... Does this mean that they necessarily percieve the world a as a sharp not so friendly place? And chinese and italians should really love it , the languages have no sharp edges at all!!
The comment was supposed to be funny.I have nothing against Germans, Arabs
.ACMD setaloiv siht gnidaeR
From the sounds of it, this is the early stages of research which might benefit UI design at some point (though maybe not very soon.)
The article mentions near the end that most people experience this to a degree. Think about it, we do this all the time. Sharp cheese, hot women, ec. It's so much a part of our lexicon that we don't even realize it at a concious level.
Anyhow, if most people can experience this to a degree, would there be advantages to displaying and interacting with data in a similar way?
Step 1: obtain Xbox.
Step 2: plug video cable in RCA jack, and vice versa. Leave 2nd audio cable unjacked.
Step 3: turn on Xbox and tv.
Step 4: Enjoy your risk-free LSD trip.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
A tell-tampered-with clavier.
I think I read an article about that once in Scientific American. If only I could find the link.
The best way to explain it, i think, to someone who doesn't get it is to explain how when someone says 'pair' you can call up the definition 'pear' and know that it isn't accurate- but that it's there. The sound associates with two simultaneous meanings. However, unlike words, the unnecessary definition doesn't go away again once it's been dismissed- it hangs around, making things a little surreal.
I don't know. I'm just surprised to find another description- you're right, it can foreground but mostly it's just there in the back. It just calls up more sensations than are usually called up. I think the best time it's ever come in handy is when i'm designing jewelry, because the aesthetics that work out together for me tend to strike other people as pleasing, too, even though i know we're perceiving in totally different languages. (pale green fluorite is chalky and salty, silver is more like water, and feldspars tend to be in A minor and squishy.)
But as a musician, i can't reverse those to hear an A minor and think feldspar. And most of the time i don't notice, it's normal, it's a sort of cloudy way to think of/ perceive things. Nebulous. A lot like my brain chemistry, i guess...
sol
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
If only my brain would highlight buggy code in red...or perhaps the names of football teams that would win next week. This could really pay off.
They can smell flatulence the moment they hear it.
Clairvoyance or synesthesia?
You decide.
On the other hand, synesthesia can seem to replace otherwise missing sensory experiences, as in this case from the article:
Emphasis added. So, while a deaf synesthete could not "hear" a concert as colors, a blind synesthete might conceivably "see" it as colors. Of course, it'd be hard to tell. I mean, sighted people can't properly describe colors to a blind person, so how could a blind person explain the perception of a color he has not actually ever seen, but only experienced because of a slight mis-wiring in his brain?
On the other hand, a blind synesthete could be at a distinct advantage compared to a blind non-synesthete. Consider: the sound of a car approaching fast is very similar to the sound of a gust of wind. On a gusty day, a blind synesthete might be better equipped to distinguish between oncoming traffic and mere gusts of wind.
Neeeaaaat.
Dunno if you can turn it on and off. I know I can ignore mine. I saw some report on TV about it like 2 weeks ago and they were talking about this woman who says she sees letters and numbers as different colors and I was like "Umm so? Doesn't everybody?" I thought it was just normal. It doesn't always help for memorizing number strings because then you've gotta memorize the colors instead, and often they're close or you have two with the same color, which is no help.
:P
Words having tastes is fun though. Different authors have different flavors, like say David Weber, who's kinda like a hard candy vs Neil Stephenson who's more like cream or cheese with different bits of strong flavors mixed in vs S.M. Stirling who's kinda more like a meat flavor. And yes co-authored books do blend.
Sadly I don't think I have much luck with the sound-color association, but I do get sound-tactile sometimes.
Introducing the new Occam Fusion! Now with sqrt(-1) fewer blades!
Yes, but would a deaf person be able to hear colors and such?
Anybody else ever see these billboards/placards nailed to telephone poles? Or see the ads in various publications?
Now we know where they came from.
When I was a kid, we had a black and white TV. (Really. And this wasn't the Stone Age or anything, just the 70s.) But I always thought I could see the blue in Superman's outfit when watching the Superfriends...
Funny thing, the brain.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Regardless of how one may feel about the recreational use of psychedelics, there is an enormous amount of knowledge that can be gained from the study of their effects on the human brain, and the mechanisms that cause them.
How is it scientific to study synesthaesia, identify compounds that can possibly induce it, and then refuse to dig further in the connection between the two?
Peace and love, y'all
ALSO, it's possible for crosstalk between nearby brain regions that might represent more abstract notions or ideas. So random ideas that don't normally "go together" get simultaneously activated at the same time.
With one chemical interaction (the release of inhibition between nearby cortical regions by blocking a neurotransmitter), you get both perceptual and conceptual crosstalk.
Sound like LSD or mushrooms to anyone?
One of the effects of these drugs may be a release of neural inhibition, which manifests itself in several different areas of the brain, and hence at several levels of the things the brain does-- perception and cognition. Brain regions that don't normally "fire" together because of inhibition suddenly start becoming coactivated (Hey, man, I can SEE the notes flying off Jerry's fingers!).
