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Science

New Insights into Synesthesia 368

Posted by michael from the they've-gone-plaid dept.
regs writes "Synesthesia is a pretty interesting phenomenon to experience and even just contemplate. Those kooky scientists are at it again, with new insights into 'hearing smells', 'seeing sounds', and 'tasting colors'. A recent study seems to shed insight into the brain mechanisms involved in synesthesia. Interesting read."
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New Insights into Synesthesia More

New Insights into Synesthesia

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  • LSD (Score:5, Funny)

    by ContemporaryInsanity ( 583611 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @10:54AM (#5852990)
    Why not try it for yourself ?!?
    It makes zebra crossings smell like bananas.
    • Back in high school, when I read the Health textbook, I was always fascinated by the tiny paragraph they gave to LSD, in which it always talked about users seeing flavors and hearing colors. Of course, later in life I never experienced anything close to that, but nonetheless I found it tremendously interesting and couldn't wait to try LSD.

    • Re:LSD (Score:2, Funny)

      by inepom01 ( 525367 )
      ... because you never really know how loud a sunset can be.

    • But seriously: dissociating stimulus/response (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:28AM (#5853290)
      In an earlier incarnation (like a decade or so ago).. well.. as the guy below says, ''drugs are bad, mmmkay?'' But if that statement is true, I'm not sure Shrooms could be classified as drugs.

      Anyway, in that earlier life, over a period of a few months, I did a half dozen massive doses of shrooms. One of the things I remember, is not only this kind of sense-crossing, but a general dissociation of stimulus and response. One of the best examples was the roaring waterfall of flowers that cascaded in front of me. I was enthralled by the colors, the glints of light and shadow, the ability to see inside to event eh cellular and organizmal events on the flowers an dpetals (all of which I at first believed I saw and felt), the scent floating around me (which I also believed I saw as well as smelled). Anyway the interesting part of this is that while I was deeply involved in my overwhelming response to that amazing event, I suddenly realized I was NOT experiencing any of it. I wasnt seeing it, I wasnt smelling it, I wasnt feeling it, but I WAS having a stunningly strong and deep emotional/intellectual response to as set of events I could describe, but hadnt actually experienced.

      Made me wonder at the time if the sense-crossing I experienced was a backwards kind of event. Perhaps the drug had induced emotional/intellectual responses that didnt properly match the stimulus, so my brain supplied the appropriate experience to match that response.
      • It's pretty amazing what happens when you do a little intercranial hacking like this (LSD in my case). The two things that stuck with me the most were
        1) the incredibly vivid details in terms of surface texture - patterns in wood grain, imperfections in polished metal, etc. (let alone a good stucco ceiling), and
        2. visual artifacts from listening to right music at the right time. I could swear that during the solo to Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower", we'd been transported to the bottom of the oce

        • The most amazing single visual (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          was when a Western Fence Swift ( a blue-belly lizard) ran out on a branch over my head. I was pretty much incapable of moving at the moment, and had luckily picked a shady spot to lay down in. Anyway, I was absorbing the extraordinary tecture and color of this lizard on a branch maybe 5 feet over my head, when the lizard pissed. Lizards, for the non-biologists out there, piss uric acid, which is a pasty white substance. Same white stuff that birds piss, which most people mistake for bird poop.

          Anyway, thi

    • Re:LSD (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:30AM (#5853312)
      LSD is dying.

      Oh wait, that's BSD.

    • Re:LSD (Score:3, Informative)

      by arvindn ( 542080 )
      The article makes a mention of it.

      But most have brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and mescaline can produce similar effects)

    • One of the hypotheses forwarded in the article is that a lack of inhibitory neurotransmitter is allowing crosstalk between brain regions that normally don't interact. So, shape representations (as realized in neural hardware) active color representations (which reside nearby in the brain).

      ALSO, it's possible for crosstalk between nearby brain regions that might represent more abstract notions or ideas. So random ideas that don't normally "go together" get simultaneously activated at the same time.

      With o

    • Re:LSD (Score:3, Funny)

      by Master Bait ( 115103 )
      It is a bit sad that so many have 'just said no' to LSD and have never experienced, never fully felt the reality of their place in existence. Never deeply cognited that they're standing on a planet that's evolving
      And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
      That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
      A sun that is the source of all our power.
      The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
      Are moving at a million miles a day
      In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour

      • Then there are people like my father... (Score:4, Funny)

        by cnelzie ( 451984 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @01:31PM (#5854642) Homepage
        That may have never come off of their LSD trip and now live in a scary world filled with a conspiracy theory involving some kind of experiment being performed on him. This happened to him roughly 28 years after taking a few hits...

        Now he sits in a room thinking about the conspiracy against and swears up and down, no matter what is shown to him, that he is posted all over the internet and billboards all over the US. He feels that his old employers are running this experiment and that he still works for them, that everyone that interacts with him is part of this grand conspiracy to see how he would react to having this "experiment" run on him.

