Re: Synaesthesia

----- Original Message -----
From: "Joseph Fatula" <fatula3@...>

> For most of you this probably sounds crazy, and if it doesn't make any
sense
> I'm not sure if I could explain it.  But hopefully someone here knows what
> I'm talking about.
We've had this discussion before, years ago!  Only natural for it to crop up
again!

> I've recently discovered a psychological term, "synaesthesia".  I've read
a
> few descriptions of it, but they all make it sound like it's a disorder
> where you can't tell if something is a sound or an image.
Ignorant farts! <G>  If this is the case, where you can't distinguish
sensations, then it is a true disorder.  But that's not what ordinary
synaesthesia is in the normal human being.

> And that's not
> how I'd describe it.  I'm going to ask a few questions / make a few
comments
> below and see if they resonate with anyone.  For me, conlanging is
> intimately connected with this.
I agree.

> - The letter F is blue, but a particular shade of blue that is hard to
> explain.
For me, all the numbers have colors.  And personalities.  And directions
they face, and interaction with other numbers.  This helped me with
arithmatic and multiplication.

> - The months of the year quite clearly go from top to bottom, but the
hours
> of the day do not.  They go from bottom to top (starting around sunrise),
> then curve back to go down to the next day around 8pm.
This may be because you were used to seeing calendars and clocks from a very
early age.  The morning hour of six is at the bottom of the clock, and then
goes up to noon, and clockwise down to evening six again.  This is how I see
the hours of the day, and it's very definitely based on the clock.  The
months, though, are more complicated.  I can see January 1 ahead and to my
right as I face a starry north.  I am standing on the crest of the weekend,
Saturday, and the New Year veers sharply to the right where I can see it
running down a long slope till about May.  Then, June, July, and August, at
the bottom of the valley, swerve again to the left (to the west), and start
the uphill climb to December.  The years themselves have this hilly quality.
The weekends are raised ledges.  Wednesday is at the nadir of the weekly
valley.

> - When I listen to some songs, they have a very clear appearance.  The
style
> of the 80's group, the Police, is definitely a type of purple with these
> thin black lines across it in a haphazard way.
I'm not quite that synaesthetic.  Certain songs will inspire intense
emotions in me that recall scenes from my childhood, or from dreams.

> - What color is Wednesday?
A dull orange! <G>

> - These colors, images, and sounds that I am talking about are clearly not
> in front of me like the things that elicit them.  They are instead some
sort
> of innate quality that I am aware of, sort of on top of what I'm
> seeing/hearing/smelling.
Yes.

> - Has a word ever bothered you because it had a meaning that was very
clear
> to you by its sound, yet totally different from the meaning it is used as?
> For me, the word "paper" is definitely the wrong word for the thin stuff
we
> write on.  A better name for that stuff would be "filled" or "bristle".
I know that certain latinate or Greek words don't sound like what they mean.
"Pulchritude" for instance.  "Diphtheria," however, sounds like a beautiful
flower.  "Paper" sounds right to me, because of its plosive quality.  It
puffs away with a single breath.

> I'm sure most of you are reading this and wondering what I've been smoking
> today.
No.  Synaesthesia was a hot topic about four years ago on this list.  You'd
be surprised how many people know about it.  I've heard that some musicians
(Mozart?) have seen different chords, keys, and notes as colors.  John Cowan
and his encyclopedic memory ought to help out here!   I've heard of people
associating sounds with colors, tastes with colors, ideas with textures. You
might read Oliver Sacks' _The Anthropologist from Mars_, not to mention his
famous _The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat_ to discover some amazing
things about the brain.  Granted, he writes mostly about neurological
mistakes, errors and accidents of the brain, but I think somewhere he writes
quite a bit about synaesthesia.  Perhaps I'm thinking of the artist who lost
his ability to see colors (a chapter in _Anthropologist_), even to remember
what colors looked like, and this malady affected his ability to taste, even
to listen to music--since he was formerly so synaesthetic--much less paint.
Synaesthesia should not be labeled a pathology.  Dagnammit, but that annoys
me.  CONLANGING has also been considered a pathology.  The way the brain
cross references ideas and sensations is remarkable.  There's a terrific
book by Antonio Damasio called _Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the
Human Brain_.  In it, Damasio writes that reason and emotion are not the
separate things scientists and philosophers have thought them to be
(remember the tripartite mind of classical and medieval thought?  the
rational, the passionate, and the appetitive, of which three, animals shared
only two with humans).  He says that damage to the emotional nexus of the
brain will almost always affect the ability to reason.  He starts out with
the remarkable story of Phineas Gage, the American railroad worker who was
the victim of an explosion where an iron rod, used to tamp down the
explosive powder, was shot through his head.  It left all his apparent
faculties undamaged.  He could still see, hear, taste, smell, speak,
remember, read, count.  It apparently went through that portion of his brain
that governed emotional response.  After the doctors stopped marveling about
this miracle, they began to notice a subtle change in his personality.  Gone
was his ability to make rational social decisions.  Gone was his shrewd head
for business, and for the goals he aimed for.  He went from a socialized,
happy, well-liked human being to an irrascible, swearing, trouble-making,
unreasoning  and damaged man who couldn't seem to make a distinction between
a good course of action and a bad one.  "The equilibrium," says Dr. Harlow,
"or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculty and animal
propensities" had been destroyed.  He couldn't decide on anything, follow
any plan of action, and gave in constantly to passions and angers.  The
argument of the book seeks to overturn this popular concept we have of the
"right" and the "left brain," or of the romanticized notion that emotion has
to somehow be kept separate from reason.  It overturns the premises behind
both the Vulcans and my dear Data of Star Trek.  How can Data function as a
moral being without emotion?  How can T'Pal of _Enterprise_?  In other
words, the book examines how the brain makes mysterious alliances between
functions and capacities we like to see as separate.  I think that
synaesthesia is a vital manifestation of this cerebral interaction and
cross-referencing.

> If instead any of these struck you as obvious (or in the case of my own
> associations, completely wrong), that's what I'm interested in.  If you're
> like me, you've never thought about it much, like you never think about
> walking.  I realized something was going on when I made a comment about
the
> "inherent" color of something as opposed to the color it actually has.
And
> if you find that much of your conlanging is in the furtherance of a quest
to
> find ought what everything ought to sound like, let me know.
Indeed!  My Teonaht words have to "sound" like what they mean.  I have no
way of explaining why they do.

Sally Caves
scaves@frontiernet.net
Eskkoat ol ai sendran, rohsan nuehra celyil takrem bomai nakuo.
"My shadow follows me, putting strange, new roses into the world."

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