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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.
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.'"
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