By shaking up the stereotypical neurocognitive dynamics that one typically engages in, LSD may not only cause the "cool dude" visual illusions, but also the deep and meaningful connections between ideas and expereniences that people find mystical.
The term "outside the box" is squarely within the box at this point.
I bet cheezy mass-market pop music would taste like chicken. It all sounds pretty much like a blank mash of other music styles. If that doesn't define the taste of chicken I don't know what else does....
What other music style/taste treat combinations can we come up with?
Person 1: What do you think of my shirt? Person 2: Tastes like chicken
Or else he would have known the importance of laying out your circuits to minimize crosstalk . . .
One shocking result of the synesthesia research reported in Scientific American this month is that a color-blind person who saw numbers as colors, saw colors that he couldn't actually visually see. This happens because in typical red-green colorblindness, the problem is with the pigments in the eye -- the brain processing areas for color still work just fine. So this person was seeing real colors from the brain crosstalk stimulating those color processing regions.
Charmingly, he called them 'martian colors', as they didn't correspond to anything in his real life.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
trust me, you do *not* want to know what a copy-protected RIAA CD smells like ;)
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I wish someone would do a study on why about every three months I come across some new blog post about synesthesia, containing the same breathless excitement of new discovery of what is actually a really tired 'net meme.
As I understand it, hallucinogens give you an overwhelming sense of the realness of the hallucinations, whether or not you know (at the time) that they're "really real" or not, and it's not like you can say, "Ok, I'm just not going to see that right now." Synaesthesia manifests much more like peripheral vision: It's kind of there, kind of not. It's not like you're seeing visions and rainbows and colours. As one of the interviewees in the article put it, they're "Martian colours," even to those of us who see colours. In fact, a lot of the time, we have to concentrate on that particular sensory input to even be aware of it. (Which indicates strongly that it's largely superfluous information, but can have some uses.)
I don't personally think that it's coded to memory. The article has some good arguments against that theory, and I can also say that I've been experiencing these things for as long as I can remember: If synaesthesia really were keyed to specific memories, wouldn't you expect it to increase or change over time? Where is the Ur-memory that causes all my different sensations? Keyed to memory? Nope, sorry, don't buy it. Come back again when you know what you're talking about.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Green is kind of crackly to me. Violas are red, or at least they make red notes.
See, silly drug people, even synaesthesiacs don't agree on sensations! It's not consistent, and you can't really use it for much. Even if you had it, you might not know what to do with it.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
"Listen! ... Do you smell something?"
Karma: NaN
hey slashtard, until you learn to shower and move out of mommy and daddy's basement, you'll only be "fucking" a 4-1
As far as senses go, NLP focuses on taking control of our thoughts with modalities (visual, auditory, kinesthetic senses) and sub-modalities (sensory quality..such as size, shape, color,sound,etc) Basically you can try the stuff yourself to prove it works. For instance, using one of the techniques, you can remove any phobia you have within ten minutes.
There's lots of info you can find on the web, but a good place to start is: nlpinfo.com
Hope that helps
was when a Western Fence Swift ( a blue-belly lizard) ran out on a branch over my head. I was pretty much incapable of moving at the moment, and had luckily picked a shady spot to lay down in. Anyway, I was absorbing the extraordinary tecture and color of this lizard on a branch maybe 5 feet over my head, when the lizard pissed. Lizards, for the non-biologists out there, piss uric acid, which is a pasty white substance. Same white stuff that birds piss, which most people mistake for bird poop.
Anyway, this intricately formed, textured strand of uric acid crystals started falling through sunlight and shadow, blazing shards of light in the sun, and inverting into deep, immense dense, glittering shadow evey time it passed out of the sunlight.
I watched that thing fall for several hours, until I got sucked back into experiencing the amazing sound and pressure of my own blood flow inside me, again, and that of the friend laying similarly incapacitated next to me with our fingertips just touching, right where I was when the lizard first ran out.
That was the same day the vulture over the creek circled into and out of the hill on the other side, orchestrating the trees and shrubs over there into a threatening and deeply frightening (but not panic-inducing: I was to busy observing it all) attempt to convince me to cross the creek to where they could reach me. You ever watch the sap rise from underground into the root and up through the vascular structure and into the leaves of an angry Oak tree?
Very good memories...
I don't think you can turn it on or off, either; the best you can do is just sort of ignore it. I too went through years of thinking, "Doesn't everyone do that?" and then found out, "Er, no." It's sort of amusing.
I do music as colours, mostly, and smells as colours. I perceive prose as having different textures, although I'd be hard pressed to tell you precisely what. Harlan Ellison feels like filigree; Ernest Hemingway feels like sandpaper studded with tacks (argh!), and some writers change textures so often they're unreadable to me.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Yes, if the part of their brain that controls hearing still functioned. Then they would in fact be able to hear what they see. Atleast that is my understanding of the matter.
Beer Die is the game of champions Learning To walk my own path.
"I can see the music!" --Lisa Simpson, Selma's Choice.
Ok, so I knew you were talking about your son, but at the same time, I thought, "Wow, is there really a son command? I don't even know what section 4 of the man pages is about."
And to top that off, to check that out, I had to type man son.
Your mind is squeezed by a blast of pain!
