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Colors, sounds, etc. (No OTR)
Rhys wrote:
> i am visually oriented in some ways and colour is a big part of my life. i
> think sounds have color.
>
> ideas have shapes and colors.
>
> i am weird.
Nah, that's not weird. It reminded me of this article from Time.com. (Pasted
below.)
Getting way off topic here, but this was too cool not to share... I associate
sounds with colors and shapes also, but not to this extent. Wish I did... ;)
Anita
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
May 21, 2001
Ah, the Blue Smell of It!
By Unmesh Kher
When Sean Day hears the wail of a saxophone, he sees a writhing mass of
neon-purple snakes hovering in the air. The hum of a harmonica, on the other
hand, has a pleasantly greenish hue, while plunking pianos evoke a fine blue
mist. Eating is colorful too. When Day takes a spoonful of mango sorbet, the
wall before him turns lime green, rippled with cherry-red stripes.
Day is no human kaleidoscope. Nor is the Taiwan-based linguist afflicted with
anything you would call a disorder. He's a synesthete--one of a small group
of otherwise ordinary citizens who perceive the world in extraordinary ways.
Synesthesia is a kind of crossing of sensory signals in which the stimulation
of one sense evokes another; purple may smell like kiwi; the aroma of mint
may feel like glass; letters and digits might scroll by in Technicolor. This
week a few dozen synesthetes and the psychologists who study them will gather
at Princeton University for the first meeting of the American Synesthesia
Association--a society devoted to furthering research into the phenomenon in
the hopes that it will reveal something about the inner workings of the human
mind.
Although the society is new, physicians and scholars have known about the
condition for centuries. History, in fact, teems with brilliant
synesthetes--including such luminaries as novelist Vladimir Nabokov, composer
Franz Liszt and physicist Richard Feynman. Synesthesia enjoyed a certain
spiritual currency in the late 19th century, especially among the European
avant-garde. Many artists, most notably abstract painter Wassily Kandinsky,
were famed for their synesthetic pretensions. "I saw all my colors," wrote
Kandinsky, recalling his experience of a Wagner opera. "Wild lines verging on
the insane formed drawings before my very eyes."
Scientists have only recently begun to unravel the mysteries of synesthesia.
They estimate that roughly 1 in 2,000 people has the condition and that there
are nearly as many types of synesthesia as there are permutations of the
senses. While synesthetic responses are usually as unique as fingerprints,
the condition runs in families. Nabokov, for example, for whom the letter b
evoked the color burnt sienna, and t, pistachio green, often argued with his
equally synesthetic mother about the true colors of the alphabet.
Such revelations are not surprising. When synesthetes are asked to link
letters and words to their corresponding hues, the responses tend to be
precise. (The n Feynman read in his physics equations wasn't just violet; it
was "mildly violet-bluish.") Tested a year later, synesthetes report the same
colors 9 times out of 10; control groups repeat them just a third of the
time.
Brain imaging shows that this consistency has a physical basis. Words
activate not only the language centers of the synesthete's brain--as they
would in anybody else's--but also the vision- and color-processing centers.
What remains open to debate, however, is how intimately the synesthetic
response is tied to consciousness.
Recent studies of synesthetes who see colors in response to numbers and
letters provide conflicting answers. Last year Mike Dixon of the University
of Waterloo reported that merely imagining a number was enough to provoke
synesthesia. And in March Australian researcher Jason Mattingley reported in
Nature that the conscious recognition of a number is crucial to the
generation of color. "You have to be aware of the meaning of what you see to
experience synesthesia," says Dixon.
Not so, say Vilayanur Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard of the University of
California at San Diego. Their studies take advantage of a perceptual quirk:
when an image in the periphery of our visual field is surrounded by similarly
shaped and colored images, the brain has trouble registering its
presence--even though the eye picks it up. They reported at a meeting of the
Vision Sciences Society in Sarasota, Fla., last week that even when
synesthetes can't "see" a peripheral image--say a 5 that's "crowded" by
3s--they see the color associated with the digit in question. That suggests
that synesthesia occurs in the earliest stages of perception--before the
brain ascribes meaning to what the eye reports.
What does all this tell us about the mind? "What you're seeing here is a
window into thought itself," says Ramachandran, who is slated to speak at the
Princeton meeting. "It also gives us an experimental handle to investigate
the neural basis of more elusive phenomena like metaphor." It's a fair bet,
he argues, that synesthesia is caused by genetic mutations that create dense
neural connections between areas of the brain that process sensory
information. Ramachandran hypothesizes that in normal brains, a handful of
these links might play a role in the formulation of metaphors, which often
blend sensory elements of language (consider "sharp cheese" or "bitter
cold"). That, he says, may explain why synesthesia is far more common among
novelists, painters and poets than in the general population. And, perhaps,
why the rest of us, who don't experience the world as synesthetes do, can
still take pleasure in their visions.
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