Everything is like everything else when you're synaesthesiac !
 

Take a moment to ponder this condition...
The implications are truly philosophical.

......................

'I can taste my words'

BBC News

James Wannerton lives in a house that tastes of mashed potato and is situated in a fruit gum town.
He has a toffee flavoured nephew and used to have a condensed milk granny.

His next door neighbours are a mixture of yoghurt, jelly beans and a subtle hint of a waxy substance.

James is not mad, nor is he on a taste orientated drug trip - he has a neurological condition called synaesthesia, which mixes up his senses.

Colours

To him verbal and written words can conjure up taste sensations.

"This doesn't affect every word or sound, although I have a horrible feeling that it could if I allowed it, " he said.

Say the word safety and James, aged 44, will imagine lightly buttered toast. When someone says or writes the word jail, it sparks the taste of cold bacon.

Synaesthesia is frequently based around colours - letters of the alphabet, or sounds, are associated with specific shades - and a number of artists are thought to have had the condition

It also runs in families and is thought to be linked to the X-chromosome, as it is more common in women.

Less frequent is the taste-based synaesthesia experienced by James, a systems analyst from Blackpool.

James says his condition means having conversations can be difficult.

As people talk he finds his mind wandering to the taste image conjured up.

'Complex'

He said he was reluctant to tell people about his synaesthesia because it was difficult to understand.

"I don't tell people about it because it is an odd thing.

"If you say you have this and that this happens to me they expect you to be able to do something exceptional."

Dr Jamie Ward, of University College, London, who has studied the condition, said it should be seen as a genuine phenomenon in search of a psychological explanation.

In his article in the Psychologist, the British Psychological Society's Journal, he says that if synaesthesia could be proved it would increase understanding of how the brain works.

About one in 2,000 people were affected by synaesthesia and of these only 10% had the taste form, he said.

The tastes/word imagery was often complex.

"One patient, when you said the word six to him, he thought of vomit, and the word seven and he said Spangles (a type of sweet).

"It is kind of interesting that some of the words are linked with childhood.

"Bizarrely there are often phonetic relationships between the triggering word and the name that is used to describe the taste that is elicited.

"For example, cinema may taste of cinnamon rolls and Chicago may taste of avocado."

Dr Ward said about twice as many women than men suffered from the
condition.
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Epistemological questions have always fascinated me.
How do we know what we know?
In many ways, we are stuck with what our senses serve up.
Not only that, our sensations need to be interpreted by our brains.

IMO, many times, nonsense ensues - even when we're not synaesthesiac.
What would it be like if we were?

It's rarely holistic, but just with some sort of stimulus connecting wich each other. Many "normal" people say they like some numbers better and if they are asked why, they might just say that "2 sounds so friendly and 3 is so rude" like they were people. I admit to having some seemingly irrational opinions on what colors should smell, but I am not a real case cos they don't occur to me spontaneously. A person I know is a syn and here's a link to what some stuff seems to her:
http://www.astro.helsinki.fi/~ajlilj...aesthesia.html

Writings on synesthesia, resources and organisations and such:
http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/index.htm

I skip that epsitemoly part right now cos I am tempted to start on lecturing stuff I learned in the philosophy of the mind course and everybody can take a book and read how someone more equipped to debate that than me reviews the current philosophical insights on this, in the light brought by newly developed cognitive sciences.

So what would it be like if we all got that.. whatshallIcallit, talent?

The culture would be really different. I can't think of all the possible ways it would change things, but somehow I think it would be more chaotic what comes to expressing experienced data and getting others to understand what we are feeling or seeing.

I've heard of the condition (without knowing its name) where the person hears 'color'.

It is a fascinating way to explore the way the brain is wired and how the world is percieved.

As to us being wired differently, who can say how it would affect us? The simple truth is we are what we are. I've often wondered what it would be like if we could see different wave lengths of EMR, such as Xrays or Radio waves, or if we could hear much lower or higher than we do.

I suspect if that were the case, we would know that to be "normal" and ponder some other way to experience reality.

yeah...
Being a systems analyst, if this guy was insane, he'd call the customer and say "Your databse back-end is too sweet," or "There's rancid beefsteak in your router."
heh
The fact that he is not insane means he knows other people don't work the same way.

There's a hidden assumption that we make here. We make it many times. We assume the color red, for example, is the same for all people. Things like that aren't the way color perception works. Color perception is one thing that is not defined objectively by wavelengths of light, it is defined subjectively, by an individual's experience of color.
The assumptions we make about "normalcy" are filled with assumptions like this.
This is part of why it is so difficult communicating simple things.
People experience things differently.