        He believes that the events of September 11th were created to see how it would mess him up. He believes that I am involved in the experiment and that I work for something he calls the coporation...

        All I know is that he has sharpened the points on all the screwdrivers in my house, to protect himself when "they" come to end the experiment. I also know that the medication is finally starting to calm him and bring him slightly into reality.

        So all I can say is, "Yay! Way to go LSD!"

        If you have never done LSD, DON'T! You could ruin your mind forever, or put yourself into such a dangerous position that your mind will break one day and everything you hold dear today, will break under the weight of your madness.
        • That may have never come off of their LSD trip and now live in a scary world filled with a conspiracy theory involving some kind of experiment being performed on him. This happened to him roughly 28 years after taking a few hits...

          Of course, there are many people with similar problems who have never taken LSD at all. And most of the people who took LSD 30 years ago aren't any wierder than the general population, well, not a lot wierder. So your proposed cause-and-effect relationship is a wee bit tenuous.
        • That may have never come off of their LSD trip and now live in a scary world filled with a conspiracy theory involving some kind of experiment being performed on him. This happened to him roughly 28 years after taking a few hits...

          Ahh... another victim of the War on Drugs. Forget the 'permanent damage' FUD for a moment and get some competent treatment for your father.

        • Re: 28 years ago, wtf? (Score:4, Insightful)

          by big_pianist ( 563663 ) <big_pianist&gmx,net> on Thursday May 01, 2003 @03:01PM (#5855793)
          Okay. Wait. What?

          I'm probably replying to a very clever troll, and if so I'll have a nice day, but seriously:

          You cannot rightfully blame your father's schizophrenia or psychosis on one or two LSD trips that he had 28 years ago, especially since the disorder came on quickly and from nowhere. People develop schizophrenias and psychoses all the time without a catalyst such as LSD. It just happens, for whatever reason. Hallucinogens and psychotomimetics can be responsible for activating a latent disorder if all the conditions are just right (or just wrong, depending on how you want to see it). But they are not schizotoxins. You have to be fucked up already before these things will work against you. And from that, we get the standard hallucinogenic disclaimer as a corollary:

          "Individuals currently in the midst of emotional or psychological upheaval in their everyday lives should be careful about choosing to use strong psychedelics such as LSD as they can trigger even more difficulty. Also persons with a family history of schizophrenia or early onset mental illness should be extremely careful because LSD is known to trigger latent psychological and mental problems."
          There are plenty of reasons why people become schizophrenic or psychotic. LSD can certainly precipitate these effects but it happens immediately not out of the blue 28 years down the road. LSD may produce a temporary psyschotic state but schizophrenia is completely different from a user's state of mind while tripping. LSD, or any hallucinogen for that matter, does not cause schizophrenia in and of itself. Spreading FUD about a substance, which is relatively benign if used correctly, will not make your father suddenly snap back into reality.

          I feel sorry for your father -- I really do -- but your story does not provide me with ample evidence to accept your conclusion as truth.

          Sorry.

          Ciao

  • whoaa..like, I got an early post..it smells good! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by rol7805 ( 593339 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @10:58AM (#5853026)
    What are the benefits of this besides tripping out? Do blind people learn to see art by smelling it? Do deaf people learn concerts as colors?
    • 'Do deaf people learn concerts as colors?'

      That would be impossible. The person with this disorder can still hear, but their brain is wired so that the impulses from your hearing receptors go to your optic part of the brain. Their for they are interpreted as colors. A deaf person would not be able to hear, so would not be able to transmit the impulses for them to see the concert.

      Although, being able to "see" a concert would be quite interesting. Probably not unlike tripping on acid.
      • I see what you are saying.
      • I'm deaf. You're mistaking "deaf" with "profoundly deaf" or "the total lack of hearing". Even the profoundly deaf can experience a concert through the vibrations in the floors and seats (this obviously won't work for quiet classical music.) but most "deaf" people can hear a range of sounds, and some concerts will be in that range of sounds. They'll hear the sounds as sounds, just as different sounds than the rest of the world. For example, my hearing loss is mostly on lower frequencies--so I'll hear everything at a higher pitch.

        However. My eyes/ears have a closer bond than is normal, because I use my eyes to hear people talking, and to anticipate when and where sounds should occur when I can't hear them as well as I should. This results in funny cross-wirings like "hearing" closed captioning (I can never remember closed captioning, I always remember that I "heard" a TV show, even though that's an impossibility. I also "see" sounds. Like I'll be listening to a song, and later I'll remember it as colors and things, rather than as tunes or sounds. And when I take out one of my hearing aids and leave the other one in, I have difficulty seeing out of the eye on the side of the hearing aid I took out. If I take both out, I can see fine. When I take off my glasses, sound gets "quieter"--because part of my perception of sound is "a sound should be there because I'm seeing an action that should result in sound".