Everytime I see a girl walk by I feel a tingle in my crotch!
Yeah, and when I see a very sexy one I start to salivate uncontrollably as though I'm tasting something really salty.
...we have this all the time, and we're not on drugs!
Fortunately, it's usually very ignorable, although the parasthesia problem can be a bitch.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Ok so the title of this post is an eye grabber, I don't really know whether it's true or not. But I think the data points towards it being possible. Why do you say? Well, I kinda did an undergraduate thesis on it. Let me know if you want to see the paper.
Basically the theory is this: There are those who are born with perfect pitch or at least develop it VERY early in life, and then those who LEARN it later on. Are these two different mechanisms, then? Not necessarily. It's just that those with early "prodigy" perfect pitch have an extremely quick learning curve for discerning between tones. Why? Memory. They have a "permanent" set of tones to which they compare notes to in their head. For example, I play an F# on the piano, the person with absolute, or perfect pitch, compares it, knows what it is, and then can tell you without looking at the piano that it is indeed an F#.
So how on earth can you "learn" it? It's all in the comparison. Music students may be able to more "permanently" obtain these notes in their minds by frequent exposure / practice in relative pitch excercises. Some are faster that others, and this would explain the ones who have absolute pitch early on.
There is so much more on this, but that's at least where the data is pointing, and there is probably a LOT more research out there since my undergrad thesis (1996). Interestingly, I originally got interested in this because my roommate in college was Jason Marsalis, brother of Brandford and Wynton Marsalis, and he has perfect pitch (apparently from birth).
-- (Score:i, Imaginary)
After light reflected from a scene hits the cones (color receptors) in the eye, neural signals from the retina travel to area 17, in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain.
And let me guess, conspiracy theorists and UFO-ophiles have a highly developed Area 51, right?
Heh. I used to watch startrek (TNG) as a kid, on a black and white TV. I always thought the uniforms were blue. I was oddly disturbed when I first saw it on TV and realized that Captain Picard's uniform was *red*. How.. Un-captainly.
-Sara
I could be mistaken, but didn't Debussy try to evoke colours (whether harmonic or otherwise) and moods in his compositions?
In addition to arguably being labelled an Impressionist, Art of Noise (band) did an album covering his music and it seemed to allude to the use of colour.
On another note, Synthaethesia is also a brilliant side-project of Bill Leeb, a member of Front Line Assembly, Delerium, et al, in case anyone is interested.
I haven't seen too many posts from people who actually have synaethesia, as opposed to those who cite recreational pharmeceutical use. Basically, synaesthesia always felt to me like sensory bleedover. As far back as I can remember, numbers and letters have always been colored. I remember phone numbers and times of day sometimes by their characteristic hues. It gets really weird with color names, because the word "yellow" suggests both yellow and the additional synaethesic hues of the individual letters--in this case, white, green, black, white and lavender.
Danke tres mucho, tovarishch.
Yoga guys (Patanjali for one) say that our 5 senses are 5 interpretations of a single ubersense. Interesting stuff there.
focus schmocus
I have heard that digit-color synaesthesia is fairly common. I find I have such associations -- they're below. Out of curiosity, anybody else have digit-color associations? Are they similar?
0: while / no color
1: black
2: yellow
3: red
4: blue
5: green
6: brown
7: light green / light pink
8: dark blue / purple
9: orange / orange-yellow
0 through 5 are stronger than the others. It's on a digit level -- "32" is like 3 and 2, red and then yellow.
I don't see any particular rhyme or reason to it but the associations are definitely there.
It also happens for letters, but not a strongly.
There is an excelent lecture discussing synesthesia here. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago. I really recommend listening to it.
Jonathan
"Did everything just taste purple for a second?"
I guess I can't help you there...I don't see graphemes as colours, but I can tell you that spoken foreign languages have different colours than English, and written foreign languages have different textures, at least to me. Then again, I suspect that most synaesthesiacs' experiences are highly individualised.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
Me, too, but it stinks.
There are two separate fields exploring this phenomenon. The synaesthesia described by Ramachandran and Cytowic (The Man Who Tasted Shapes) generally researches the kind that is both involuntary and consistent (eg the taste of mint always feels like cold glass columns). These synaesethesias are quite elementary: a particular pitch appears blue as opposed to some blue-winged fairy flying past. The taste of chicken feels spiky. Mint feels like glassas opposed to
One of the most famous synesthetes was S, a photographic memory expert.
The other field is part of Neuro-Linguistic Programming which already provides a lot of useful applications for the non-synesthete.
One example would be an automatic lie detector, based on the voice tone (and body language) someone used. In response you could automatically see the word LIE emblazoned across their forehead, or if you had a really good imagination, you could even see their nose growing...
Here is a website that seeks to bring the two fields together.
I have a hard time with languages like German and Latin that use gender, because they're always wrong. Like in German, "tree" is male. But for me, "tree" has always been female. Using the wrong gender can screw up the whole sentence. There are also people that I don't like just because their names are a bad shape, color, or taste. Can't stand Tina. Tina could be the nicest person in the world and I would always dislike her because of her unfortunate name's flavor.
