Synesthesia

[ragashree]

I was thinking along those lines, though not in such scientific detail, ragashree.

I've heard scientific explanations for near-death experiences as well. Where I exercise personal caution is the effort to medically diagnose such as abnormal. The scientific mind. . .

God bless em, anyway. Heh.

The scientific explanation is only ONE possible personal line of enquiry for me too, actually... Not necessarily the most important one either from my perspective Obviously it helps to have a SO who works in that area and whose brains can be picked for the rather abstruse technical detail necessary when I'm trying to follow things in those terms! Otherwise I suspect I tend to take something closer to your own view, at least from what I've seen you post so far on this.

By the way, I'm not quite clear from what I've read so far whether you have similar issues to myself - ie something that would probably be open to medical diagnosis as epilepsy (not that I necessarily tend to view it that way, more as an intense and strange experience with many possible connotations). I'd be interested to hear whether you do, anyway, or if not how you do see your experiences?

 

[Anja]

Used to be in the public health sector. Read a lot of Laing, Szasz, Chessler in the day and got another viewpoint there.

I've spoken with schizophrenics who had a pretty sane perspective if you could have patience with the word salad you had to dig through to get to the nuggets of truth.

I like this quote from one of the above (probably reworded) "Insanity is a sane response to an insane world." Hee.


And, of course the question remains : Which happens first? The brain changes or the events?

Edit: I'm just cautious about labeling people "damaged."

 

[ragashree]

Used to be in the public health sector. Read a lot of Laing, Szasz, Chessler in the day and got another viewpoint there.

I've spoken with schizophrenics who had a pretty sane perspective if you could have patience with the word salad you had to dig through to get to the nuggets of truth.

I like this quote from one of the above (probably reworded) "Insanity is a sane response to an insane world." Hee.


And, of course the question remains : Which happens first? The brain changes or the events?

Edit: I'm just cautious about labeling people "damaged."

Yes, I'm very familiar with Laing myself. I believe the quote you paraphrased was his. I gave a copy of "The Divided Self" to my somewhat recalcitrant SO some time ago in the hope of persuading her away from her apparent (if understandable) fixation on viewing mental illness from a biological perspective. So ingrained were her views that it has so far had about 1/100th of the hoped for effect... ah well
I would tend to view it as pretty unconstructive to see any psychological problems as originating from the brain rather than the person unless there is clear evidence of a neurological condition which can be linked to the person's symptoms by a chain of cause and effect. In the absence of such a condition, and given how poorly the overall self-regulatory processes of the human brain in relation to the person interacting with their environment are understood, it seems to me to be missing the point entirely when psychological problems are attributed primarily to some kind of organic malfunction, even when evidence of, for instance, low levels of an important brain chemical such as dopamine are found. (And clinical investigation of psychiatric cases rarely proceeds this far anyway before the nearly inevitable drugs are administered.)

 

[Anja]

Yeah. Heh. Hence the disclaimer, "This drug works best when administered in conjunction with talk therapy."

I think we've managed to carry this interesting thread far afield. Hope to discuss this further with you when the opportunity arises.

 

[Gamine]

Cool. Freakin. Thread.

*glee*

I've stopped explaining my forms of synesthesia to people once I learned that I was the only one having the experiences around me. Individual numbers are meaningless to me, but combinations of numbers are like poetry, with its own tone, mood and message.

I'm also a musician, and beyond the normal emotions that can be communicated through melody, tone and pitch, I can feel physical impressions of sound. Even the voices of people.

What are some of your favourite portions of your own experiences? Which number is your favourite colour? Which colour MM tastes the best? Have you ever experienced one of your tools acting as instinct?

 

[Dali]

I have number form synesthss... (ah, f*** it).

I associate every year in (my) living memory with a particular feel, color and smell to it and they have patterns and, every few years, there's a break in the pattern and the following few years after that reform into a new pattern. If I want to remember something from my long term memory, I visualise the pattern first before I zero in on the particular year.

Mo

 

[Jae Rae]

Nabokov had it.

 

[Nonsensical]

wow! I have always wondered about this..I have had it since I was little, and actually talked about this sensation the other day to a friend, though i didn't know it was a formal or universal state. I sometimes feel numbers and letters as moods or colors, and picture an almost..imaginary..timeline in my head, like a wheel, or line..when I think about years. It happens with days of the week days, months, and times.

 

[ragashree]

The French composer Olivier Messiaen famously had synesthesia. I thought it might be interesting to compare his apparently synesthesia-influenced understanding of his own music (as evinced in his description here) with the music itself. This is the second movement of his Quartet for the End of Time.

