synesthesia

CSGnet Archive CSG2002
1

[From Bruce Nevin (10.12.02 14:47 EDT)]
Just heard an interview on NPR with a neurologist, Richard Cytowic,
author of The man who tasted shapes, about a man who on tasting
something, experienced the taste as tactile and kinesthetic tastes and
shapes.

He wanted his chicken to taste prickly. It didn’t have enough points to
serve to his guests. Another taste was like glass columns - smooth,
round, extending with no apparent end, cool to the touch.

It’s a brief phenomenon that soon fades. Synesthetes who experience light
and color concurrent with other sensations describe it as like
fireworks.

What particularly caught my ear was his statement that we are all
synesthetes and that the difference is that we are not aware of it; and
that this seems to be an atavism rather than a new development. He said
that all the senses pick up on a new sensation, but this parallel
diversity of interpretation quickly fades.

This suggests that the perceptual input function is a matter of attention
selecting from inputs by diverse neural connections rather than the
neural connections appropriate for our experience of the sensation being
hard wired.

There’s a paper by Cytowic at
http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html
titled “Synesthesia: Phenomenology And Neuropsychology
A Review of Current Knowledge”. I haven’t read it yet.

    /Bruce Nevin
2

[From Rick Marken (2002.10.15.0920)]

Bruce Nevin (10.12.02 14:47 EDT)

Just heard an interview on NPR with a neurologist, Richard Cytowic, author
of The man who tasted shapes, about a man who on tasting something,
experienced the taste as tactile and kinesthetic tastes and shapes...

This suggests that the perceptual input function is a matter of attention
selecting from inputs by diverse neural connections rather than the neural
connections appropriate for our experience of the sensation being hard
wired.

Vry interesting. It suggests to me that people either differ in how they
_describe_ their perceptions (which would go with your attention
interpretation; some people may just not pay attention to the shape-like
aspects of their taste perceptions, say) or in how they _perceive_ ( which
would suggest that people differ in terms of the nature of the perceptual
functions that produce those perceptions; some people may not have or may not
have developed perceptual functions that take lower level perceptual
"arguments" from different modalities). Whether or not synesthetes actually
perceive differently than others should be determinable experimentally, using
the test.

Best

Rick