Synaesthesia

[Moose-tache]

I hate it when people say they "have synaesthesia." It's like saying you have a special condition that allows you to convert oxygen into carbon dioxide, or track a moving object with your eyes. Everyone "has" synaesthesia. You're not special.

[bradrn]

Everyone "has" synaesthesia.

I don’t. I don’t believe most of the people I know have it either, insofar as it comes up in conversation at all.

[Moose-tache]

Everyone "has" synaesthesia.

I don’t. I don’t believe most of the people I know have it either, insofar as it comes up in conversation at all.

So if somebody asked you what a "dark" tasting beer taste like, or what a "blue" piece of music sounds like, you wouldn't know?

[bradrn]

Everyone "has" synaesthesia.

I don’t. I don’t believe most of the people I know have it either, insofar as it comes up in conversation at all.

So if somebody asked you what a "dark" tasting beer taste like, or what a "blue" piece of music sounds like, you wouldn't know?

That’s not synaesthesia, though! It’s just plain old metaphor. Having synaesthesia would mean that you might, for instance, literally perceive the colour blue when a certain piece of music is played.

[Moose-tache]

I don’t. I don’t believe most of the people I know have it either, insofar as it comes up in conversation at all.

So if somebody asked you what a "dark" tasting beer taste like, or what a "blue" piece of music sounds like, you wouldn't know?

That’s not synaesthesia, though! It’s just plain old metaphor. Having synaesthesia would mean that you might, for instance, literally perceive the colour blue when a certain piece of music is played.

Yeah. That's pretty much what happens to everybody. You don't sit there with a completely empty mind when you're listening to music. Stuff happens in there, based on what you're hearing. Some of that stuff is colors, some of it is smells. Most often it's shapes. But there's going to be something other than a blank nothingness.

[bradrn]

So if somebody asked you what a "dark" tasting beer taste like, or what a "blue" piece of music sounds like, you wouldn't know?

That’s not synaesthesia, though! It’s just plain old metaphor. Having synaesthesia would mean that you might, for instance, literally perceive the colour blue when a certain piece of music is played.

Yeah. That's pretty much what happens to everybody.

Um… no it isn’t. Sure, I don’t have a blank mind when I listen to music, but for the most part, I don’t perceive any particular sensations either. Is it perhaps possible that you have synaesthesia, and don’t realise that it’s an unusual thing to have?

[Moose-tache]

I don’t have a blank mind when I listen to music, but for the most part, I don’t perceive any particular sensations either.

I am struggling to understand how these two statements could be simultaneously true. You have something in your mind, that is not a perception? Is it a ghost?

[bradrn]

I don’t have a blank mind when I listen to music, but for the most part, I don’t perceive any particular sensations either.

I am struggling to understand how these two statements could be simultaneously true. You have something in your mind, that is not a perception? Is it a ghost?

Well, sensory perceptions are just one thing you could have in your mind. You might also end up imagining words, or images, or numbers. When I listen to music I mostly end up thinking about the intervals and chords involved, which in practise are expressed as letters and numbers. And then of course there’s the lyrics, which are occasionally inteligible as words if the singer is clear enough.

(One thing which I should probably make clear here is the difference between actually perceiving something with your senses, versus merely imagining the same sensation. Everyone has the latter when they listen to music, but synaesthesia relates specifically to the former — it’s when you actually feel you’re perceiving a specific sensation given a stimulus.)

[Moose-tache]

I'm still not convinced. What is the difference between "perceiving" that the color blue is happening to your eyes, and involuntarily "imagining" the color blue in front of your eyes? When you perceive things, you are in fact imagining them. Your brain doesn't know that the cold object you have in your mouth is ice or mint leaves. It's a lump of wet robots trapped in a box. This distinction between imagining sensory input on the one hand, and actually having sensory inputs except oops they're not real they're just in your mind on the other is, in my opinion, artificial.

Think about it. You touch a microfiber cloth, and an image of a triangle comes to your mind's eye. How are we to distinguish whether this is just "imagining" a triangle, or "perceiving" a triangle that isn't there? How about if you drink pineapple juice, and you hear Calypso music as clearly as if it were playing right next to your head? There are countless ways your brain-puddle mixes up perceptual inputs, and none of them are more or less "real" than the others.

[bradrn]

What is the difference between "perceiving" that the color blue is happening to your eyes, and involuntarily "imagining" the color blue in front of your eyes?

Here is an example which may help clarify things. Close your eyes, and imagine that you can see a car. (Actually try this. I’ll wait…)

…OK, can you see it? Now expand the box below and look at the image:

More: show

(source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File ... 02)_01.jpg)

That’s the difference between ‘imagining’ and ‘perceiving’. (For proof that this distinction isn’t ‘artificial’, consider the existence of aphantasia, where the former faculty is impaired but the latter isn’t.)

Think about it. You touch a microfiber cloth, and an image of a triangle comes to your mind's eye. How are we to distinguish whether this is just "imagining" a triangle, or "perceiving" a triangle that isn't there?