The question "What if we were all this way?" may be answered by the statement, "We are already all this way."

We experience our associations - we don't experience definitions.

What this guy experiences is only different from what we experience by a matter of degree.

Lebell:

Yeah, I've thought about those things too, but the thing with syn-people is that everybody have radically different ways of perceiving stuff. Another thing I have always wondered about is what if mind reading was possible. How differently individuals actually think and feel even tough language makes it seem like we can understand people from the same cultural background fairly well.

http://home.swipnet.se/tord/Hawaii/clearwater.jpg
So is the sea (look at it near the horizon) in that pic green or blue? :)

Suvi,

Absolutely.

As to the picture, I can give it a name (blue) and I know what that means. But what does it mean to you? Unless I could look through your eyes (or you through mine) we'll never know. My 'blue' could be your 'pink'.

Art, Hume and Kant had this discussion and they were unable to resolve it. Take it a step farther to the "reasons" things happen. We come up with explanations based on observed behaviors and draw conclusions from our experiences. Some of the "common knowledge" of the 1600s sounds absolutely stupid today. I'm sure quantum physics will be a running joke in 400 years.

Kant actually sort of won it. Hume couldn't answer his last argument sufficiently, but Kant died before the last word was being said in that querrel.

If you really want toknow what it would be like, try some acid. On second thoughts, don't: It's bad for you, but it does/can give you a synaesthetic experience. Allegedly.

In the end, it's all how YOU define it.

LSD is definately a cause of synaesthesia. I would honestly consider trying it in a controlled atmosphere if I knew I wouldn't thoroughally mess myself up.

Even by knowing that others dont experience things the same way that he does, can he ever fully understand our perspective, and can we ever truly understand his? But, as an above poster said, if everyone experienced it we would simply consider hearing w/o tasting an impairment and wonder about it. Does anyone have a specific medical report on this condition, I'd like to know how this happen, what wires would cross in a persons mind to cause this...

I don't know if this is synaesthesia, but whenever I think of simple addition (5+5,6+4,7+3)(most frequently when it equals ten) I sense an image connected with them (6+4 is roundish sort of red) It isn't extremely noticeable, i have to observe it. Multi-sense synaesthesia is quite interesting (been reading about it).

In keeping with what seems like resurrection month for me, I'm posting this from the February 2010 Issue of Scientific American. It's about seeing "impossible colors."

Well then, what does this have to do with synaesthesia?

It would appear that these "impossible colors" add new tones/experiences to the palette of synaesthesiac experience.

I am able to see these colors pretty well. So some of you should be able to see them as well. (See the example below).

OK, first the article excerpts:

"
Key Concepts

Red and green are called opponent colors because people normally cannot see redness and greenness simultaneously in a single color. The same is true for yellow and blue. Researchers have long regarded color opponency to be hardwired in the brain, completely forbidding perception of reddish green or yellowish blue. Under special circumstances, though, people can see the “forbidden” colors, suggesting that color opponency in the brain has a softwired stage that can be disabled. In flickering light, people see a variety of geometric hallucinations with properties suggestive of a geometric opponency that pits concentric circles in opposition to fan shapes.
"

Here's the visual example:

http://www.artelevision.com/images/t...ble_Colors.jpg

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In any event, my overall point for bringing all this to the fore is that once I saw the reddish-green/greenish-red color, I immediately associated it with a particular mental state/feeling I have been experiencing recently and have been quite unable to put into words.

Now I have a color for visualizing/expressing it!

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And in general, regarding synaesthesia - I think there's more of it about these days.

You noticing this, too?

I don't know if synesthesia is becoming more prevalent, or simply more widely known and acknowledged. I suppose one's as good as the other.

Wikipedia is educating the masses, I suspect.

The idea of red/green is interesting; I've never given much thought to impossible colours. I have no immediate association to make, though.

I'd offer that it is becoming more prevalent because, previously, there was no such definition and/or condition to explain such occurrences. Also, the internet culture that has spawned alongside has also helped identify others with this extraordinary capability (wow, you are able to see colors in music too?! i thought I was the only one! How freaky!). I first learned of the varied condition via PBS, then some months later, Discovery hopped on the bandwagon and decided to featured 'Synaesthetes' as well.

Segment of the feature: "Extraordinary people", 2007

Martian - you experience sounds in a more rounded and complete way than most of the rest of us, right? I remember a thread where you described the colours of songs. That might be a bit like the way conversations and concepts swim in my mind as an ever-flowing imagery that is both important and difficult for me to express in visual art.