That's not what it's like at all. It isn't like "being anywhere," even for a moment. Things just are the way they are, and the associations are neutral and not connected to memory. Sorry you'll never understand. It hasn't got a damned thing to do with memory associations or recall; it's got everything to do with cross-interpretations of sensory input. Because I think a certain thing "smells brown" doesn't mean I'm associating it with something -- I may never have smelled anything that smells like that before.
And how do you explain that when I had a tactile input I'd never had before, I perceived it as a fuzzy, electrical fluorescent green sensation? Someone touched me in a way I'd never been touched before (scram, you perverts!), and I saw fluorescent green in a sort of spiky electrical pattern. No memory association there, dude. --shrug-- If you don't have it, you'll never "get" it, so don't even try.
I'm not a geek, I'm just a clever script.
That may have never come off of their LSD trip and now live in a scary world filled with a conspiracy theory involving some kind of experiment being performed on him. This happened to him roughly 28 years after taking a few hits...
Now he sits in a room thinking about the conspiracy against and swears up and down, no matter what is shown to him, that he is posted all over the internet and billboards all over the US. He feels that his old employers are running this experiment and that he still works for them, that everyone that interacts with him is part of this grand conspiracy to see how he would react to having this "experiment" run on him.
He believes that the events of September 11th were created to see how it would mess him up. He believes that I am involved in the experiment and that I work for something he calls the coporation...
All I know is that he has sharpened the points on all the screwdrivers in my house, to protect himself when "they" come to end the experiment. I also know that the medication is finally starting to calm him and bring him slightly into reality.
So all I can say is, "Yay! Way to go LSD!"
If you have never done LSD, DON'T! You could ruin your mind forever, or put yourself into such a dangerous position that your mind will break one day and everything you hold dear today, will break under the weight of your madness.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
THat did run through my mind at the time. Specifically, i thought of it more as TRAINING for the gom jabbar... especially during that EMG experience!!!
"I'd say 'Have a good time,' but arson is still illegal.
Like my father...
You have a real world experience that snaps the fine threads that are left holding your mind together and before you know it, you live in a delusional world. You feel that everyone is watching you, that there is a grand experiment being performed on you, that your name and face is plastered all over billboards and the internet.
Then you sharpen flathead screw drivers as protection for when they come to end the experiment. Yeah, LSD is fun. Bad things "never" happen to people that take LSD.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
It's funny how so many people who have never taken hallucinogens or experienced synesthesia are so eager to put in their $.02 on this thread. Well, I've done both. In a time when I was younger and more reckless, I did LSD. Frequently. In fact, I'd say I used it roughly once per week for a year. I've also experienced synesthesia since I was very young.
Everybody is eager to draw comparisons between these two things because the descriptions that they hear of the two things sound similar. Unfortunately, 95% of the descriptions you hear are misleading.
It's probably worst on the LSD side. So much of what you hear is urban myth, exaggeration, or just crap that people have made up while lying about having taken the drug. The giant pink elephants, spiders, and headless bodies in the closet just don't happen. It's hard to describe what does happen when you take LSD and it's probably not as interesting to listen to. Here is a list of effects, at least some of which one can typically expect from a trip:
1) Things may confuse you that ordinarily wouldn't
2) You may lose all ability to keep track of time
3) Things may make perfect sense that later turn out to be nonsensical rubbish
4) You may have visual hallucinations that involve the shapes of the objects you're viewing distorting. (It is _very_ unlikely you will see something that isn't actually there)
5) You may see patterns (that don't actually exist) in randomly dispersed objects such as threads of carpet or the black and white dots of a TV screen tuned to a channel with no broadcast
6) You may see tracers following moving objects
7) You may see halos around light sources
8) Things you hear will distort in time/frequency/volume or possibly have an echo that isn't actually there
9) Being touched in one place may cause a similar sensation in another place or the sensation may have "echoes" that move around a little
10) You may have hot flashes and/or chills
11) You may sweat profusely
12) You may be fighting down paranoia for a good portion of the experience
13) You may experience synesthesia but not the normal kind
14) You may experience unexplained mood swings
I think these are the bulk of the effects that my friends and I experienced in our LSD-using days. However, there is an additional component to a trip that isn't easily described. There is a portion of the experience that you lose as soon as you sober up. It's a bit like waking up from a dream. You just can't quite wrap your brain around some of the details concerning how you felt and why you thought some of the things you thought. It's difficult to describe.
Synesthesia is also very hard to describe. You can say you "see" the number three as red but you're not really seeing red with your eyes. It's more of an internal thing. It's almost like there's a copy of the three inside your head that's red and that copy kind of overlays itself on the three you're seeing. It's like it's there but it's not. Words really don't accurately describe it. You just have to experience it to understand. I actually have fairly weak synesthesia when it comes to numbers. It's a little stronger for me with words, especially people's names. However, the biggest area where I constantly experience it is audio bleeding into other senses.
From my experience, the synesthesia I've experienced from LSD feels, very different from what I normally experience. For me, on LSD, synesthesia was more like you'd expect it to be from reading the descriptions but it came it short bursts. For example if I were to catch a number three out of the corner of my eye, it would legitimately appear green no matter what color it was. When I would then turn back to look at it, I would see it in its normal color. If somebody were to poke me with a stick in my arm, I would completely feel it in my calf, 100% as if they had poked me there but then the sensation would rapidly snap back to my arm. I dunno, all this stuff is hard to describe.
