tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post8263802052116231161..comments2024-03-10T20:46:19.274-04:00Comments on In the Middle: Synaesthesia is not a metaphorCord J. Whitakerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/06224143153295429986noreply@blogger.comBlogger9125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-28899396466183318652012-09-19T09:19:27.127-04:002012-09-19T09:19:27.127-04:00Karl - I was thinking a bit more about your commen...Karl - I was thinking a bit more about your comment re: 'translating' April, and for me it's more of both/and. April *does* carry associations of bunnies, tulips, "shoures soote" and the like and ALSO it's inherently dark pink-light red.<br /><br />This is a weird case though where language and perception can interfere. In Chinese April is simply "fourth month" (四月) so when I see/hear/think of April in Chinese it's brown (4 is brown). If i'm "thinking about April" in English (or Indo-European language), it's pink-red again. Similar thing with days of the week - since they have numbers in Chinese but "names" in English/IE languages.<br /><br />In any case "units of time with names" def. operate under a different color scheme than numerical sequences. So weird.Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-15543176992084069282012-09-18T13:02:44.348-04:002012-09-18T13:02:44.348-04:00Ashby - that's really great. I don't know ...Ashby - that's really great. I don't know much about the current state of research but it would be very intriguing to see how the relationship between multilingualism and synaesthesia could be mobilized to test any number of factors. Thinking out loud, I wonder if grapheme-color synaesthesia that does NOT match up across a multilingual person's various languages might provide some sort of "index" of one's relative degree of second (or third-) language acquisition.<br /><br />dmf: I appreciate your comment in turn; "ethical humility" is exactly what I am trying to suggest in this posting - if we are being completely earnest, we must acknowledge and as you say "own" the as-if quality involved whenever we reach toward understanding another POV.Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-55242234815295622582012-09-18T10:00:25.966-04:002012-09-18T10:00:25.966-04:00I appreciate your reminding people that by employi...I appreciate your reminding people that by employing metaphor/poetics they have not gotten beyond speaking for an-other's experience/p.o.v. to speaking from it, and that there should be some ethical humility (and some foregrounding/owning of the as-if quality of such works) in any venture to sketch out alien phenomenology. We should view such experiments as works in a prototypical, not arche-typal, mode.<br />-dmfAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-29784886415584250992012-09-17T23:14:59.129-04:002012-09-17T23:14:59.129-04:00And, so, the multilingual synesthetes would allow ...And, so, the multilingual synesthetes would allow one to differentiate all kinds of things, both where in the sensory stream the cross-modal matching is taking place (and again, in neural synesthesia, that's probably and mostly pre-linguistic) and whether it is "high" or "low" based on whether a particular linkage "matches" across language or does not (if it does not, the matching is happening in the primary visual cortex before the associational / integration areas). But language itself would not be (and I cannot resist) coloring the experience. <br /><br />I like that connection to allegory, and I think it is very useful to think through the ways some of our "primary processes" result in some fairly complex cognitive work, way before we've become even aware of them, much less systematized them at the level of language and culture. <br /><br />Sorry about the "Unknown" thing: I'm not good with the blogging thing and the identity thing. So, my name below...<br /><br />-Ashby KinchAshby Kinchnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-56658239890794804162012-09-17T12:25:41.804-04:002012-09-17T12:25:41.804-04:00Unknown: Excellent. Thanks so much for your respon...Unknown: Excellent. Thanks so much for your responses here - I actually really like the rambling - - and I *love* that you're taking part in co-taught Brain and LIt course! Yes, I've heard of the "ordinal linguistic personification" thing before - in fact encountered a few syn. who have told me about this, even discerning distinct *personalities* with those ordinal embodiments. This would take us one step toward allegory, right?<br /><br />I'm sure it really is much more complex that we think of and it's not just a cross-modal interaction along 2 modes, but a cluster of concurrent, mutually-informing modalities.