Slashdot Mirror
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."
'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.
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."
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
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
Actually, in some ways, it probably is like drugs, whether you know it or not. Disclaimer: I have never taken LSD, nor do I experience synaesthesia. However, the article says that the mechanism may be "crosswiring" - the unusual interconnection of neurons - or unusual behavior on the part of the transmission or reception of chemical messages. Either way, signals within the brain gain either more or less relevance than they should to neighboring regions.
LSD ostensibly operates by making messages between neurons and larger functional units within the brain more significant to their neighbors than they ought to be, thus something in one area of the brain can activate some other seemingly unrelated area of the brain. While this does lead to meaningless and/or (relatively) unimportant stimuli taking center stage in your thoughts at times, it also leads to valuable and unexpected insight. As a friend of mine put it to me, "I didn't understand math until I did LSD."
In other words, Synaesthesia and the effects LSD would seem to be related. Some of the effects of LSD are certainly similar to (or sometimes apparently identical to) synaesthesia, though obviously I am not qualified to comment on that first-hand. Nor is anyone else of course, because synaesthesia could quite possibly alter the effects of LSD on one's brain, to the extent that one's brain is different to begin with.
Finally, I will leave you with this thought. The mechanism of memory is not well known and could still be playing a part here, though not without some form of "crosswiring", again as the article puts it. While there is a strong belief that the "dendrites" - calcium structures built in the brain - are responsible for the storage of memory, the mechanism is not known. Perhaps the crosswiring truly is stimulating a memory which is coloring your perception. If areas of the brain tend to perform particular functions, I see no reason why different areas of the brain could not store different types of memories, possibly but not necessarily related to the types of data that area processes.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
For the most part, you are correct. The frightening part is when things become extremely disassociated, and you can no longer recognized common objects, a shirt for example. While you intellectually *know* that its a shirt, you simply cannot recognize any of its features (ie, its a floppy tangle of loops of substance with a number of various sized holes, and the whole thing has a vague quality of shirtness to it). Similar things happen to campfires and rock ledges. Unfamilar things have properties that are facinating, but unrecognized. Large drop-offs can look completely non-threating because the associations with large drop-offs, falling and dying are broken.
Large doses of LSD or other psycoactives is a bad idea without a sitter.
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...
Of course, there are many people with similar problems who have never taken LSD at all. And most of the people who took LSD 30 years ago aren't any wierder than the general population, well, not a lot wierder. So your proposed cause-and-effect relationship is a wee bit tenuous. Perhaps it's a reaction to having lived during the Nixon regime, or he was exposed to Anita Bryant, the Cuban Missle Crisis, or Love Canal, maybe he mixed aspirin and Coke, or took nutmeg. I'm not going to be a staunch defender of LSD, I didn't like it much myself, but the connection is not obvious.
Ahh... another victim of the War on Drugs. Forget the 'permanent damage' FUD for a moment and get some competent treatment for your father.
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
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