Even reading my own descriptions I don't feel like I've gotten it quite right and I've been there. All the speculation from people whom have experienced neither is worthless.
This is a bit OT, but one thing I've been wondering for quite a while is whether we all perceive colors in the same way. Do we all see red the same way, or perhaps some people say, swap red and green?
This article made me wonder something else. Turns out a colorblind person's brain can see the color the eyes won't process correctly. Supposing I could mess with my brain's wiring, could I see some new color I've never seen?
For example, imagine having electronic eyes that can see infrared at the same time as normal colors. Could the brain give a new representation to infrared so that it'd look different from all the normal colors?
000000 = black
.. and many many more
The wierd thing about this condition I have is that it only works when I type hexadecimal numbers into this color selector applet. I guess the reason I never noticed it is because small numbers tend to be black/very dark blue so I assumed they were just black, but a big number like D90301 is bright red!
FFFFFF = white
FF0000 = red
00FF00 = green
0000FF = blue
D000D0 = purple
Eat at Joe's.
Why it stinks like fish!
Actor: Its 2003, we were promised flashbacks! Where are the flashbacks?
Voiceover: With IBM, you can have flashbacks.
Fade to picture of OS/2 Warp...
FreeSpeech.org
One word: Smell-o-Vision!
Hell I was tasting colors back in pre school
I had heard of this syndrome or trait in the human brain associated with the Indian mathematician Ramanujan. I remember from math history lessons in college that he associated formulas, equations, and even theories into colors and shapes. I think it was a part of his genius for number theory with respect to the mastery of such a way of thinking.
Reading through other posts I found that it is also associated with musical masteries related to perfect pitch and tune. Ramanujan seemed to have the same skill respectively, he just associated with numbers and mathematics instead.
If this skill can be taught or mastered, it seems a host for creative, original thinking for any aspect of science and/or artistic expression and would be wonderful if harnessed.
--"The perfect example of the man of action is the suicide." - William Carlos Williams
I see ordered sets as all having a specifig color scheme. Like, for example, all 4's are yellow and all 3's are green. The letter J is blue and the letter M is red. And when they get combined together, they form different colors based on some rules that I can't define, but somehow know (19 is black and 76 is blue but 1976 is always blue, 1796, however, would be yellow while 1679 would be blue again, etc.) and those colors and color combinations do not change (I had a friend ask me what "color" a random number was, and then wait a few months and ask me again, and it was the same, even though I had forgotten what I originally said.)
This happens with any kind of set that has a specific order to them. If you just pull 10 random shapes out of the wood-work they would not have any colors, but if you said to me that they all go in order from shape1 to shape10 then I would suddenly begin to see them as colors.
Holy crap! The exact same thing happened to me with the characters on Sesame Street! B&W TV, and I thought Elmo was blue and Grover was red! So it wasn't just a red->blue transition, it was also a blue->red!
To this day, I'm still not sure what color Plastic Man is supposed to be. (Ok, I just checked google, and its red.. i thought he was blue)
Then I finally saw it in color at a neighbor's house and it confused the crap out of me because all the colors were wrong (to me).
I wonder what we queued off of in the image. Must be something with the color densisty in the YcBcR encoding that is used in NTSC.. and how it comes out when the TV doesn't recognize that.
Wow, and I thought I was just a freakin weird kid!
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
I'm probably replying to a very clever troll, and if so I'll have a nice day, but seriously:
You cannot rightfully blame your father's schizophrenia or psychosis on one or two LSD trips that he had 28 years ago, especially since the disorder came on quickly and from nowhere. People develop schizophrenias and psychoses all the time without a catalyst such as LSD. It just happens, for whatever reason. Hallucinogens and psychotomimetics can be responsible for activating a latent disorder if all the conditions are just right (or just wrong, depending on how you want to see it). But they are not schizotoxins. You have to be fucked up already before these things will work against you. And from that, we get the standard hallucinogenic disclaimer as a corollary:
There are plenty of reasons why people become schizophrenic or psychotic. LSD can certainly precipitate these effects but it happens immediately not out of the blue 28 years down the road. LSD may produce a temporary psyschotic state but schizophrenia is completely different from a user's state of mind while tripping. LSD, or any hallucinogen for that matter, does not cause schizophrenia in and of itself. Spreading FUD about a substance, which is relatively benign if used correctly, will not make your father suddenly snap back into reality.
I feel sorry for your father -- I really do -- but your story does not provide me with ample evidence to accept your conclusion as truth.
Sorry.
Ciao
And you shouldn't have typed that either, but you did, and so did he. Guess what that means? I shouldn't have type this either! bleargh.
> Then could I, as a heterosexual male, fuck an eleven?
Wait, you say you're hetero AND want to screw 11? Man, that's a weird definition of hetero. Now, that seven is one hot bitch, dude!