        -Sara

      • 'Do deaf people learn concerts as colors?'

        That would be impossible. The person with this disorder can still hear, but their brain is wired so that the impulses from your hearing receptors go to your optic part of the brain. Their for they are interpreted as colors. A deaf person would not be able to hear, so would not be able to transmit the impulses for them to see the concert.

        Yeah. If I understand correctly, and assuming the article authors are correct, synesthesia takes place when sensory information

      • Yes, but would a deaf person be able to hear colors and such?
    • It makes learning some things difficult, but it can also make learning other things easier via association. For example, certain numbers have always had an associated color with me, (and no, they don't correlate with the little plastic refridgerator magnets we all had as kids). Learning those numbers was easy for me, but I remember that basic math came easy while more advanced math was confusing at first because the results did not always correlate with the "right" color.

    • rol7805 writes:
      " What are the benefits of this besides tripping out? Do blind people learn to see art by smelling it? Do deaf people learn concerts as colors?"

      Well ...what if you could?

      We make connections between things and these connections seem obvious. We "smell" watermellon and we know there is some around. If this makes sense then why would "hearing" watermellon -- assuming you could -- be any less valid (assuming the connection had some basis in fact and not merely random).

      In other words, why mus

    • A synaesthesiac talks about the benefits (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Interrobang ( 245315 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:31AM (#5853316) Journal
      Well, speaking as a synaesthesiac, there are benefits, but they mostly manifest as an aid to recall. I mean, if you can remember that that piece of music looks like a black background shot through with gold and red threads -- and you know enough about music theory -- you can reconstruct the song by ear without having heard it recently. That's just one example of something you can do with synaesthesiac inputs.

      However, I absolutely guaranfuckingtee you can't use it for "tripping out." It doesn't work like that. It's completely not like being on drugs at all, as far as I understand it (I've never done hallucinogens). It is, however, kind of like peripheral vision: It's not really there 100% but it can come in handy sometimes.

      I mean, you people seem to think it's like this constant, centre-of-attention thing at all times, which it's really not. The people in the article say the same thing as I'm saying, too. To make another clumsy metaphor, which is about as well as a synaesthesiac can describe it to a non-synaesthesiac, it's sort of like a supplementary sensory background process. You can foreground it if you want to, usually temporarily, but most of the time, you don't even really notice it's there. For us, it's really quite ordinary, sort of like "normal people's" sensory inputs are to them.
      • Green, green is like a humming sound.

        The best way to explain it, i think, to someone who doesn't get it is to explain how when someone says 'pair' you can call up the definition 'pear' and know that it isn't accurate- but that it's there. The sound associates with two simultaneous meanings. However, unlike words, the unnecessary definition doesn't go away again once it's been dismissed- it hangs around, making things a little surreal.

        I don't know. I'm just surprised to find another description- you're right, it can foreground but mostly it's just there in the back. It just calls up more sensations than are usually called up. I think the best time it's ever come in handy is when i'm designing jewelry, because the aesthetics that work out together for me tend to strike other people as pleasing, too, even though i know we're perceiving in totally different languages. (pale green fluorite is chalky and salty, silver is more like water, and feldspars tend to be in A minor and squishy.)

        But as a musician, i can't reverse those to hear an A minor and think feldspar. And most of the time i don't notice, it's normal, it's a sort of cloudy way to think of/ perceive things. Nebulous. A lot like my brain chemistry, i guess...

        sol

        • Green is kind of crackly to me. Violas are red, or at least they make red notes.

          See, silly drug people, even synaesthesiacs don't agree on sensations! It's not consistent, and you can't really use it for much. Even if you had it, you might not know what to do with it.

  • I chose the wrong career. (Score:5, Funny)

    by checkyoulater ( 246565 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:00AM (#5853053) Journal
    You mean I could have kept on doing Mushrooms and actually have gotten paid for it? And in the process do meaningful research? That is so not fair.

  • Interesting tidbit (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Matey-O ( 518004 ) <michaeljohnmiller@mSPAMsSPAMnSPAM.com> on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:04AM (#5853086) Homepage Journal
    I noticed when my 3 month old boys were talking, they'd wave their hands alot. One of my cow-orkers stated that at that point in development, both the vocalization and the movement were being handled by the same part of the brain.

    The point? Two disparate tasks are being run by the same ciruitry, so Synesthesia may just be another manefestation of a similar behavior.

  • Sega's Rez for the PS2 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Cutriss ( 262920 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:04AM (#5853089) Homepage
    Rez is an excellent demonstration of synesthesia. It's basically a track-shooter, but set to low-level trance music, and your actions in the world (enemies shot down, powerups gained, progress made) determine how the music is played, and what visual effects are presented.

