Synaesthesia
Yesterday I attended a symposium by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics on the subject of Synaesthesia; Seeing the Voices: A multi-disciplinary view of Synaesthesia and Cross-modal Transfers.
Speakers included Roland Posner (TU – Berlin), Daniel Algom (My psychophysics and cogpsy prof.), Gerald C Cupchik (University of Toronto), and others.
It was particularly interesting to see how the subject was approached from different disciplines. As noted in Cupchik’s brilliant presentation, the topic can be studied from an “Enlightenment”, or, rigorous scientific approach, or a “Romantic” holistic-humanities approach.
Not only do these apporaches not interact, they appear to have different goals in mind. As Prof. Algom pointed out, from a Cognitive Psychologist standpoint, “hard” synaesthesia is something to be treated, or resolved. It confounds our ability to focus attention on one modality, we can’t help it, it’s completely out of our control. This has been the traditional approach of medical sciences (at least in the west) as well; That Synaesthetes have a ‘condition’ that should be treated.
The Romantic approach is a bit less judgmental on the subject, but if anything, tends to considers hard Synaesthesia a gift.
Also worth noting, that I call Synaesthetes people with ‘hard’ synaesthesia, because to some lesser degree, we are all synaesthetes.
The medical approach tries to pinpoint the etymology of synaesthesia. Some say that newborns are ‘hard’ synaesthetic , and synaesthetes are simply people who have not ‘outgrown’ this phase.
Other approaches lean to a more mystical view.
Evolution is characterized in emergance of higher and higher complexities. In the example of language, Herder states that the closer the language is the it’s origin, the more primitive it is, the lexicon of such a language contains more cross-modal perceptive adjectives.
Roland Posner suggested a distinction between 4 main types of synaesthesia; stimulus, signifiers, signified, and message (note the Saussurean distinction). For example, there are synaesthetes that get triggered by a certain shape (say a circle), while others would only be triggered by the shape in the context of a signifier – i.e., the letter ‘O’.
Another interesting example, the distinction between number synaesthesia and numeral synaesthesia. Is the synaesthesia triggered by the ‘font’ or by the meaning? For one synaesthete the letters IV in context would be coloured like a ’4′ , for another it would not.
A big part of the day was dedicated to Synaesthetic Metaphors. Some interesting conclusions were that while we don’t seem to prefer sight over sound, there is a definite distinction between the “low” modalities of touch, taste, smell, and the “high” modalites of sight and sound. Metaphors across languages move from low to high. They make more sense to us, they feel more natural. “Bittersweet Symphony” makes sense; “colourful heat” not-so-much.
While on the subject of metaphors, Gerlad Cupchik (who was the best speaker by far) gave me a copy of his paper The ‘Interanimation’ of worlds: Creative Metaphors in Art and Design. Well worth looking it out. He seems an interesting fellow, with work spanning across disciplines (psychology, architecture, semiotic, industrial design, astrophysics, arts, to name a few), in search of the cognitive basis of aesthetics. I, for one, will be looking for more of his work.
I’m hoping to install WordPress real soon. The site might be fucked up for a bit, bare with me.
Tagged as creativity, cross-modeal, Daniel Algom, Gerald Cupchik, metaphors, psychophysics, semiotics, Shay Brog, synaesthesia, synathesia, שי ברוג + Categorized as Art/Culture, Psychology
very good to point out the different approaches AND the different goals.
my synaesthetics
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One of the oldest recorded cases of synethesia is in the Torah: “and the people SAW the thunderings…” at Mt. Sinai. Modern translators “correct it to “heard” but check out the Hebrew…
I couldn’t find it, I don’t suppose you have an exact location?
Speaking of metaphors and the bible, I really this one from Exodus 24:10
One of the few descriptions we get in the bible for God. ‘Kema’ase livnat hasapir’.
The English translations I think are rather lacking, as the phrase should be translated and understood in context, and not atomized word for word.