<br /><br />I think one area for development is research involving bilingual/multilingual subjects. Yes, my 5 works across languages (also V is five if I know it's "supposed" to be a numeral and NOT the letter - yes, it changes color from green V to red 5) so I'd guess that connection is happening on a prelinguistic level.<br /><br />PS. By the way, my point of "discovery" or "coming out" as a synaesthete was in via Ramachandran. I was sitting in a neuroethics course and R was invited to give a talk; he presented a version of that 5 & 2 number matrix and I immediately discerned the triangle of 2's. Don't remember exactly the convo that unfolded, but I def. remember talking with R after the class and being flabbergasted that my perception was *unusual* much less that it was a "thing" with an actual name.Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-75947111163737505092012-09-17T00:18:16.988-04:002012-09-17T00:18:16.988-04:00Fascinating, Jon. This comment will perforce, ramb...Fascinating, Jon. This comment will perforce, ramble. I hope you will take that rambling as a sign that it seems fun to engage on this a little. I am teaching a first-year seminar (Brain and Literature) with a neuroscientist this fall and we just spent a session on multisensory and cross-modal imagery on Thursday; I am most certainly not a neuroscientist, and I rely on my co-teacher to keep my facts straight, a luxury I do not have out here in the naked blogosphere. I had a student in an upper-division course last fall who experienced a form of synesthesia known as "ordinal linguistic personification" (sensing biological gender in letters and numbers). This student had never heard the condition described: she just thought she had a strange brain. My presentation on it last fall sent her on a semester-long journey of research and reflection and some fascinating poems (she's in the MFA program here), and I learned a lot more, much more than I could have otherwise hoped. It seems as though many (though clearly not all) synesthetes have multiple, overlapping forms of cross-modal experience rather than just one (i.e., ordinal, grapheme-color, personification). I suspect that the more research and broader cultural discussion of it there is, the more we'll realize that subtle and less pronounced versions of neurological synesthesia are much more common. (Ramachandran himself writes about the students who approach him after his lectures). One emerging theory is that all infants begin life as synesthetes, and that synaptic pruning, followed by myelination, tends to create narrower sensory channels that synesthetes, for reasons not entirely clear, never close down. The evolutionary value of cross-modal matching is evident, and as long as synesthetes are not harmed by, and perhaps even enhanced through, their ability, there would be no particular reason for that trait to diminish their fitness. In any event, one detail in your post caught my attention, b/c it seems to indicate that you are a "higher-order" or "upstream" synesthete: if you respond to the color in the number 5 regardless of language, then the cross-modal matching is happening at a level beyond primary visual processing, and therefore in or around the fusiform gyrus, yes? That area, and the broader area of the so-called TPO junction (where the temporal, parietal, an occiptal lobes converge) seems to be a very important place where we do a lot of our neural "work" in comparing sensory information. It's not a language center, necessarily, but of course all of the sensory areas articulate robustly to our language areas. Anyway, if all things are metaphorical, it's because experience is always already cross-modal and cross-sensory, not because of anything special about metaphor, right? Metaphor would be, cognitively, a layer or two of abstraction higher than our primary processing of the sensory world where our senses remain locked to one another for obvious reasons of efficiency, clarity, and animal need. We need our eyes to hear and ears to feel if we have any chance of narrowing the ultimately unbridgeable gap between our brains and the world, a gap that we have to leap over millions of times a day.Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03245245895508499128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-61963836892750777362012-09-17T00:17:17.856-04:002012-09-17T00:17:17.856-04:00Fascinating, Jon. This comment will perforce, ramb...Fascinating, Jon. This comment will perforce, ramble. I hope you will take that rambling as a sign that it seems fun to engage on this a little. I am teaching a first-year seminar (Brain and Literature) with a neuroscientist this fall and we just spent a session on multisensory and cross-modal imagery on Thursday; I am most certainly not a neuroscientist, and I rely on my co-teacher to keep my facts straight, a luxury I do not have out here in the naked blogosphere. I had a student in an upper-division course last fall who experienced a form of synesthesia known as "ordinal