II. Vocalise, for the Angel Announcing the End of Time: The first and third parts (both very short), evoke the power of this strong angel, crowned with a rainbow and clothed in clouds, one foot on the sea and the other on land. The central section deals with the impalpable harmonies of heaven, the piano playing soft cascades of chords: blue and mauve, gold and green, red-violet, blue-*orange; all of this dominated by steel-grey. These chords, faraway chimes, surround the plainchant-*like melody of the violin and cello.

YouTube - O. Messiaen - Quator pour la fin du temps - Vocalise, pour l'ange qui annonce la fin du temps

 

[Uytuun]

Hmm, interesting, I've always been into personification and connoting stuff (letters, words, countries, concepts...)with a certain colour/coloured aura. I would say "this word is blue to me", but I don't actually see it as blue on the page like the wikipedia article suggests. I also always used a folder that had the colour of the spirit of the course whose notes were supposed to go in it. Latin was always red for example - it felt red to me; French was blue. I had no idea this was special. My brother makes similar associations, I remember having a conversation about it with him.

 

[kyuuei]

I had thought for a bit about a recent thing that happened to me and decided to post it here. I mean, it's happened before obviously, but my recent education on Synesthesia is influencing me to recognize it in my daily life more and more. Upon asking casually about it in Vent, Edahn's guesstimation made me think to post it here.

I went into the bathrooms of the George R. Brown Convention Center.. and found I had an impossible time with the stalls themselves due to the texture on the walls. On top of a bright red color, they had tiny textures of bumps on the surface of them. I saw a constant moving of lines racing through the cracks between the bumps.. like shadow and light striking constantly in hatchmark formats.. It's really quite hard to describe.

As a side effect, this caused me to have absolutely no depth perception when it came to these walls.. I found myself having to feel along them to grab things without slamming my hand into them. I might as well have been blind.

I've seen other textured areas move for me as well, and it's always been an annoyance for me.

 

[Risen]

I had thought for a bit about a recent thing that happened to me and decided to post it here. I mean, it's happened before obviously, but my recent education on Synesthesia is influencing me to recognize it in my daily life more and more. Upon asking casually about it in Vent, Edahn's guesstimation made me think to post it here.

I went into the bathrooms of the George R. Brown Convention Center.. and found I had an impossible time with the stalls themselves due to the texture on the walls. On top of a bright red color, they had tiny textures of bumps on the surface of them. I saw a constant moving of lines racing through the cracks between the bumps.. like shadow and light striking constantly in hatchmark formats.. It's really quite hard to describe.

As a side effect, this caused me to have absolutely no depth perception when it came to these walls.. I found myself having to feel along them to grab things without slamming my hand into them. I might as well have been blind.

I've seen other textured areas move for me as well, and it's always been an annoyance for me.

Oooh. I heard you mention this before, but couldn't really understand it until now. I still can't imagine that sort of perception though, it's so radically different. What do you think was the main trigger for the altered perception in that episode? Was it the texture of the wall, the color, or the combination? Have there been other times when something has set off an altered depth perception?

 

[kyuuei]

Oooh. I heard you mention this before, but couldn't really understand it until now. I still can't imagine that sort of perception though, it's so radically different. What do you think was the main trigger for the altered perception in that episode? Was it the texture of the wall, the color, or the combination? Have there been other times when something has set off an altered depth perception?

I can't be sure if the color hindered, but it certainly didn't help. Yes, I commonly have trouble with textured things moving on me.. but I can't recall many times where I've had such difficulty doing such a simple task due to the way I see it.

 

[Engler]

I've always enjoyed associating certain symbols (letters, numbers, etc.) with certain personality types, and I do it rather frequently, but would that actually be considered synesthesia? I had always assumed it was simply due to my potent imagination.

 

[Anentropic IxTx]

Synæsthesia

I've always found it intriguing. My science teacher has it, and I think it adds another level to how we see the world. I tend to use certain vocabulary despite the fact that I understand a wide range, and it limits my spoken word, yet it's natural.

 

[CrystalViolet]

I just read the wiki article. I have mirror touch synaesthesia.(check out the article links) OMG! I just thought it was a quirk of mine.

 

[Tiltyred]

Is it possible you have astigmatism?

 

[phthalocyanine]

i have a few types of synesthesia, according to a few people & a couple of assessments i have taken.. all of them are color-related in nature - i am an artist, so this never struck me as odd; it was just this past year that i became aware of what synesthesia was..before then i thought it was just an experience everyone had and nobody talked about

(bump) any other synesthetes?

 

[jenocyde]

I have it very strongly. People think I'm an idiot sometimes if I don't stop myself from saying: that's delicious, it tastes just like purple!

 

[phthalocyanine]

mmm, purple.. i like the smell of purple.