by Nathan Natas 18 Replies latest jw friends
I had a very interesting discussion with a genius friend of mine not long ago about the subject of synesthesia. If you have personal or professional experience with synesthesia, drop me a line.
synesthesia - a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualization of a certain color.
I never understood what it is exactly. Does a certain kind of music make everything green or red or yellow? How do the senses actually
mesh?
And while we're at it..... Has anyone ever had a 'near death experience' ? Is it only like an intense dream or 'really real'? Did your senses
work? or not?
metatron
Extremely rarely, I experience an synesthetic effect. If things have been very quiet and I have had a lot of time to acclimate to the silence, and a sudden, startling noise occurs, I will experience it both as noise and as a visual effect that is hard to describe, but is much like bright light flashing (like from a camera flash.) The effect disappears in a fraction of a second.
Biggest feature of Synesthesia which a lot of people forget is that it isn't merely a intellectual feature, it's an actual wire-crossing of the senses.
A person touching a red object might comment that it felt furry to him, and totally mean it. It's a problem when people don't properly respond to stimuli, esp when it comes to communicating facts and experiences.
A couple of artists, including Scriabin the composer and Kandinsky the painter, have been suspected by medical historians of having synesthesia to some degree. This is a little more doubtful in the case of Kandinsky because he was known to belong to a school of art that concerned itself with the idea of vision/sound crossover.
metatron....It's more like, "That kind of music sounds like an orb spinning to the left while flat disks bounce from the bottom, all in a mist of orange and green." Seriously.
My syn is sound -> color/shape/texture, emotion -> color, shape -> color/temperature/personality (the last one only involves the shapes of letters and numbers). On rare occasions I've experienced a reversed color/emotion -> shape. Of these, the letter/number -> color type is the most common. My experiences also range the gamut of associated syn (i.e. one sense evoking another sense) and projective syn (i.e. one sense stimulating actual perception in another). When my syn is projected, I literally see the sounds and colors and shapes quite vividly. But it is fairly rare when it gets really vivid.
I suspect it is not that uncommon...I keep meeting others with it all the time. There are also probably synesthetes out there who have it without really realizing what it is. For instance, I believe people who see auras are probably experiencing projective emotion/temperment/personality -> color synesthesia. Anyway, it is a huge boost to my enjoyment of reading and music...wouldn't want it any other way.
Here is my name the way I see it:
I added motion blur because the letters do blur together like that when they occur within a word. Also, my favorite color is green and it is no coincidence that my name here is dominated by green color. I gravitate toward aesthetically attractive words, names, etc. that emphasize the colors and color combinations I like.
under_believer: I get that effect, too.
Leoleia: Wow. I would love to have that. Does it ever become overwhelming or inconvenient?
How interesting! I've never even heard of this before.
I'd heard of the condition, but I only thought it was something that happened to people who take "certain substances" for recreational purposes.
Leolaia, is there any danger involved in having sensory areas that "interfere" with each other. Or is it just something that people are used to, like colour blindness?
While LSD can temporarily induce symptoms of Synesthesia it's more that possible to have it without use of substances.
I think that many people have certain crossovers between senses in their brain that can temporarily cause them to see music/taste colours but I think part of the criteria to be diagnosed with synesthesia is that your misfiring connections are consistent eg. If the number 11 is always a bright red, if a flat square object always tastes bitter etc
There's nothing dangerous about it that I'm aware of. I had a friend who was diagnosed very late in life with it after reading an article. She had just assumed everyone saw things that way which isn't as strange as it may sound, we all tend to take our perception of the world for granted. It's the age old question of "how do I know that what you call and percieve as the colour red isn't actually what I call and percieve as the coour blue" argument.
It does actually seem to have some benefits. I think their are tales of people with synesthesia having an affinity for maths or particualarly the arts.
Right brain disturbances are fascinating. Neuro psychology for a long time ignored this part of the brain in their studies assuming it to be more primitve than the left. It turned out however to be the part of the brain that deals with how we percieve the world and, as such, any disturbances in it can have fantastical outcomes, many of which neuropsychology has very little understanding of. Try reading Oliver Sacks "The man who mistook his wife for a hat" for excellent and insightful case studies in to some of the strangest cases one particual neuropsychologist encountered over his lengthy career.