I think we all swim in seas of sensory overlap. And while we have congenital or experiential differences in how our various senses feed our inner understanding we also have external communication differences where what may appear to be the same language is not the same language - not until we have effectively communicated and understand just what our terms, language and definitions are.

We are a loooong way from dealing with the things our complicated minds form when we go through life. What people have done so far while making manifest our inner worlds reminds me of that conversation about "the things we know, the things we don't know, the things we know we don't know, and the things we don't know we don't know". The understandings of the future and the understandings of the past and the confusions of the present . . . a long swim in a sensory sea indeed.

Any point in this post? Probably not, but it served me to word it out and I tust no one will experience a tasteless, dull, dim ennui while delving into it :thumbsup:

kramus, your point is quite poetic and resonates well with our experience.

"I think we all swim in seas of sensory overlap."

...so true.

That's an interesting question. It's difficult for me to categorize my experiences in a comparative way -- the one thing that I've learned as I discovered more about this is that perception is an entirely subjective thing. Perhaps that sounds self-evident, and yet we all go through life assuming the people around us perceive things exactly how we do. Is my experience of sound more rounded and complete? Or is it simply different?

A sound has a colour and a shape. I accept this as a fact of life. It was relatively recent that I learned that not everyone experiences it.

I can attempt to document and explain, but I doubt that there's any way I can provide a full sense of what I experience. The flip side, is that I don't know what it's like to not have these associations. They've been there as far back as I can remember. An anecdote that I may or may not have related is in regards to the sort of visualization plug-ins that are common on modern media players. I dislike them, because they disagree with what I 'see' when I listen to music. In my early days, before I knew that not everyone was able to 'see' what I could, I thought it was a limitation of the technology. It never occurred to me that it was my own bias.

A more recent anecdote: I recall discussing a Beatles song (Get Back, I think) with Secretmethod70, and suggesting that a cover could improve upon it by imparting a different energy. I could think of no better way to convey this, however, than to suggest that the song ought to be more 'red.'

It's an odd phenomenon. It wouldn't surprise me if it turned out to be far more prevalent than anyone had guessed. How many are there out there who, like I did, simply assume that their experiences are de rigeur? It's normal and mundane for them, and they might very naturally assume that it's normal and mundane for the rest of the world as well.

I also like 'seas of sensory overlap.'

My grandfather would insist that my mother not wear that 'ugly coloured' dress.

It was years later when we realized grandpa did not see the same colors as we did.

The color 'blue' was a dreadful unpleasant color for him.

That might explain his persistent dour daily expression.
I can't imagine what it would be like to intensely dislike the color of the sky,
and the lake.

I see it. I don't inherently associate it with anything, but I do recognize it as distinctly different from normal colors, "unnatural" isn't quite the right way to describe it, but it's the closest thing I can think of to how I perceive it. I have to wonder if this can have a connection to tetrachromacy, and if tetrachromacy can even exist in males, or if I've just trained myself to differentiate colors significantly better than the average person.
Out of curiosity, when you were young, did your parents or teachers ever worry about your unique perception? I've heard horror stories of synaesthetes being misdiagnosed with schizophrenia, especially before synaesthesia was understood by the medical community.

When I look at the picture posted above, I see red, then green, then red again, then green. It's like it keeps changing from one color to the other, with no overlap in between. Is this what I am supposed to see?

I'm not sure all can perceive the new hues discussed in the article...

The two above can be united into a visually overlapping hue which can be seen to drift in and out, initially as a greyed-out red, then as a greyed-green, then slowly they can be seen to merge into something that could be called reddish-green or greenish-red. Those are impossible hues based on color-wave theory.

Duuuude, like my hand, is touching itself!

That's what I thought of for some reason :P

It was easier living inside this closed box when I thought I knew what it was made of.

Okay, a question for anyone who cares to work their mind out. The moderators have left me a message saying that I've never left a post, and that I need to speak up.

If synesthetic connection is essentially arbitrary (being that it varies from person to person, e.g. red may be creamy for some or it may be the note A minor for others), then how could synesthesia be anything other than a neurological mnemonic device?
mnemonic: a device such as a pattern of letters ideas or associations that assists in remembering something.