    The experience is really hard to quantify, but you have to sit down with it for a while to realize just how interesting it is.

    The game is out of print, but you owe it to yourself to give it a shot if you know a friend with it. It was released on the Dreamcast in Japan and the EU, and later, an enhanced version for the PS2 was released for all three territories.

  • So then (Score:5, Interesting)

    by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:04AM (#5853093) Homepage Journal
    How long before we can turn this on "at will" and then switch it back off again on the same terms? LSD (and related compounds) are unreliable at best, we need a way to fool the brain into sending new chemical messages on a regular basis, and not realizing that they are wrong and "solving the problem" at another layer of the brain. (After all, as we all know, you can fix hardware with software, or software with hardware, in some cases, and the brain is really quite good at it.)

    Just imagine how handy it would be if musical notes were color-coded. Learning to play an instrument would be a snap. You'd never have to wonder if you were in the right place for a chord, for example. The implications of color-coding digits surely need no description for those who perform their own accounting tasks. And of course, color-coding letters would be handy, especially when typing in those Microsoft product keys...

    • This is a bad post!

      I am going to start taking LSD to learn faster!

      Seriously, this is going to mean trouble for me, and you are to blame.

      But dude, it would actually help if it really worked that way.
    • Synaesthesia isn't reliable, and it isn't necessarily consistent, either. How do I know? I have it. Really. I don't have the graphemes-as-colours thing as is described in the article (and analysed in detail) -- thank goodness! -- but I certainly do have the music-as-colours perception, as well as smells-as-colours, and sometimes even music-as-smells/tastes. Sometimes even tactile sensations manifest as colours, smells, or tastes, or sometimes even sounds.

      Synaesthesia is pretty complicated and unrelia

      • Actually, in some ways, it probably is like drugs, whether you know it or not. Disclaimer: I have never taken LSD, nor do I experience synaesthesia. However, the article says that the mechanism may be "crosswiring" - the unusual interconnection of neurons - or unusual behavior on the part of the transmission or reception of chemical messages. Either way, signals within the brain gain either more or less relevance than they should to neighboring regions.

        LSD ostensibly operates by making messages between

        • Probably not (Score:3, Informative)

          by Interrobang ( 245315 )
          As I understand it, hallucinogens give you an overwhelming sense of the realness of the hallucinations, whether or not you know (at the time) that they're "really real" or not, and it's not like you can say, "Ok, I'm just not going to see that right now." Synaesthesia manifests much more like peripheral vision: It's kind of there, kind of not. It's not like you're seeing visions and rainbows and colours. As one of the interviewees in the article put it, they're "Martian colours," even to those of us who

    • Re:So then (Score:3, Interesting)

      by jdavidb ( 449077 )

      And of course, color-coding letters would be handy, especially when typing in those Microsoft product keys...

      I actually had a good friend, complete geek, with synesthesia who could do this. For years he said numbers were colors. Give him a long sequence of characters, and he could rattle it off, days later. He used it for Microsoft keys on multiple occasions.

    • Re:So then (Score:2, Interesting)

      by asparagirl ( 69545 )
      "Just imagine how handy it would be if musical notes were color-coded. Learning to play an instrument would be a snap. You'd never have to wonder if you were in the right place for a chord, for example."

      In college, I was in a sketch comedy group that also did some musical bits (parodies and the like). Our musical director one year had synthaesia, probably since birth. It had helped her learn to play the piano and, more usefully, meant that she could more easily tell all of us when we were (not) in tune

  • Metaphor and maths (Score:3, Informative)

    by itchyfidget ( 581616 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:07AM (#5853120) Journal
    What's really interesting about this story (IMO) is that the angular gyrus (the area of the brain implicated by the study as being involved in metaphor) is also involved in basic mathematical functions such as addition/subtraction/multiplication, etc. Injury to this part of the brain can result in loss of mathematical ability (sometimes even specifically, eg. retention of multiplication but loss of the ability to subtract)

    What would be really interesting would be if they can find a patient or two who *used* to have synaesthesia but then suffered a stroke (or other, similar brain injury) to either the colour area in primary visual cortex (V4?), or to the angular gyrys, and now can no longer 'feel' colour...
    • That's pretty interesting. When I was a kid, I had synaesthesia, and now that I look back on it, it started to go away about the time I had a series of head injuries...

      Of course, I am a data point of one, so I can't draw a causal relationship. I recall reading that sometimes synaethesia is more common in kids, and goes away as they get older as well.
  • Everytime I see a girl walk by I feel a tingle in my crotch!

  • Synthesia Perfect Pitch (tm) (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stratjakt ( 596332 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:10AM (#5853151) Journal
    If you read any musicians mag, you'll see these full page ads for this Perfect Pitch system, which claims to make you be able to identify notes perfectly, and then play by ear and etc etc.