I’d go for something like “as the act of the saphire’s brightness[?]“
brightness here is my choice for translation. It could be transparancy or maybe shine.
Nice, isn’t it?
i’d translate livnat as reflection, like levanah which is moon which reflects back light from the sun.
a few weeks ago i went to a lecture at the RCA on synaesthesia, and, like everything else at the RCA, is sucked. The cognitive psychologist who came to lecture was an in the closet art historian, and so the whole thing ended up being a pathetic procession of what he called ‘the usual suspects’. He basically provided crappy, speculative and sometimes downright stupid evidence why say Boudlaire was NOT a synaesthet while Nabokov was. Who cares? (I will add that in the spirit of the current British Chauvinism, all of the ‘usual suspects’ happened to be French. The English romantic artists discussed were presented under the Power Point title ‘Metaphors’, thus minimising the shame. I will not go into the subsequent hypothesis about Absynth because it is too lame to tolerate.
What this guy (who is a psychologist at the end of the day) did, was put Synaesthetes in an MRI to scan their brains. So when he read out letters or words, he saw the visual parts of the brain light up. In this he presumably proved they really do see colours when hearing words. However, Walter J. Ong, priest, historian, philosopher etc. wrote in ‘Orality and Literacy’ that ‘literacy tyranically locks words into a visual field forever’. I agree. Once we have learnt reading and writing, no word is totally unassociated with its visual sign. How many times have you tried to recall a name an said ‘it begins with a S’ rather than ‘it rhymes with Goodbye’.
I also had this brain-flash recalling Francios Truffaut in Close Encounters, making hand gestures to translate the sonic/visual language of the aliens into a visual one. La La La La LAAAA.
So, maybe synaesthetes are like this next evolutionary phase. Maybe before writing emerges, there were synaesthetes who connected sounds with forms, and they multiplied until writing emerged. And now, maybe varied wavelngths of colour will be hooked up with varied wavelengths of sound for a New Writing.
I hate the RCA.
oh, i forgot the best bit about the sucky lecture. In the end, I asked him if he had conducted these MRI tests on literates and illiterates (to see if Ong’s idea applies or not). So then he said –
‘yes, there have been experiments conducted in Africa and also in Japan’.
Naturally, Africans and Japanese are well known for their illiteracy, probably on account of them being black and yellow. did the lecturer suffer from RACIST SYNAESTHESIA?
God save the Queeen, because her subjects are moronic turds.
Hahaha, he sounds like a dick. My lecturers where decisively not-dicks. In fact, remind me next time I see you to give you Cupchik’s article to read, I think you’d like it.
It’s funny, I didn’t realize that hard synaesthesia is something that is still needed to be ‘proven’. As far as I know, there’s been ample evidence on the subject for ages. Also, the paradigmatic example of synaesthetes in the arts is Kandinsky, but maybe they haven’t heard of him in England. .?
What Ong says has long since been proven (though recently has been put under questiomn again, but nevermind that) in what is known as the Stroop Effect; A really famous cogpsy experiment where you are shown colour-words in varied-coloured fonts, like say the word RED in all blue. The task is to say as quick as you can the colour of the font. If the colour of the font is incogruent with the word, it interferes with your attention, if it’s congruent with the colour-word, it ‘helps’. We are all in this aspect synaesthetes.
Interestingly enough, as I pointed out earlier, it’s the evolutionary cognitive psychologists POV that synaesthesia is actually an old evolutionary phase. This is speculated based on geneology of language and synaesthetic metaphors, as well as apparent (though unverified) synaesthesia in newborns which they “grow out of”. It’s also speculated that animals are more synaesthetic than us in some respects. It’s as if we evolve in being able to ‘specialize’ or ‘focus’ on one modality.
Of course, the romantic view is pretty much the opposite of this, but, well, I digress.
i think the dickhead suggested Kandinsky wasnt a syn. but who cares.