Also, my sister (a neuroscientist) is studying this phenomenon in the Houston Medical Center at Baylor College of Medicine. She says that there has not been any correlation established between artistic thought and synesthesia... that is to say that a synesthete is no more likely to be an artist than you or me. So if the power of synesthesia is simply a freakish memory boost then would you say that it is advantageous or would you say that it is not advantageous to have synesthesia. I personally feel pretty happy without it. I think that if I had a bunch of arbitrary sensory hangups then I would be impaired as an artist/aesthetician (and artistic expression is what I am working to be great at).

I don't know that anyone ever realized anything was amiss. I certainly don't recall anything ever being made of differences in my perception as compared to that of my peers, which would be why it came to such a surprise to me about a year ago when I discovered it.

It's not something I talk about often. I can think of a handful of instances where I made an off-hand comment that in retrospect was no doubt quite confusing (and it does explain some reactions) but I don't think anyone ever connected the dots. I never thought that I should discuss this in any depth with anyone, because it didn't occur to me at the time that it was unusual.

I don't see how it's a hindrance at all. Art is at it's core a method of translating and relaying perception. It all starts with what you see, hear or feel. The art is in taking those things and putting them into a form that's accessible to others. The mandate of an artist is to reach out and evoke feelings in his or her audience. In that context, a different perception may inform the art, but need not limit it in any way.

Some of the greatest musicians of our time and of history may have been synesthetes, according to my reading. In light of that, I find it difficult to argue that synesthesia hampers artistic expression in any meaningful way.

I suppose you're referring to Wassily Kandinsky and who?

I like you. You taste like peppermint.

synesthesia and art - Google Search

I do think we're all this way to some degree, yes. And that's our common humanity. This is my actual interest in the subject. It does seem to me that the limitations we place upon ourselves as a result of what is called, "adaptation" or "entrainment," cultural bias, and fear eventually separate us from most of our native potential. What remains is often thought of as "sanity" but a reading of human history belies this simplistic notion.

I like to think that, when it does come down to a matter of existential choice (which is very rare, I know) we would choose to be more open to the deeply interconnected nature of all experience.

To resurrect a question for years ago, being outside of the normal range doesn't feel unusual on a personal basis, but it definitely highlights differences when it comes up in conversation. I'm statistically among the tallest 150,000 people in the US, but I'm used to seeing everything from up here so I don't have a constant feeling of being tall, it's just normal. Like I mentioned in a previous post, I have at least trained myself to recognize color differences very well. I can look at a test pattern on a projected image and not only know what's wrong with a signal, but I notice subtle variations in color across each of the bars that most people don't see, even when I point it out.

I also have much better than average hearing; while the normal range is considered 20hz to 20khz, I could hear down to about 12hz and up to almost 22500hz when I was last tested. I hear things that most people simply can't and people sometimes accuse me of imagining things that I can hear distinctly. It comes in handy sometimes but can also be annoying. A few months ago I felt like I was on the verge of a panic attack for what would appear to be no reason were I not able to identify the pulsing 15hz vibrations from a nearby highway construction project. I can hear a TV left on down the hall because of the scream of the flyback transformer (although most young people can hear this.) At such extremes it's almost more of a feeling in my head than a normal sound, but it's just another aspect of what my senses pick up.

I've been fascinated by extension of senses, and I still really want to find a safe way to try the magnetic implants pioneered by Steve Haworth a few years ago Boing Boing: Implant gives artist the sense of "magnetic vision"

i think that it is far more work to impose discreteness on aspects of the sensorum (i like that word and rarely get to use it) than it is to allow them to work in concert. i think most routine embodied cognitive activity (you know, being in the world) is synaesthetic. the separation seems to me a matter of labels and then thinking through the labels, like most separations are. probably useful in some situations. in others really not useful.

it seems to me that language is an extended demonstration of synesthesia---word recognition, associations, etc.
i just realized this is a rephrase of what art posted above.


i see structures and colors when i play piano. i use them as compositional devices. it's normal to me, so i don't really think about it. i'm a little surprised when people tell me that listening is not visual--i tend not to believe them. playing seems to me immersive, so involves lots of sensory input. the hierarchies between types of data is controllable...you can alter it over time by changing your process.

it's just part of being in the world that you can work with and refine or not.

So there we have it...

Somewhere between "Everything is everything" and 'everything is different from everything else,' lies the territory...um...in between.

Since all one's sense organs lead to a single brain, much of this territory must be artificially separated...not by nature but most probably by culture.

That's my current thought, at least.

Yours?

News Flash:

Beautiful colorimeter lets you take snapshots of smells

Researchers at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign have developed a way to compare aromas visually using specially developed inks.

