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."
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?
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.
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.'"
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!!!!
> 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!
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.
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.
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.
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
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 thing is the king of artificial Synthesia, imoho, is old cartoons. Smells come across as green vapors, noises come across as *BLAM* of *BOOM* etc... And imoho, they get the general visual sense of it. As for seeing music, well, yeah, the visualizations on a media player, or fantasia works too.
Problem is everybody sees music differently, some people see a certain song... oh let's use Oorf's Oh Fortuna. Some see just red shapes in their head dancing to the music, others see a huge battle with medeival armies and dragons and stuff, and other people see their futures, etc. It's all relative, so unless it's person for person, it's kinda irrelevant.
What I'm wondering is can a person with synesthesia satisfy a craving by just smelling something?
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.
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.
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.
I believe I saw a study somewhere on the effect of language on perception (it was described as disproving Orwell's ideas about newspeak, but it applies here as well). It turns out that the primitive languages used by various aboriginal tribes contain far fewer color names than most other languages (just "light" and "dark" as opposed to "red", "blue", "burnt sienna", "a sort of orange-blue", etc). However, their eyes and vision centers are just as capable of distinguishing betwee any two colors as speakers of any other language; they could recognize that two colors were not identical even though they could not quantify the difference.
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...
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)
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.
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.
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?
The studies still show it's contaminants that tend to cause the bad trips, including caffine (externally taken) and various by-products and related versions of LSD, which would, as I said, result from poor QC.
I'm not shy, I'm stalking my prey
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.
arguably worth the risk considering the spiritually eye-opening experience of tripping
A guy I knew named Fuzzy once described his worst trip ever. He ended up running stark naked down the middle of the street, scared for his life because there were giant horses right behind him with big, sharp teeth trying to eat his clothes. I'd say just about nothing is worth the risk of having an experience like that. Thank you, I'll take starvation over LSD if I want to alter my perceptions.
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
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.