Anecdotal Evidence Theater, Essay Version

[corivax]

There have been three interesting public posts on my friends list about synaesthesia of late. ( 1, 2, 3), plus two interesting friends-locked ones. Far be it from me to do anything other than mindlessly follow the cool kids!

I think "synaesthesia" as the official medical definition goes is reasonably uncommon, but most people I've talked to have

Comments

[king_chiron]

I'm a bit jealous that I *don't* have synaesthesia, it seems more and more people I know have some aspect of it.

[corivax]

I doubt you have none, though. One of the posts this week mentioned this image (or one like it) and pointed out that when people are asked which of the two shapes is the 'kiki' and which is the 'boba,' 19 in 20 people picked the same set. :) That's a sound/shape thing, at least.

It's not "clinical" synaesthesia, but most people have something along these lines. Do certain pieces of music remind you of colors or scenes? Do certain people seem to fit with certain colors? Certain moods with scenes or colors? Stuff like that.

[urox]

But is that due to the shape of the english letters translating to the shapes shown? It would be interesting to do the same for people who don't use a latin alphabet.

[corivax]

The official explanation goes like this:

"The kiki visual shape has a sharp inflection and the sound ‘kiki’ represented in your auditory cortex, in the hearing centers of your brain, also has a sharp sudden inflection. Your brain performs a cross-modal synesthetic abstraction, recognizing that common property of jaggedness, extracting it, and so reaching the conclusion that they are both kiki." -V. S. Ramachandran.

I don't know enough to comment intelligently on it.

[gfish]

Guitar chords, when I'm playing them, have moderately distinct colors in my head. E is royal blue, G is forest green, C is white, F is a light yellow, Am kind of maroon, Dm a muddy orange. But only when I'm playing them, not just hearing them, and only as an abstract thing in my head, not directly visual at all.

[caladri]

I think sometimes it's one's relationship with a thing that gives a sort of personal understanding, to the level of it changing our perception of how we work with it, how we do it. Everything like that becomes a matter of a spatial sense in some way or another - I know a full map of a lover's body, or I know where to move my hands on a keyboard, or the thing I'm focusing on doing right looks to be at a different depth of field. It's interesting that as I relate more and more to a keyboard (having avoided the things like the plague until 3 years ago), I don't just move my hands (or internal hands) in various directions in connections with changes in pitch, there's an automatic inclination towards my hands being where they belong on a keyboard. I am starting to be able to figure out notes in my head from knowing C. And C very much has a color in my head. It's not that way for other people's music, unless I'm figuring out how to play it in my head

[hello_mike]

Hm, funny. I don't think that way, but those colours make complete sense to me. e.g. F should definitely be yellow.

[solarbird]

Vowels have taste. A is sweet, sometimes too much. E is savoury and kind of nice. I is a bit astringent. OU is neutral except for maybe a little salty. O is kind of hard to describe but isn't unpleasant, but maybe a little hollow. (Yes, tastes can be hollow. Is this another example in a separate area? I don't know. I do know people have gone "what?" when I've described something as tasting hollow.) U alone is kind of ... bleh. Kind of a hint of rubberyness, like an eraser. I tend to want to spell words so that they have a balanced "taste," which often leans to issues with vowel selection.

[corivax]

If it's at all explainable, what makes a word's taste balanced?

[solarbird]

I've been trying to think of a good answer for this and have so far failed. I can force one, but it'd be wrong in at least some cases. Even "balanced" isn't a very good word; the real word would be "right," which is pretty much unparsable.

[caladri]

It's weird that shanmonster's post features so much mention of eyes-closed stuff, as I spent much of my childhood playing with such things. My favorite similar thing was to rub my eyes hard and then stop, and the weird visual disturbances that result. That said, I can definitely (normally) get closed-eye-visuals of a fairly detailed sort (at least when sleepy.) Also the previously mentioned (I think in my post) fun with changing my perception of colors by staring at things for a long time (especially in low-light or low-color environments.) The eyes-closed thing is very much, for me, a short-cut to short-circuiting video-in and switching to mind's eye in a pinch, too. Every time I've mentioned the "strands" of my life for the past few days, I've seen a literal rope of these interesting vinyl-textured ropes like red vines in all sorts of colors linked with lots of convergence points and then lots of them streaming off into the distance to join up with other ropes of other sorts.

Mmm, mindhacking.

[corivax]

I hate closing my eyes voluntarily. I usually fall asleep with them slitted open (though I usually wake up with them all the way closed). Somehow I can't hear very well with my eyes closed, and touch doesn't work very well for me like that, either. Creeps me out.

for fairness' sake

[corivax]

I am not a "real" synaesthete, but I do have some amount of random sensory oddness.

• I have a strong music/math crossover. Solving a math problem is a matter of getting the music to come out right. For sumple algebra, this is just a chord or two - you know everything in the equation is in the same key and all you have to do is find how the individual notes fit into the chord. For calculus, I get elaborate and lovely things like fugues; the same melody, self-modifying, played against itself in shadows and inversions, harmony with silence, a beat and a beat.
  
  Works the other way, too. I can feel the number-theory underpinnings of music when I'm singing and listening to the harmonies, or in arched spaces sketched gull-wing over harpstrings by my fingertips.
  
  
• I perceive most sensory input as visual. Sounds are usually these translucent glassy looking things, some of them soft-edged and blurry as dawn, some with long intricate purple fractal sea-urchin spines. I can see a sound and the thing that makes it occupying the same space; neither

Re: for fairness' sake

[twoeleven]

how does this differ from classic synaethesia? looks like it's spec to me. :)

Re: for fairness' sake

[corivax]

As I understand it, clinical synaesthesia is a conceptual -> sensory mapping, like letters to colors, or colors with gender, or whatever. Mine all seem either too low-level (sense -> vision) or too high level (math <-> music). I don't think either sense -> sense or concept -> concept qualifies, right?

The math <-> music thing, as I understand it, is really, really common, and I've never seen it referred to as synaesthesia.

Re: for fairness' sake

[caladri]

Really? Sound -> Vision is the most classic example I know other than grapheme-color.