    Apparently it works by you repetitively linking a note with a color, until you hear the colors. An A flat is a red, and a C# is a blue, and so on. So you can hear music as a sequence of colors and makes you super crazy talented.

    It's probably just a scam. But I guess it's got a pseudo-scientific base to the scam.
    • Is it legal for them to be selling LSD?

      Cuz, I would like to buy some.

    • Perfect Pitch can be trained (Score:4, Interesting)

      by 0x00000dcc ( 614432 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @12:48PM (#5854079) Journal
      Apparently it works by you repetitively linking a note with a color, until you hear the colors. An A flat is a red, and a C# is a blue, and so on. So you can hear music as a sequence of colors and makes you super crazy talented.

      Ok so the title of this post is an eye grabber, I don't really know whether it's true or not. But I think the data points towards it being possible. Why do you say? Well, I kinda did an undergraduate thesis on it. Let me know if you want to see the paper.

      Basically the theory is this: There are those who are born with perfect pitch or at least develop it VERY early in life, and then those who LEARN it later on. Are these two different mechanisms, then? Not necessarily. It's just that those with early "prodigy" perfect pitch have an extremely quick learning curve for discerning between tones. Why? Memory. They have a "permanent" set of tones to which they compare notes to in their head. For example, I play an F# on the piano, the person with absolute, or perfect pitch, compares it, knows what it is, and then can tell you without looking at the piano that it is indeed an F#.

      So how on earth can you "learn" it? It's all in the comparison. Music students may be able to more "permanently" obtain these notes in their minds by frequent exposure / practice in relative pitch excercises. Some are faster that others, and this would explain the ones who have absolute pitch early on.

      There is so much more on this, but that's at least where the data is pointing, and there is probably a LOT more research out there since my undergrad thesis (1996). Interestingly, I originally got interested in this because my roommate in college [loyno.edu] was Jason Marsalis, [amazon.com] brother of Brandford and Wynton Marsalis, and he has perfect pitch (apparently from birth).

  • Sad (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Strange Ranger ( 454494 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:13AM (#5853173)
    > most have brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and mescaline can produce similar effects) or a mere curiosity.

    Yes, God forbid somebody actually do legitimate modern research on psychoactive compounds. ("Shut up you hippie, it's just an artifact of drug abuse")

    The attitude of the scientific community with respect to this is pathetic. A community eager to create designer genes and programmable microbes, experiment with cloning, etc, etc, (with REAL moral and legal implications) brushes off what just might be a set of keys to some very interesting knowledge. Why? Because it's taboo? Because 30 odd years ago we learned all there is to learn? Shame on "Modern Science".
    • The attitude of the scientific community with respect to this is pathetic

      There are lots of scientists who would love to do research on drugs. They A: Can't get funding, B: Will goto jail because it's illegal.

      If you want to bash people atleast bash the real villans -- a government bent on destroying "drugs" when their definition of drugs is largely arbitrary and racist.

      • Re:Sad (Score:3, Interesting)

        by forkboy ( 8644 )
        You actually can get a DEA waiver to do drug research, but you have to play the game and imply that you're trying to demonstrate the harm in taking a particular drug, not that you're trying to show that it has benefits that can outweigh the risks. (or has little risk for that matter..*cough* THC *cough*) We actually have a DEA license at my school for possession of narcotics, but it's mostly just so the criminalistics students can screw around with identification techniques so that they too can show the w
    • Regardless of how one may feel about the recreational use of psychedelics, there is an enormous amount of knowledge that can be gained from the study of their effects on the human brain, and the mechanisms that cause them.

      How is it scientific to study synesthaesia, identify compounds that can possibly induce it, and then refuse to dig further in the connection between the two?

  • Juvenile onset synaesthesia! (Score:4, Funny)

    by mlush ( 620447 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:13AM (#5853179)

    My son (4) has sight/taste synaesthesia, he able to take one look at a plate of food and declare

    I don't like It!

  • VS Ramachandran (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jodrell ( 191685 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:16AM (#5853196) Homepage
    One of the authors, VS Ramachandran, gave this year's Reith lectures [bbc.co.uk] on the subject of Neuroscience. You can read or listen to the lectures on the Beeb's website. Well worth taking a look at. Some of it is absolutely fascinating.

    • Re:VS Ramachandran (Score:2, Informative)

      by heidkamp ( 653609 )
      VS Ramachandran also wrote a book called "Phantoms of the Brain" which is in many ways similar to the article. What is impressive about his work is how low-tech and amazingly simple some of the experiements are. For example, the 2's and 5's experiment basically proves that this is a real phenomena, and can literally be done with things you find around the house (or even a pre-school classroom).

