Wired online carried a story recently on a talk by ‘neuroscientist extraordinaire’ V.S. Ramachandran, one of the folks responsible for a lot of creative thinking in the brain sciences. Brandom Keim writes on a recent talk Ramachandran gave at the World Science Festival in a story, Poetry Comes from Our Tree-Climbing Ancestors, Neuroscientist Says. While I typically find his stuff both fascinating and resonant, this particular piece left me unpersuaded.

Normally, I might take issue with the sloppy logic of the title (‘poetry’ coming from ‘tree-climbing ancestors’ being a dangerous conflation between non-proximate contributing factors and eventual effects — you could just as logically say that ‘poetry comes from spinning disk of post-stellar material in proto-solar system’…), but I’ve got bigger fish to fry: synesthesia.

Rmachandran’s work on synesthesia is excellent; for example, his piece with in Neuron on synesthesia is essential reading, and the piece he co-authored on the condition in Scholarpedia is my source for a fair bit of what I will write. The problem is that I don’t think that synesthesia is a good metaphor for, well, metaphor.

Although there may be some ways that metaphor is like synesthesia, when we add up the pros and cons, synesthesia as a metaphor for metaphor may not help us too much to understand the latter, and I seriously doubt that the two are linked in a more profound causal fashion (like a ‘gene’ for both synesthesia and metaphor). Similarly, attention-based failure to perceive something may be like blindness, but using one to try to explain the other is futile. In other words, not all metaphors are equally useful, and I’m concerned that the synesthesia metaphor for metaphor might do more harm than good.

Continue reading “Synesthesia & metaphor — I’m not feeling it”