🚀 go-pugleaf

I enjoyed reading Raymond Chamberlin's polemic discussion
about the state of affairs in synesthetic research, and
sympathise with a number of the more basic issues he 
implicitly puts forward, although perhaps I would have 
used different wordings.

I'd like to see the synesthesia subject drawn out of the 
current largely phenomenological approach describing only
exotic spontaneous cases of synesthesia. Though these are
very interesting, at least as interesting is the question
to what extent synesthesia can be induced, learnt, whatever,
by the ``average'' human being. Which neural pathways could
contribute, what level of brain plasticity is needed, what
does this mean for adults versus young children, etc.

I would like to see more experimental work, e.g., how does
distribution of (human or animal) brain activity gradually 
change after mapping inputs for one sense to another sense 
while blocking the inputs to that one sense. Are the cortical 
or other brain areas normally associated with this one sense 
gradually going to respond to the remapped sensory inputs of 
the other sense? And if so, how, and to what degree compared 
to their normal functioning for the original normal sensory
inputs?

A bit hard to follow perhaps in these general terms?

Remember how well the brain appeared able to adapt in 
the classic experiments with image reversal goggles. 
Remember also how the brain activity of trained musicians
has been shown to differ from that of musical laymen 
while listening to music. Is the processing of different 
senses in the brain really so strongly split (through 
missing neural pathways) as to make cross-modal remappings 
inevitably fail where unimodal remappings succeed? What
evidence is there, both pro and con?

Say one maps, one way or the other, visual information
into an acoustical form (while preserving much visual 
information), and blindfolds the subject: what is going
to happen to brain activity during training? If something
does happen, can that be explained from (knowledge about)
existing neural wiring plus some degree of plasticity? 
Maybe others know still better questions to ask, but at 
least let's try to get into scientifically reproducible 
results that might pertain to a better understanding of 
the workings of  ``normal'' brains (I hope words like 
``normal'' don't sound or smell offensive to synesthetes
reading this, as it isn't meant to).

Peter Meijer

Artificial Synesthesia
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Peter_Meijer/asynesth.htm