      In "Phantoms in the Brain" he explores phantom limbs as mechanism to explore the brain, much as he synesthesia

  • It's an oldie... (Score:3, Funny)

    by aeolist ( 302023 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:24AM (#5853255)
    This synesthesia sounds like a pain in the butt
  • I think I must have borderline synesthesia or borderline dysliexia...I've always had a strong association with certain numbers with certain letters, and it goes back a while, I found where when I was young I spelled "kirk" as "ki4k"--I think because of the r sound in "four". And 5 is linked to f, again because of the sound (so when I saw a promotional poster for "The Fifth Element" that said "it mu5t be found" I was confused... "muft?")

    I wonder what kind of condition this is. It's not a big deal, rarely i
  • and phantom limb...

    OKe. Let me start by saying that i have physical sensation synesthesia more than any other kind, in which one physical sensation can evoke other physical sensations- even in other limbs. It's quite peculiar, really, and very real. In my case, it's because i have a neurotransmitter disorder which makes certain physical sensations- especially pain- transcend the normal 'map' of the body in the brain. Overflow of chemicals, for the most part, coupled with a hyped up sensation system to start with (I've got extra pain centers and have a lot of Restless Limb Syndrome as well.)

    For those really interested in how this stuff happens, i would suggest starting out with ramachandran's phantoms in the Brain which is about phantom limb syndrome, and brain mapping in general- it's really very good, and explains a great number of things, from how to cure phantom limb syndrome (trick the brain into trying to use the signal paths that it still has mapped out) to sympathy pain (how your brain can identify with other things- even a wooden table- to the point where it perceives things happening to someone whom you love as also happening to you. It doesn't talk much about synesthesia, but can help give the basics as to how the brain's architecture works for this to happen.

    In my case, i can say this: it makes things bizarre. The sensation of pulling a hair out of, say, my arm, can cause sensations of it happening in other places, and it can also induce completely other sensations. I went through a job interview once- one of the interviews for my current job, in fact- with the distinct sensation that my right arm was burning. It left temporary redness as my body attempted to respond to what it thought was happening- but the arm was fine. And tastes can sometimes cause very bizarre reactions, too. sound very seldom does, but colours and tastes tend to get connected. When i see colours they have flavours attached sometimes. And i know they aren't things that i'm tasting, but the brain goes, mmm- turkey, and it's irrevocably linked to a sort of light cyan colour. Every time i see it there's the sense of roast turkey.

    Most people experience some form of synesthesia at some point in their lives. a lot of people, for example, report that when a cat licks their hand, it will make a tingling or prickling somewhere else, like along their hip? That's not just parasthesia, which is usually related to nerve damage- it's a sensation actively invoking another sensation in another area.

    From my point of view, it's just the world. Many things- types of rock or surface texture, for example, come up with food textures or physical body experiences in my brain. It's like having one word call up two simultaneous definitions, and one of them is real and the other one is just happening along with it. (Amethysts are crisp, like cucumbers. Marble is sleepy.) It doesn't make me sleepy, i don't go chewing up jewelry. These are just... simultaneous experiences. And they are common, but not nearly as common as when i bump my knee and my arm hurts, or as when my ears get cold and it makes my tongue tingle. And yes, i've tried to find ways to have fun with it, and no, there aren't many, it's just too weird (i have only had the neurotransmitter problems for a couple of years, so it's been extremely weird to get used to.)

    Just thought i'd share some perspective from a synesthete's (admittedly bizarre and multi-layered) point of view. Bubbles in soda on my tongue make my back tickle. Dark blue- really dark blue, the kind you get when mixing cobalt with coal black- is kinda like hot fudge, rich and with texture. I think it tends to be tastes with colours just because that's where the overlaps happen. I'm not sure. i know the physical stuff tends to be more predictable, for me. Hell was when i went in to have EMG tests run- you don't need to feel electric current in more than one limb at a time, thankyouverymuch!!! (In soviet russia, the current swims through YOU!)

    It's a pecu

  • I bet this could revolutionize... (Score:3, Funny)

    by LordDartan ( 8373 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:37AM (#5853366)
    the internet pr0n industry. Instead of just seeing it, you can feel your pr0n too.

    Think about it, you know you wanna try it ;)

  • The Mind of a Mnemonist (Score:3, Informative)

    by InfinityEdge ( 9122 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:39AM (#5853396)

    One of the more famous case studies amongst brain interested researchers. The Mind of a Mnemonist by Aleksandr R. Luria [amazon.com] tracks someone who has significant Synesthesia and is able to leverage that to remember ANYTHING for ANY period of time. He wound up using this great power as a sidshow act.

