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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."
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.
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.
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.
You are correct, you are not a musician. C flat is B, not B sharp (It is only a semi-tone between B and C).
In the Keys of G-flat and C-flat the C is flat. The Tenor Sax part of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue has a section in G-Flat.
You must give up reading a lot of articles when they mention conecpts that are foreign to your experience.
But most have brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and mescaline can produce similar effects)
IME that's a training thing - spend long enough looking for something and areas of your visual cortex become very adept at identifying it. Interestingly some animals seem to use visual patterns extensively - birds of prey for instance are very adept at identifying their prey, but appear to have much poorer visual resolution for other things.
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.
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.
That's untrue. Although people *do* have bad trips, flashbacks are just propaganda. Typically a bad trip is one where you get introspective and focused on some depressing thing. Unless you're weak minded, it's really debatable whether they are really "bad" or just insightful in a depressing way. I've had my fair share of 'em and I tend to lean towards the latter. Also, with psychadelics you don't see elephants or spiders or hallucinations like that. You don't think you can fly and go jump out of buildings, or punch windows, or whatever else the Just Say No folks claim. Even with really visual acid, what you see is ordinary objects just like you're used to but they look like they're melting, twisting, shrinking/growing, losing their ordinary boundaries, growing wispy fuzz, seeming brighter, etc. However, you're fully aware that it's the LSD that's causing the hallucination, so it's not like you go apeshit, thinking you're actually melting or anything.
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.
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
With drugs like speed, crack, coke, heroin, etc, yes that's an issue. WIth acid though, the active dose is like 5-15 micrograms. It's typically taken on a very small piece of blotter paper or a tiny flake of gelatin. Even if the urban legend of LSD being cut with strychnine were true (check out www.erowid.org's LSD section to debunk that) the LD50 (dose at which 50% of subjects experience fatality) of strychnine is around 50mg. that's around 50,000 times as much lsd as you just took. There's just no way to get an even remotely dangerous dose of a contaminant in a hit of acid unless it's sarin or VX or something else that your typical hippie acid-chemist would certainly NOT make.
Bad trips and recurring mental anxiety later in life are about the only risk associated with LSD. (arguably worth the risk considering the spiritually eye-opening experience of tripping)
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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.
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.
The medical stuff you've read? Give me a break. This is a total load of urban legend crap. There is no reason to cut acid with rat poison or "cheaper hallucinogens." It's generally dried on blotter paper so there's really no point in "diluting" it for any reason. When sold in liquid form, it's often diluted with liquor. It's so incredibly potent (as in, 25 MILLIONTHS of a gram will cause baseline effects) that cutting it with fucking POISON or other hallucinogens would be EXPENSIVE, POINTLESS, AND STUPID.
Cutting agents don't cause bad trips. Adverse reactions to LSD cause bad trips. This could mean taking LSD on accident without knowing it, taking LSD in a bad setting, taking LSD in a bad state of mind, etc.
This is not to say that acid has never once been cut with strychnine. It has happened to be sure, but only because morons hear this urban legend and then do it themselves for some idiotic reason. In all reality there is no fucking reason to go out and buy rat poison in order to some how dilute a drug that is by weight the most powerful mind altering substance on earth and I'm utterly sick of this crap being propogated to this day as fact.
Required reading...