I will freely admit I don’t have a sure-fire, explicit methodology for making this distinction. I am assuming that you know your own mind well enough to tell the difference between what you can see and what you can imagine.

In the spirit of being helpful, though, I’ll have a stab at distinguishing the two anyway: ‘perceiving’ is automatic, in that it happens without your conscious control. When you open the box above, you instantly perceive an image of a car, whether you intend to or not. ‘Imagining’, by contrast, requires at least some degree of conscious control — when I ask, you can choose to think of a car or not, even if the one choice feels more natural than the other.

[linguistcat]

I think there's two issues here:

1) Because of things like the Kiki-Bouba effect or whatever it's named, you COULD say that most people have some SMALL amount of synesthesia since cross culturally, most people would pair words like kiki with angular, spiky shapes and words like bouba get paired with rounded, blobby shapes. When given those two shapes to choose from in a controlled environment.

2) Synesthesia isn't just metaphor as mentioned before. Common metaphors, even if learned at a young age, are still learned. Or, novel metaphors are created consciously. While synesthesia MAY come from associations in early childhood (and we aren't sure of this scientifically, there are plenty of other possible reasons for it), it is not taught. And these connections are not a conscious process, they are automatic. Someone with letter-color synesthesia doesn't need to think about what color S is for them, it's just that color. Also, it's not going to be green one week and orange the next. The input and output remain fairly similar over time. Likewise, I'm sure people with sound-taste synesthesia (or other similar subtypes) would love it if they could change what some words taste like to them, since it seems fairly common for some words to taste absolutely vile to those affected, and it has nothing to do with the actual meanings assigned to those words.

So where I might imagine colors and shapes to a piece of instrumental music, I do not see C flats as a deep blue each time as I do not have that form of synesthesia. Having letter-color synesthesia however, I will read "C flat" as a series of the colors pale orange, lime green, almost white gray, transparent, and medium blue. And those letters are always those colors to me, regardless of where or when I read them or the actual colors they are printed in. I can ignore these colors for the sake of doing other things, like if I'm taking a test where I have to say what color a word is printed as but the impressions of the letter's colors in my mind are still there.

[zompist]

Having letter-color synesthesia however, I will read "C flat" as a series of the colors pale orange, lime green, almost white gray, transparent, and medium blue. And those letters are always those colors to me, regardless of where or when I read them or the actual colors they are printed in. I can ignore these colors for the sake of doing other things, like if I'm taking a test where I have to say what color a word is printed as but the impressions of the letter's colors in my mind are still there.

Thanks for sharing this; it's really interesting. Have you ever learned a language with a different writing system? If so, does this ability make things easier?

[zompist]

That’s the difference between ‘imagining’ and ‘perceiving’. (For proof that this distinction isn’t ‘artificial’, consider the existence of aphantasia, where the former faculty is impaired but the latter isn’t.)

You're both right, or both wrong. You're appealing to a "common sense" difference between seeing and imagining; but Moose is pointing out correctly that they are the same sort of thing, namely qualia 'experienced' (whatever the hell that means) in the visual cortex. Neither a neurologist nor a philosopher can accept that seeing and imagining a car are fundamentally different; the obvious inference is that the latter depends on the former.

You should be less sure of yourself if you consider some less clear cases:
* Dreams. These are full sensory experiences that can be impossible (at the time) to distinguish from reality.
* There are neurological conditions where people perceive (say) music at great volume and consistency. Oliver Sacks describes some cases.
* Some people have extraordinarily good mental imaging. Temple Grandin, for example: she can form a mental image, rotate it mentally— she compares it to using 3-D modeling program.

My experience, I'd wager, is like yours: imagining a sound or sight is weak and vanishing compared with seeing something directly. For some reason sounds work better: I can easily look at this text and imagine it being read in an English accent; I can't look at it and imagine it upside down. But the brain can do better, I just can't consciously will it to.

(Daniel Dennett has pointed out that dreams are not full simulated realities: the brain only has to simulate what consciousness is actually looking at, and doesn't need to model the whole world. That's why you can leave a room in a dream, come back, and find it different.)

(I do think Moose is being a bit unimaginative, or disingenuous, about synaesthesia— the sort of strong, involuntary color-coding that linguistcat describes is hardly the same thing as whatever vague images a non-synaesthete experiences if told to 'imagine a blue letter A'. Yes, they both happen in the brain, but so does everything.)

[Ketsuban]

Yeah. That's pretty much what happens to everybody. You don't sit there with a completely empty mind when you're listening to music. Stuff happens in there, based on what you're hearing. Some of that stuff is colors, some of it is smells. Most often it's shapes. But there's going to be something other than a blank nothingness.

For what it's worth, this sounds exactly like a synaesthete trying to argue from the preconceived notion that their experience of reality is what everyone else experiences. It's the same kind of conversation that occurs with aphantasia; aphantasics like me would go through life assuming that "the mind's eye" is a metaphor for thinking about something which happens to be visible, and "visualising" is the process of a cartoonist designing a character (making a bunch of decisions like "a bulbous nose" and "a thin moustache" and then drawing the result of those decisions) while non-aphantasics understand these to be literal (they can picture a horse and then answer questions like what colour it is and what it's doing).