When I eat enough to get really full, my left shoulder hurts in one spot. That is all. But now I have a name for it. :-)
Now I know why every time I read the word "Slashdot" I taste SPAM and get a burning sensation.
Here's my color chart.
0 - clear
1 - white
2 - pink/red
3 - yellow
4 - green
5 - red
6 - yellow
7 - orange
8 - blue
9 - black
The uneven distribution is fascinating to me - there's no purple. Also, I am constantly confusing 3 and 6, because they are the same shade of yellow to me.
Numbers above 9 seem to either be mixes of the colors of the associated numbers (10 = watered down milk color, 11 = milk, 12 = pink frosting, 13 = lemon merangue, ...) or are simply separate non-mixed colors, (345 = yellow next to green next to red).
Hey - do others associate the same colors-to-numbers, or different? I always wondered about that. The article mentioned a test subject associated red to 5, when I read that I said, woo hoo! :)
I thought the article provided some insight into logo design, and why some logos seem to "work" or "fit" and others don't. I.e., our brains are wired to match certain shapes with certain sounds and concepts.
I design logos as part of my job, and so when I see a particularly good or clever one I try to analyze it and see what makes it work. The idea of synesthesia gives me another angle to consider.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
Hey, here's a stupid random thought I had:
What if certain functions could be created by crossing the right chemicals? Such as those claimed by people with ESP and other such unexplained phenomena? I don't really believe that, but I found it odd that no one else had made that connection before.
Heck, maybe everyone has some form of this -- Sometimes, usually when I'm ill, I get the feeling of a cylindrical object with a pretty foul taste and it's kinda' slippery (hey, no sick jokes from the peanut gallery). I always wondered where that feeling came from. I don't usually actually have the taste in my mouth or really feel the "thing" but have a distinct impression of it existing and having those properties. Impossible to explain.
This parent post isn't really meant to be funny. For some of those with synesthesia numbers can assume gender properties. Male, Female, both, even none. Ex-girlfriend had it.
i have the same thing. when i look print or think of them in my head, every number and letter has a color, the same way the letter "s" has the ssssssss sound. in my head, it's just an intrinsic property.
2s and 6s have the same color in my head, and i once went to the wrong classroom because of it. Unfortunately it the same course, different section/intructor. I was adament that i should be among the registered students/ felt foolish later when i realized i should have been in 502 instead of 506.
--
fight global cooling
This has ALWAYS been my fave xmms plugin!
In primary motor cortex, the hand area is located next to the face area. They are not right next to each other, however. Areas for the other parts of the face lie between. Do their faces move, too? See this picture of the motor homunculus for fun.
The cortical areas for the different senses are significantly further apart. Vision is in the back. Touch runs coronally in the middle. Audition is on the sides. At least, the simplified primary processing follows these patterns.
If only they could figuire out how to cause this condition in programmers so that software bugs where a blaring red.
The brain is excellent at compensating for lack of information. This tends to be particularly common with bright people. I recall reading a story about a deaf boy whose parents never knew he was deaf because he picked up on how THEY reacted to things happening, and he was extremely observant. Apparently he didn't know he was deaf, either. When someone dropped a spoon, he thought they reacted to the sight of the dropping spoon, and not to the sound that it made.
Different colors have different "temperatures", as well. These may still be distinguishable when the color itself can't be seen. I'm deaf, and cannot hear the words people say, but I can hear the tone, the mood, the changes in volume, etc. Just because part of an ability is missing doesn't mean the whole ability is missing.
-Sara
If Synesthesia is related to creativity, and Synesthesia seems to be a partially inherited trait, is this evidence that creativity is inherited via the same vector?
;-)
Combine this "Nature" effect with the "Nurture" effect of being raised by your parents. If they aren't the creative type, then you probably won't be either. Put down the paint, step away from the easel, and for god sakes don't write any poetry.
I experience synesthesia myself, although it is relatively benign and it was only when other people told me they did not have similar sensory perception that I realised it was not universal, or even common.
I get very vivid colour perception from tastes and smells. I mean very vivid. And the colours by no means often match the visible colour of the food/drink/whatever. Sometimes they do, especailly for strong, pure, natural flavours. For example, oranges test a slightly orange-tinged yellow. Apples tend to be red, even when the skin is green. Meats tend to be a kind of mucky swirl. It's very odd.
But I can attest that these perceptions are very real.
And I have never taken any hallucinogens.
You should get some education on the issue. I admit that a couple of doses is not likely to cause problems.
However, it is well known that chronic use of powerful psychoactives does create long term psychological/emotional problems.
You are flat out wrong when you say that the effects are precipitated immediately. You shouldn't speak as an authority unless you are one. I partied too hard when I was younger, and I am now paying the price. I've been treated by addiction specialists, and I do know what I'm talking about. Talk to a doctor before you go spreading any more misinformation.
Me too. Not all numbers; some were anrogynous. "1" and "7" are female, "8" and "4" are male. Didn't really give much thought to the others.
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Numbers and letters for me. They even have personalities. 4 is middle-aged and maternal. 6 is an impish male kid and 7 is a wisecracking adult male. 8 and 9 are catty, gossiping teenage girls. Where did this come from? I have no idea, but I can still remember these associations to this day (I'm 27). You could test me over and over and I would get the essentials right every time, I'm fairly sure.
