Synaesthesia - crossovers in the senses

[AnonKat]

I wonder what everybodies toughts are on this subject

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/nov/19/synaesthesia-cross-overs-senses

Synaesthesia - crossovers in the senses

Nabokov experienced colour with each sound, Kandinsky heard music with a splash of paint, both had synaesthesia, a rare neurological condition which causes the senses to intertwine

'LSD Art' on the cover of Life magazine
Synaesthesia, the neurological condition in which one sense automatically evokes another; so sounds have colour, and tastes have texture and so on can also be induced by LSD. Photograph: Yale Joel/Time & Life/Getty

The Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman reported seeing equations in colour. The artist Wassily Kandinsky tried to re-create the visual equivalent of a symphony in each of his paintings. And Vladimir Nabokov wrote, "One hears a sound but recollects a hue, invisible the hands that touch your heartstrings. / Not music the reverberations within; they are of light. / Sounds that are colored, and enigmatic sonnet addressed to you."

All had synaesthesia, a harmless neurological condition in which activity in one sensory modality, such as vision or hearing, evokes automatic and involuntary perceptual experiences in another, due to increased cross-talk between the sensory pathways in the brain.

"It's generally agreed that there's cross-activation, so that activity in sensory area A will activate area B," says David Eagleman of the Baylor College of Medicine, "but we don't know whether it's due to a difference in wiring or in the chemical cocktail." Eagleman chaired a symposium at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in San Diego earlier this week, in which he and others presented the latest findings about the condition.

Once thought to be extremely rare, synaesthesia is now believed to affect between 1 and 4% of the population. Several years ago, Eagleman and his colleagues set up a website, containing a battery of tests to objectively verify synaesthetic experiences, and to date more that 9,000 synaesthetes have registered on the site.

Self-reports on the website

 

[Lermanet_com]

Only thing Ive noticed like this is while meditating, but awake, I sometimes see a flash of white behind my eyelids when I hear a sound that disturbs me.

 

[He-man]

I wonder what everybodies toughts are on this subject

Talk about completely redefining life.

It must be very hard to live with Synaesthesia if one sence triggers another.
I wouldn't want to have that experience although I suppose if you had it from birth the individual would likely be used to it.

Or the individual would have constant senory overload.

 

[Techless]

Synesthesia = A fantastic CD by Peter Himmelman !! (circa mid 80s)




But Yeah - I have had this sort of thing happening a various times for most of my life - It get weirder with age!

 

[Dulloldfart]

I wonder what everybodies toughts are on this subject

Dunno about it being "rare." I remember a marvellous LSD trip I had while at university (1970) when sights and sounds were disrelated: I noted them as perceptions and appreciated them as such, but the usual association between one and the other just wasn't there. So I would look at someone speaking, and hear their words, but it was two separate sets of perceptions. It's a bit like what happens when playing a video of a movie and the audio and video are a bit out-of-sync as sometimes happens, except at this time one didn't continuously lag the other.

"Hearing colours" and the like are common LSD experiences, I seem to remember.

Paul

 

[secretiveoldfag]

I associate numbers (from 0 to 9) with colours. Red numbers are a bit uncertain but I've been getting the same results (including the uncertainty) since at least 2000. Probably all my life.

0 is white
1 is pale grey
2 is pale blue
3 is bright red
4 is yellow
5 is reddish brown
6 is dark blue
7 is dark green
8 is dark red
9 is black

Pythagoras had something similar but had no zero (not invented yet)
1 was white
2 was blue
3 was red
4 was yellow
5 was pale blue
6 was purple
7 was orange
8 was green
9 was black.

 

[AnonKat]

Only thing Ive noticed like this is while meditating, but awake, I sometimes see a flash of white behind my eyelids when I hear a sound that disturbs me.

Ditto when I am doing Yogha

 

[Sindy]

Synesthesia = A fantastic CD by Peter Himmelman !! (circa mid 80s)




But Yeah - I have had this sort of thing happening a various times for most of my life - It get weirder with age!

So hilarious! I was just going to post this and then thank you

http://www.whosdatedwho.com/tpx_38761/peter-himmelman/tpx_9199209

My favorite Peter Himmelman song

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2MCxXvLd3M&list=PL7CWpbHKn8osna58Kt5RnJf9Z3ax5sdxH

The guy's a genius.

 

[degraded being]

When I first got an mp3 player and walked around while listening to music all the people in the street seemed to be moving in a co-ordinated way ----a bit like a big walking flash dance. Quite nice.

A sort-of related thing was when I studied poetry at university, intensely analysing, etc....what happened was that after a bit of that everything I read was like reading poetry...newspapers, billboards, notes scribbled, and people talking too sometimes, newsreaders...soaps on tv...etc.

In a way, I think that it all is poetry, as soon as it's considered to be so, and the brain can instantly switch to a poetic processing mode if asked to.


I think it might be quite easy to induce some kinds of synaethesia (without drugs)