  • Here's how they did it (Score:3, Informative)

    by arvindn ( 542080 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:41AM (#5853419) Homepage Journal
    For those too lazy to RTFA, here's (my understanding of) how they proved beyond doubt that synesthetes are not just being metaphorical in reporting correlation between the senses:

    If you have a grid of dots, most of which are red but a few are green, you can instantly detect the shape formed by the green dots. However, if you are shown a grid of tiles, most of which are marked '5' but a few are marked '2', you can't detect the shape formed by the 2s without careful observation. The subjects were shown the latter kind of grid, and they performed as well as normal people would on the former kind, showing that their perception of color in numbers enabled them to detect the shape.

    Clever.

  • Implications..... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by watzinaneihm ( 627119 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @11:42AM (#5853430) Journal
    From the article
    Consider two drawings, originally designed by psychologist Wolfgang Köhler. One looks like an inkblot and the other, a jagged piece of shattered glass. When we ask, "Which of these is a 'bouba,' and which is a 'kiki'?" 98 percent of people pick the inkblot as a bouba and the other one as a kiki. Perhaps that is because the gentle curves of the amoebalike figure metaphorically mimic the gentle undulations of the sound "bouba" as represented in the hearing centers in the brain as well as the gradual inflection of the lips as they produce the curved "boo-baa" sound. In contrast, the waveform of the sound "kiki" and the sharp inflection of the tongue on the palate mimic the sudden changes in the jagged visual shape. The only thing these two kiki features have in common is the abstract property of jaggedness that is extracted somewhere in the vicinity of the TPO, probably in the angular gyrus
    German language is rather guttural and so is arabic... Does this mean that they necessarily percieve the world a as a sharp not so friendly place? And chinese and italians should really love it , the languages have no sharp edges at all!!
    The comment was supposed to be funny.I have nothing against Germans, Arabs ,Chinese or Italians or for that matter against member of any country .

    • Re:Implications..... (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Have Blue ( 616 )
      I believe I saw a study somewhere on the effect of language on perception (it was described as disproving Orwell's ideas about newspeak, but it applies here as well). It turns out that the primitive languages used by various aboriginal tribes contain far fewer color names than most other languages (just "light" and "dark" as opposed to "red", "blue", "burnt sienna", "a sort of orange-blue", etc). However, their eyes and vision centers are just as capable of distinguishing betwee any two colors as speakers o
  • From the sounds of it, this is the early stages of research which might benefit UI design at some point (though maybe not very soon.)

    The article mentions near the end that most people experience this to a degree. Think about it, we do this all the time. Sharp cheese, hot women, ec. It's so much a part of our lexicon that we don't even realize it at a concious level.

    Anyhow, if most people can experience this to a degree, would there be advantages to displaying and interacting with data in a similar way?
  • I bet cheezy mass-market pop music would taste like chicken. It all sounds pretty much like a blank mash of other music styles. If that doesn't define the taste of chicken I don't know what else does....

    What other music style/taste treat combinations can we come up with?

  • Color-blind synesthetes see colors in numbers (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Thagg ( 9904 ) <thadbeier@gmail.com> on Thursday May 01, 2003 @12:15PM (#5853724) Journal
    One shocking result of the synesthesia research reported in Scientific American this month is that a color-blind person who saw numbers as colors, saw colors that he couldn't actually visually see. This happens because in typical red-green colorblindness, the problem is with the pigments in the eye -- the brain processing areas for color still work just fine. So this person was seeing real colors from the brain crosstalk stimulating those color processing regions.

    Charmingly, he called them 'martian colors', as they didn't correspond to anything in his real life.

    thad
  • trust me, you do *not* want to know what a copy-protected RIAA CD smells like ;)

  • In the immortal words of Ray Stantz... (Score:3, Funny)

    by tomzyk ( 158497 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @12:29PM (#5853844) Journal
    "Listen! ... Do you smell something?"

  • Obligatory Simpsons Quote (Score:4, Funny)

    by YetAnotherName ( 168064 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @12:43PM (#5854031) Homepage
    "I can see the music!" --Lisa Simpson, Selma's Choice [snpp.com].
  • After light reflected from a scene hits the cones (color receptors) in the eye, neural signals from the retina travel to area 17, in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain.

    And let me guess, conspiracy theorists and UFO-ophiles have a highly developed Area 51, right?
  • There is an excelent lecture discussing synesthesia here [bbc.co.uk]. It was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 a few weeks ago. I really recommend listening to it.

    Jonathan

  • Synesthesia != LSD (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 01, 2003 @01:48PM (#5854910)
    It's funny how so many people who have never taken hallucinogens or experienced synesthesia are so eager to put in their $.02 on this thread. Well, I've done both. In a time when I was younger and more reckless, I did LSD. Frequently. In fact, I'd say I used it roughly once per week for a year. I've also experienced synesthesia since I was very young.

    Everybody is eager to draw comparisons between these two things because the descriptions that they hear of the two things sound similar. Unfortunately, 95% of the descriptions you hear are misleading.

