🚀 go-pugleaf

"Joseph S. Wisniewski" <jwisniew@ford.com> wrote:

>
...................
>
>Great attitide, Ray: open thinking that's a credit to the scientific
>community. 

Well, you know all these so-called "sci" newsgroups aren't all so
heavy in intense science, and someone cross-posted this thread across
some that are and some that aren't so much, like sci.med.vision, where
I have been posting (and can often be more scientific than the
optometrists here, but. . .).  However, my "attitude" was supposed to
be *pro*-science, in the sense that, having heard the term
'synesthesia' used only in a psychologist's or performance artist's
subjective sense, I had held it suspect, as anything correlating to
the objective world, to which I would limit the narrower sense of the
concept 'science' (requiring scientific "objectivity").  Afterall,
psychologists (not objective science, by definition) and related types
have been dumping distortive subjective concepts, with no objective
correlates on us heavily from before the turn of the last century
through the 1970s.

>Synesthesia is a very well documented limbic system
>abnormality, with several forms documented in DSM-IV. Estimates on
>incidence rates usually put it at one in 10,000 people, so there are
>there are at least 1/2 a million cases worldwide. That's just the
>incidence of cases severe enough to seriously impact people's lives. I'm
>not going to dump a hole bibliography on you, but you could have a look
>at Cytowic's synesthesia web site.
>
>   http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html

From what you say and a quick glance at Cytowic's Web site, it looks
like I was wrong to intimate flakiness, or mere metaphoric status, to
the concept of synesthesia, as centered in some rather unique "wiring"
of the limbic system.  (However, I immediately see some statements one
could argue over for some time.)

It's been said that you can't believe everything you read on the Net,
but that if something wrong is printed there, it sure doesn't take
long for the correct substitute information to get printed alongside
the mistaken stuff.  (. . .only my third mistake. . .mumble mumble
. . .)  I may be back after thoroughly reading Cytowic.

Ray