When I listen to music, I hear music (of course) but it doesn't conjure images or smells in my head at all. I don't have images or smells in my head; I had to teach myself to generate an internal monologue so I could do exams in silence, because my natural flow is to talk out loud. (It's not necessarily relevant—in primary school I had a teacher who was worried about my mental health because I was reciting Star Trek episodes to myself.)

[Travis B.]

I myself associate the color blue with /eɪ ɛr ɛ/, specifically a deeper blue with /eɪ/, a lighter blue with /ɛ/, and an in-between blue with /ɛr/, and I weakly associate red with /oʊ ɔr/, but my association is on the level of the kiki-bouba phenomenon - they aren't the kind of association that synaesthetes get. (Note that I associate no other phonemes with colors; even /æ/ has no such association, despite the fact that is really is an open-mid unrounded front vowel for me.)

That said, Moose-tache, are you sure that you aren't a synaesthete?

[Ares Land]

I used to have some synesthetic association as a child. (the sort of association between colors and letters linguistcat describe.) But I really don't experience any of this anymore.

So, nope, not everyone has synesthesia.

FWIW:

So if somebody asked you what a "dark" tasting beer taste like, or what a "blue" piece of music sounds like, you wouldn't know?

'dark' tasting beer suggests a stout or a strong ale -- though I'd never use that metaphor myself. I had to think a bit about what you meant by 'blue' music. (We don't have that idiom in French, and maybe that's the reason.)
Music suggests feelings or memories to me; not color or shapes.

[linguistcat]

Having letter-color synesthesia however, I will read "C flat" as a series of the colors pale orange, lime green, almost white gray, transparent, and medium blue. And those letters are always those colors to me, regardless of where or when I read them or the actual colors they are printed in. I can ignore these colors for the sake of doing other things, like if I'm taking a test where I have to say what color a word is printed as but the impressions of the letter's colors in my mind are still there.

Thanks for sharing this; it's really interesting. Have you ever learned a language with a different writing system? If so, does this ability make things easier?

I have studied Japanese for most of my life. I have connections between color and hiragana or katakana, but not for kanji. Maybe if I had learned kanji at an earlier time? Or with more usage? Or if I had focused more on their readings? Since we don't know what causes synesthesia, I can't really say what blocked that or would have encouraged those connections.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Having letter-color synesthesia however, I will read "C flat" as a series of the colors pale orange, lime green, almost white gray, transparent, and medium blue. And those letters are always those colors to me, regardless of where or when I read them or the actual colors they are printed in. I can ignore these colors for the sake of doing other things, like if I'm taking a test where I have to say what color a word is printed as but the impressions of the letter's colors in my mind are still there.

Thanks for sharing this; it's really interesting. Have you ever learned a language with a different writing system? If so, does this ability make things easier?

I have studied Japanese for most of my life. I have connections between color and hiragana or katakana, but not for kanji. Maybe if I had learned kanji at an earlier time? Or with more usage? Or if I had focused more on their readings? Since we don't know what causes synesthesia, I can't really say what blocked that or would have encouraged those connections.

Maybe it's a sort of synaesthesia that's connects colours to sound-based graphemes? Did Hiragana and Katakana start out having colour connections, or did they develop once you realised they were writing?

[WeepingElf]

To me, shapes have sounds and typefaces have voices. I don't really hear them, but I associate them with the shapes. Sans-serif typefaces usually have male voices, serif typefaces female. Fraktur speaks with a brittle old man's voice. Italic speaks with higher pitch, boldface louder, double spaced print speaks more slowly.

[linguistcat]

Thanks for sharing this; it's really interesting. Have you ever learned a language with a different writing system? If so, does this ability make things easier?

I have studied Japanese for most of my life. I have connections between color and hiragana or katakana, but not for kanji. Maybe if I had learned kanji at an earlier time? Or with more usage? Or if I had focused more on their readings? Since we don't know what causes synesthesia, I can't really say what blocked that or would have encouraged those connections.

Maybe it's a sort of synaesthesia that's connects colours to sound-based graphemes? Did Hiragana and Katakana start out having colour connections, or did they develop once you realised they were writing?

I'd say it's probably the sound-grapheme mix, although numbers also get colors that don't seem to correspond to any of the Latin alphabet sounds in their names. But I built those connections much earlier. (<7> is a bright teal color but <seven> is mostly yellow, gray and salmon.) I'm not sure the kana had associations when I was first learning but I also didn't know what synesthesia was or that I had a form of it until much later in my schoolding either. BUT I'm willing to lean toward the sound-grapheme theory since, for example, the K- row tends to have orangy hues like <k> in the Latin alphabet, and the N- and M- rows tend to be very warm colors like <n> and <m> and so on. It's not the exact colors that I see for English combos but they've definitely affected each other.