    It's probably worst on the LSD side. So much of what you hear is urban myth, exaggeration, or just crap that people have made up while lying about having taken the drug. The giant pink elephants, spiders, and headless bodies in the closet just don't happen. It's hard to describe what does happen when you take LSD and it's probably not as interesting to listen to. Here is a list of effects, at least some of which one can typically expect from a trip:

    1) Things may confuse you that ordinarily wouldn't
    2) You may lose all ability to keep track of time
    3) Things may make perfect sense that later turn out to be nonsensical rubbish
    4) You may have visual hallucinations that involve the shapes of the objects you're viewing distorting. (It is _very_ unlikely you will see something that isn't actually there)
    5) You may see patterns (that don't actually exist) in randomly dispersed objects such as threads of carpet or the black and white dots of a TV screen tuned to a channel with no broadcast
    6) You may see tracers following moving objects
    7) You may see halos around light sources
    8) Things you hear will distort in time/frequency/volume or possibly have an echo that isn't actually there
    9) Being touched in one place may cause a similar sensation in another place or the sensation may have "echoes" that move around a little
    10) You may have hot flashes and/or chills
    11) You may sweat profusely
    12) You may be fighting down paranoia for a good portion of the experience
    13) You may experience synesthesia but not the normal kind
    14) You may experience unexplained mood swings

    I think these are the bulk of the effects that my friends and I experienced in our LSD-using days. However, there is an additional component to a trip that isn't easily described. There is a portion of the experience that you lose as soon as you sober up. It's a bit like waking up from a dream. You just can't quite wrap your brain around some of the details concerning how you felt and why you thought some of the things you thought. It's difficult to describe.

    Synesthesia is also very hard to describe. You can say you "see" the number three as red but you're not really seeing red with your eyes. It's more of an internal thing. It's almost like there's a copy of the three inside your head that's red and that copy kind of overlays itself on the three you're seeing. It's like it's there but it's not. Words really don't accurately describe it. You just have to experience it to understand. I actually have fairly weak synesthesia when it comes to numbers. It's a little stronger for me with words, especially people's names. However, the biggest area where I constantly experience it is audio bleeding into other senses.

    From my experience, the synesthesia I've experienced from LSD feels, very different from what I normally experience. For me, on LSD, synesthesia was more like you'd expect it to be from reading the descriptions but it came it short bursts. For example if I were to catch a number three out of the corner of my eye, it would legitimately appear green no matter what color it was. When I would then turn back to look at it, I would see it in its normal color. If somebody were to poke me with a stick in my arm, I would completely feel it in my calf, 100% as if they had poked me there but then the sensation would rapidly snap back to my arm. I dunno, all this stuff is hard to describe.

    Even reading my own descriptions I don't feel like I've gotten it quite right and I've been there. All the speculation from people whom have experienced neither is worthless.

  • Does this count? (Score:3)

    by clambake ( 37702 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @02:58PM (#5855764) Homepage
    I see ordered sets as all having a specifig color scheme. Like, for example, all 4's are yellow and all 3's are green. The letter J is blue and the letter M is red. And when they get combined together, they form different colors based on some rules that I can't define, but somehow know (19 is black and 76 is blue but 1976 is always blue, 1796, however, would be yellow while 1679 would be blue again, etc.) and those colors and color combinations do not change (I had a friend ask me what "color" a random number was, and then wait a few months and ask me again, and it was the same, even though I had forgotten what I originally said.)

    This happens with any kind of set that has a specific order to them. If you just pull 10 random shapes out of the wood-work they would not have any colors, but if you said to me that they all go in order from shape1 to shape10 then I would suddenly begin to see them as colors.

  • Logo Design (Score:4, Interesting)

    by superflippy ( 442879 ) on Thursday May 01, 2003 @03:57PM (#5856507) Homepage Journal
    I thought the article provided some insight into logo design, and why some logos seem to "work" or "fit" and others don't. I.e., our brains are wired to match certain shapes with certain sounds and concepts.

    I design logos as part of my job, and so when I see a particularly good or clever one I try to analyze it and see what makes it work. The idea of synesthesia gives me another angle to consider.

  • My personal experience (and NO drugs here) (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SamBC ( 600988 ) <s.barnett-cormack@lancaster.ac.uk> on Thursday May 01, 2003 @08:02PM (#5858674)
    I experience synesthesia myself, although it is relatively benign and it was only when other people told me they did not have similar sensory perception that I realised it was not universal, or even common.

    I get very vivid colour perception from tastes and smells. I mean very vivid. And the colours by no means often match the visible colour of the food/drink/whatever. Sometimes they do, especailly for strong, pure, natural flavours. For example, oranges test a slightly orange-tinged yellow. Apples tend to be red, even when the skin is green. Meats tend to be a kind of mucky swirl. It's very odd.

    But I can attest that these perceptions are very real.

    And I have never taken any hallucinogens.

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