linguistic personification" (sensing biological gender in letters and numbers). This student had never heard the condition described: she just thought she had a strange brain. My presentation on it last fall sent her on a semester-long journey of research and reflection and some fascinating poems (she's in the MFA program here), and I learned a lot more, much more than I could have otherwise hoped. It seems as though many (though clearly not all) synesthetes have multiple, overlapping forms of cross-modal experience rather than just one (i.e., ordinal, grapheme-color, personification). I suspect that the more research and broader cultural discussion of it there is, the more we'll realize that subtle and less pronounced versions of neurological synesthesia are much more common. (Ramachandran himself writes about the students who approach him after his lectures). One emerging theory is that all infants begin life as synesthetes, and that synaptic pruning, followed by myelination, tends to create narrower sensory channels that synesthetes, for reasons not entirely clear, never close down. The evolutionary value of cross-modal matching is evident, and as long as synesthetes are not harmed by, and perhaps even enhanced through, their ability, there would be no particular reason for that trait to diminish their fitness. In any event, one detail in your post caught my attention, b/c it seems to indicate that you are a "higher-order" or "upstream" synesthete: if you respond to the color in the number 5 regardless of language, then the cross-modal matching is happening at a level beyond primary visual processing, and therefore in or around the fusiform gyrus, yes? That area, and the broader area of the so-called TPO junction (where the temporal, parietal, an occiptal lobes converge) seems to be a very important place where we do a lot of our neural "work" in comparing sensory information. It's not a language center, necessarily, but of course all of the sensory areas articulate robustly to our language areas. Anyway, if all things are metaphorical, it's because experience is always already cross-modal and cross-sensory, not because of anything special about metaphor, right? Metaphor would be, cognitively, a layer or two of abstraction higher than our primary processing of the sensory world where our senses remain locked to one another for obvious reasons of efficiency, clarity, and animal need. We need our eyes to hear and ears to feel if we have any chance of narrowing the ultimately unbridgeable gap between our brains and the world, a gap that we have to leap over millions of times a day. Unknownhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/03245245895508499128noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-70207965607528685112012-09-16T21:25:15.772-04:002012-09-16T21:25:15.772-04:00Thanks, Karl. I was wondering if someone would men...Thanks, Karl. I was wondering if someone would mention Bogost's re: metaphor and the idea that *all things* only ever interact via metaphor; we can never get to the true substance/materiality of things b/c we are always (by necessity) metaphorizing materaility itself. What I like about SNT and other moments re: stone idols or Mandeville re: simulacra etc. is this idea that materiality puts faith itself in crisis. Seems to me that the raising of the Host in the Eucharistic ritual is a speech-act-and-citation (hoc est corpus meum) that makes metaphor and materiality one and the same.Jonathan Hsyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13214201468052661183noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21165575.post-36796167090124440942012-09-16T20:34:46.942-04:002012-09-16T20:34:46.942-04:00Great post Jon. I'm reminded of Ian Bogost'...Great post Jon. I'm reminded of Ian Bogost's notion of 'metaphorism' in Alien Phenomenology, which, iirc, is basically a description of the way that all contact between things is, basically, metaphorical. It's not just the 'carrying over' of metaphor, but the fact that the contact between, say, fire and cotton (a favored metaphor in object-oriented philosophy) is not only always partial (the fire doesn't perceive the cotton's whiteness, for example), but also always partial, a carrying over of the cotton's character into that of the fire's understanding. Metaphor is contact, in other words, and the inescapable character of contact.<br /><br />...although now that I write this, I'm a bit befuddled, since a synaesthete's contact with the concept 'April' is just plain different from mine. Mine doesn't feel like a translation at all (except insofar as April trails with it various associations: family birthdays, bunnies, cruel months, etc.); but neither is a synaesthete's April, to them.<br /><br />So I'm at an impasse for now!medievalkarlhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12440542200843836794noreply@blogger.com