Comments on: Synesthesia & metaphor — I’m not feeling it

By: Complete this quote: “There is considerable debate surrounding the issue of…” « Neuroanthropology

Sun, 14 Feb 2010 09:29:13 +0000

[...] Cultural Evolution Vilanayur, Ramachandran appears in these posts: Colour, is it in the brain? , Synaesthesia & Metaphor, TED talk, Wednesday Roundup #8, Wednesday Roundup #14, Wednesday Roundup #44, and Wednesday [...]

By: Barbara Ritchie

Barbara Ritchie — Sun, 27 Sep 2009 17:41:25 +0000

The point seems continually to be missed in this discussion that there is no such thing as any conscious “thought” which is NOT “metaphorical” in that, in order for thoughts to be “reflected” upon (that is,”known” in conscious awareness),they must be “reflections of something ELSE. (What, if not “metaphor” is THIS process?)

Cheers,
Barbara Ritchie

By: Encephalon 47 | Channel N

Encephalon 47 | Channel N — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 05:58:01 +0000

[...] It’s an interesting peek at her work studying PTSD and depression in American veterans. Synaesthesia & metaphor: I’m not feeling it by Greg Downey criticizes major league neurologist V.S. Ramachandran. Downey says, “The [...]

By: Greg Downey: Top Twenty 2008 « Neuroanthropology

Greg Downey: Top Twenty 2008 « Neuroanthropology — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 10:13:33 +0000

[...] Ten Synesthesia & metaphor — I’m not feeling it Girls gone guilty: Evolutionary psych on sex #2 Identical twins not… err… identical? Brain [...]

By: Monkey Shingle « Input::Blue & Output::Crimson

Monkey Shingle « Input::Blue & Output::Crimson — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:27:50 +0000

[...] 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.(more…) [...]

By: Sean

Sean — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 11:13:45 +0000

Dr. Julia Simner has done work on non-idiosyncrasy of synaesthesia:
Simner, J., Ward, J., Lanz, M., Jansari, A., Noonan, K., Glover, L., & Oakley, D. (2005). Non-Random Associations of Graphemes to Colours in Synaesthetic and Normal Populations. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 22(8), 1069-1085.

see
http://www.psy.ed.ac.uk/people/jsimner/

By: Ilaria

Ilaria — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 21:46:44 +0000

Hi to everybody,
I’m working on synesthesia with a research group in this too-much-broad field which is cognitive science. More precisely, our inquiry is on coloured hearing synaesthesia, and includes neural network simulations.
One of the feature of synesthesia that discouraged us was the idiosyncracy. We focused the research on a possible objective mapping between colors and music, and at the beginning we thought that as they both are defined by three variables (hue, saturation and value for color; pitch, duration, intensity for music)we could try to match these three variables to observe the underlying law of music-color correspondance.
We also found that somebody before us created a particular device for blind people that was based on this variables matching (you can read about this project here http://www2.pompeiisites.org/database/pompei/Pompei2.nsf/b4604a8b566ce010c125684d00471e00/54ab2a7b67dd9648c12570a800559377!OpenDocument)
Despite this, going deeper into the literature about synesthesia, it seems that we’re dealing with such a arbitrary phaenomenon that it’s not possible to find a law explaining the senses switch. Can anybody suggest me references about the non-idiosyncracy of synaesthesia? (i.e. some evidence that the perception of the “Do” results in the perception of red for almost all synaesthetes?)
Moreover at the moment I’m attending corses at Aarhus Center for semiotics, and here metaphor is one of the principal topic of interest. It would be interesting to discover a link between synaesthesia and metaphor, though I agree we still have no evidence to claim it.

By: Chris

Chris — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 14:39:42 +0000

Hello again. I don’t agree with Greg’s statement that ‘metaphor can be crossmodal, but it does not always flow from one channel into a specific other one’. Perhaps I’ve misunderstood this statement but the overwhelming weight of evidence shows that metaphor IS unidirectional, in that a particular specific source domain is used to provide meaning or analogy for a second particular target domain, and not the other way round. The source domain is usually based on physical sensory experience and natural phenomena, like simply moving around and walking for instance, whereas the target domain is usually more abstract, like ‘love.’ You’d describe love as being like a journey for instance, because a journey is based on real-word experiences of travelling, but you wouldn’t really describe a journey as love. Moreover the connections made my synaesthesia aren’t arbitrary, they are systematic and usually occur along similar dimensions (and even the same dimension, such as vision in coloured-letter synaesthesia), although the exact nature of the concurrents might vary from person to person. The angular gyrus of the brain has been identified by fMRI scans as being involved in the integration of info from different sensory channels in both synaesthetes and non-synaesthetes and abstracting similarities between them, which is why the bouba-kiki effect seems to ‘work’. So to a certain extent synaesthesia does seem to be based on the idea of the fundamental similarity of information from different sensory channels.

By: Erika

Erika — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 02:58:40 +0000

Ahh – Rich & Mattingly, 2002, talk about synth perceptions occuring in the same modality, like Marcus mentioned. I’ll stop talking to myself here now. (Sorry – If there was an edit button, I would have just changed my initial comment.)

By: Erika

Erika — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 01:50:57 +0000

Also, if it helps, Rich et al. describe its idiosyncratic nature as “idiosyncratic in the sense that the same inducer will elicit a different concurrent for different people (e.g. Galton, 1880). For example, the letter ‘A’ might elicit dark red for one synaesthete and lime green for another.”

A.N. Rich et al., A systematic, large-scale study of synaesthesia: implications for the role of early experience in lexical colour associations, Cognition 98 (2005), pp. 53–84.

I’m doing a 20p lit review on synesthesia tonight for class. If Marcus has a good reference disproving the cross-modal association outside of his own speculation, that would be useful for me. I’m not finding it.

The idiosyncratic question is actually very interesting. With grapheme-color synth. there’s some widespread consistency with which colors match which letters, which has led some researchers to attribute standard children’s books or even refrigerator alphabet magnets toward some sort of environmentally learned early imprint. However, this doesn’t gel very well with the evidence toward a hereditary connection. Perhaps its one of those conditions like my ankylosing spondylitis where the gene/capacity is passed on, but only manifests by a particular environmental stimulus.

I’m just a librarian, so don’t ask me.