Fry (after putting aluminum in the microwave): "Hey, what smells like blue?"
I don't think that kind of thing is too unusual. I used to watch movies and play video games on a black and white TV, and later I would vividly remember seeing them in color. And when I watch foreign films, I sometimes can't remember whether I watched them dubbed or subtitled. All I remember is "the story" translated into whatever language I use internally.
Give her a nick then..
Serious, maybe. Troll, possibly. Funny? I don't think so
Some time ago, I Read an article in TIME that spoke about all humans having a dull sense of synathesia.
They say it is the origin of all metaphors...how people come up with expressions like "sharp cheese" or "bitter cold." We can all relate to these phrases, although a taste can't really be "sharp."
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
Originally, LSD was used by psychiatric students and given to them by their colleges to assist them in understanding what it is like to be Schizophrenic. It had been found that people on LSD have the same kind of brain activity as people suffering from Shizophrenia.
He also didn't wake up on day like this. It happened slowly over the course of his life. He finally "Snapped" when he was in his late forties. Prior to that he had always been a little "off" and that could have been anything.
I am not aware of how many High School, or even Middle School Students that take the time to read through medical journals or psychiatric journals to come across the statement that you displayed above. Of course, those two groups happen to be the groups that take LSD the most.
The truth of the matter is there is NO TELLING what LSD will do to a person. No two human beings have the exact same set of experiences, no two human beings have the same neural pathways or identical brain chemistry. That is a fact.
If you wish to play Russian Roulette with your the long-term quality of your life, so be it. Nothing that I, or anyone else, can say will stop you. Just don't come whining away on Slashdot, if you even have the capability to use a PC, after dropping LSD and your find yourself permanently living in a psychotic paranoid delusional hell.
However, if you do, I hope you are as lucky as my father is and you have some family member that will put their foot in your rear and get you the treatment that you would need for the rest of your life.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Originally, the drug LSD, was used in college courses for medical students who were studying to be psychoanalysts and psychiatric professionals. They were often given this drug by their professors in order to give them a glimpse at what their life would be like, if they were Schizophrenic.
You see, they found that the neural activity of Schizophrenics was the same as the neural activity of people under the influence of LSD.
They quite suddenly stopped this practice quite quickly after they started the practice. (BTW this was in the mid 50's to late 60's, as I recall.) It wasn't a war on drugs issue, which didn't appear until the 80's. It was because some of those students lost their minds, permanently.
So, they got to experience what life was like to be a Schizophrenic for the remainder of their life.
Is that something that you wish to take a chance with?
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
This method may work but it is not true synesthesia. A mental association might be a good way to learn, but if you were experiencing synesthesia, you would swear the wall turned blue when that note was played. You would actually think you are seeing a color with your eyes.
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That's normal--our memory is only partially reality based, and our brains tend to sort through things and try to make memories "coherent". Since we see things in color, and hear language being spoken, our brains are going to tell us "color" and "spoken" when we look back at the memories. Even when things aren't color or spoken/heard.
Where it gets interesting is in cases like mine. I haven't used my ears to recieve language in over 17 years. All language, to me, is a visual thing, but I remember it as sound. Written language, subtitles, things read on peoples lips, even sign language. I even "hear" distinct voices for each person I'm remembering in my head, even though I have never heard the voices of most people.
I don't know if it's because sound is easier to remember than vision, or if pathways were established in my brain early on prior to my hearing loss that strongly tied language to sound. Or if maybe the human brain has pre-existing links from the beginning.
-Sara
How about we keep this objective? Admonishing me against taking certain substances does nothing to forward this arguement. You can do what you want to do and I'll do what I want to do and we can keep this from personalizing unnecessarily. For the record, I have used tryptamine psychoactives and may use them in the future; it is not certain. What is certain is that fearmongering from you is not likely to change that; I need proof.
Regardless of what a few ignorant researchers may have done in the 1960s, the primary and immediate effects LSD have not been shown to mimic schizophrenia. At the time, neither schizophernia nor the neurochemistry of hallucinogens was very well understood. A few psychologists may have given LSD to grad students, noting some physical and mental manifestations which were similar to schizophernia but you must acknowledge that they were working with soberingly blunt instruments and it was unlikely that they could have checked their conclusions quantitatively. Unfortunately, putting this question to rest is just as difficult today: these substance are Schedule I, unresearchable, and we still don't have a test to conclusively prove or disprove a similarity between the two. The only dead stong connection between schizophrenia and the psychedelic experience that I know of is that they both share a marked increase in central nervous system arousal. But this can be said of many states of altered consciousness and is not unique of the two we're interested in.
Blantant Sarcasm Alert: Oh well... I guess it's just easier to wave our hand and accept that the state resembles schizophrenia than to work out all the nitty, gitty details.