Kenneth Suslick and his colleagues used tiny squares of polymer film that hold 36 drops of carefully designed dyes. These pigments change colour when exposed to various chemicals. The result is a cheap system for detecting very low concentrations of gaseous compounds. The cards can be used like a physicist's radiation dose badge to alert lab workers when they have been exposed to toxic gases.


http://scienceblogs.com/sciencepunk/colorblot.png


As shown above, the cards can be used to give each particular compound a unique fingerprint. This means that the system can also be used to detect subtle differences in complex aromas, such as coffee.


http://scienceblogs.com/sciencepunk/...e%20maps_s.jpg


Suslick's seventeen-year-old son Benjamin carried out the research into coffee aromas, showing how the colorimeters could be used as a quick and reliable way to detect burned or spoiled batches in the food industry.

(from: Beautiful colorimeter lets you take snapshots of smells : SciencePunk)

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Next up:

We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains.


The evidence lies with a group of 54 wine aficionados. Stay with me here. To the untrained ear, the vocabularies that wine tasters use to describe wine may seem pretentious, more reminiscent of a psychologist describing a patient. (“Aggressive complexity, with just a subtle hint of shyness” is something I once heard at a wine-tasting soirée to which I was mistakenly invited—and from which, once picked off the floor rolling with laughter, I was hurriedly escorted out the door).


These words are taken very seriously by the professionals, however. A specific vocabulary exists for white wines and a specific vocabulary for red wines, and the two are never supposed to cross. Given how individually we each perceive any sense, I have often wondered how objective these tasters actually could be. So, apparently, did a group of brain researchers in Europe. They descended upon ground zero of the wine-tasting world, the University of Bordeaux, and asked: “What if we dropped odorless, tasteless red dye into white wines, then gave it to 54 wine-tasting professionals?” With only visual sense altered, how would the enologists now describe their wine? Would their delicate palates see through the ruse, or would their noses be fooled? The answer is “their noses would be fooled.” When the wine tasters encountered the altered whites, every one of them employed the vocabulary of the reds. The visual inputs seemed to trump their other highly trained senses.


Folks in the scientific community had a field day. Professional research papers were published with titles like “The Color of Odors” and “The Nose Smells What the Eye Sees.” That’s about as much frat boy behavior as prestigious brain journals tolerate, and you can almost see the wicked gleam in the researchers’ eyes. Data such as these point to the nuts and bolts of the Brain Rule: Vision trumps all other senses. Visual processing doesn’t just assist in the perception of our world. It dominates the perception of our world.

(from: Brain Rules: We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains.)

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(end of references)
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And so forth...

When discussing the senses, it's important to remember the overwhelming dominance of vision. After that, the other senses fall into place as variations of touch (touch itself; smell -being the touch of molecules upon the olfactory organ, hearing - being the touch of sound waves upon the hearing apparatus, taste - molecules touching the tongue and nose...

Suffice to say, there are several interesting paths to pursue in all of this - right at the limits of current brain/mind research - not the least of which involve quantum effects.


It's always good to remember, as well:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear as it is - infinite”.
- William Blake

On Tetrachromacy

snippet:
Some women are lucky enough to see colors beyond what the rest of us can imagine.

Tetrachromats have four color receptors rather than the regular three, allowing them to see colors the rest of us can’t even dream about. Because of genetic issues, it is impossible that a male could be a tetrochromat, and it is in fact more likely for males to be minus one of the regularcolor receptors, making them functionally colorblind.

A tetrochromat would have another color beyond the standard green, red, and blue trichromats experience, a color somewhere between red and blue, which would allow a tetrachromat to experience millions of extra colors when mixed with other shades.

However, even with an extra color receptor, tetrachromats still do not see colors above or below the regular range of human beings, rather, they see extra colors within the range.

-- info courtesy of scienceray

I suspect that my wife is a tetrachromat, but I can't find a way to test it.

Does she suspect she is, also?

Yes. When we are picking, say, new sheets, she has me pick the colors, because she feels that no one else sees colors the way that she does.

i spent a few hours looking at info on tetrachromacy, and some sources say it can only occur in women, some say it's possible in men. Try this test
X-Rite: Get exactly the color you need, every time, anywhere in the world.

I had one tile off, and I realized it just as I clicked to end the test. What bothers me is that there seems to be a shade of color missing toward the left of the third row, while the other three bars seem alright.

Not sure what it means, but I was off in the blue/green part of the chart by a bit . . . At least I ain't colour blind :thumbsup:

Cool test find, MSD.