So there was a gradual onset! I was confused. Sorry! However, I still don't necessarily see the connection here. There are many factors that cause schizophrenia. What makes you so certain that it was the LSD? How do you know that your father was not already a border-line schizophrenic or was in the midst of developing it? As you probably know, people are rarely born with the disorder; it develops later in life, usually in early to mid-twenties, often with major episodes significantly delayed. Now -- had you said, "Twenty-eight years ago, my father had a acid trip where he was convinced that there was a conspiracy manifesting against him and they were doing all sorts of nasty things; it scared the bajesus out of him and he never recovered," I would have immediately said, "Bingo. LSD psychosis. I guess he wasn't prepared for what he might encounter while on the trip." But that doesn't seem to be the case here and the connection is a little more tenuous and quite vague; just because "there is no telling what LSD will do to a person", doesn't mean that schizophrenia is a likely outcome.
Genuine Appeal Alert: While it won't make your situation anymore palatable, you really should entertain the possibility that LSD may not be to blame. Mind you -- when you've got proof that it was, by all means, put it up on a pedestal for all to see; I too would like to see it that I might alter my behavior. In the meantime, not arbitrarily singling out an enemy or cause for your father's problem might be healthier for you too.
I agree with you: too many kids are taking this stuff without understanding what's going to hit them. But the problem is larger than this: not just with psychoactives, but in general, they are not aware of the consequences of their actions, whether it be sex, alcohol, hallucinogens or even awful addictive stimulants and narcotics. Let's face facts, these kids are going to continue to do these things whether or not they are illegal or provably/suggestably bad for them. Some do it only because it is considered wrong in defiance! So, without unnecessarily condoning or denouncing their use, why not objectively educate them about what these substances do, what to watch out for and what the real dangers and benefits are? Telling people that "Drugs are bad, mmmkay?" or "LSD is bad, mmm
Well said.
Unlike most of the crowd here I speak from experience regarding these substances. Mescaline, paper hits of acid, 'shrooms, i've tried each in ample dose, multiple times. (way past statute of limitations, DEA!)
You'd be able to establish a better causal relationship for muted intelligence due to playing with mercury in the 6th grade science lab than you could for any potential effect of the hallucinogens I may have ingested back when I was a minor.
(we put drops of mercury on the lab table and flicked it off with our fingernail. It was fun to see the sparkles of liquid metal disappear on the floor. Hey, I was in the 6th grade. I am sure that lab is the equivalent of a Superfund site at this point just from the full bottle of mercury we wasted over a year doing that stuff. Or would be if someone tested it.)
AC because I have no desire to be harassed by law enforcement in this proto-Nazi environment we are living in.
I have a very limited form of it that is very useful. I only noticed when I had children. I see colors when I hear young babies cry. Nothing wakes you up like bright blue and magenta flashing lights for that 3:00am feeding. I thought it happened to everyone till I mentioned it to another mother and got a weird look.
/. have it.
Interestingly, it goes away when the baby is around seven or eight months and their voice changes tone. I also see some other noises. I always thought that the bright light was why fingernails on the blackboard was annoying to people.
I wonder how common this is. Seems like a lot of people on
~Cindy~
By the way, in my father's case it was a gradual onset, which started after his use of LSD. As is the case with most everyone that is afflicted with Schizophrenia. He was, what I call, a functionaly schizophrenic, in that he was barely able to take care of himself through many years of his life. Then, he became worse, some major stressers entered his life and he was unable to cope. The he started to slide down the slippery slope of madness.
Personally, I know people that went from being bright, inteligent people, capable of using the college level vocabulary that you seem fond of spouting, to having the ability to barely write out coherent sentences.
One women I know, now has a perpetual dull look about her and she now acts as though she has been put into slow-motion mode. She speaks slowly, not because she is weighing her words, but because she is simply not the same person she was before she melted her mind through drug use. I feel very sorry for this woman and had I known then, what I know now, I would have pushed for her to never use that substance.
Personally, I believe that some drugs aren't all that bad and others are quite bad. I don't need the government or the DEA to tell me that taking LSD or Exctasy is bad for me, I know people that have destroyed themselves permanently by taking those drugs. People that may never be able to live a normal life, because they believed that they were being lied to by the government and DEA.
Go ahead, do what you want to do, but when you wake up one morning drooling and rocking back and forth because you fried your brain, don't say I didn't warn you. Of course, by then, it will be to late for you. But, hey everything's a risk, right?
Good luck in life, may you never end up like some of the people that I know.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
If you were prone to synesthesia the senses would really bleed into one another and it would probably be even easier to learn this sort of trick.
Actually, if you were prone to synesthesia, it would probably be harder, unless the person/device coaching you knew exactly which sounds triggered which colors for you. (And of course - if you could tell them that, there would be no point in them coaching you, because you'd already have perfect pitch.)
Story: knew a person with synesthesia (although at the time, I thought she was BS'ing me.) She told me that she took a trip to Europe, and kept getting lost in the train system.
She sees letters as colors, and on the train system, they had letters and colors to represent the lines (the "A" line would be orange, the "B" line would be green, etc..) so that foreigners who couldn't read the language would have an easier time navigating (you look at a map of where you want to go, use the color from the map, then find a train with the appropriate color.)
When she asked for directions, people just gave the color (as that's what they were used to) - like "take the green line" - only she kept confusing the colors of the lines with how synesthesia associated the colors to the letters in her head.. so to her, the "green" line was D (or something like that.)