🚀 go-pugleaf

I remember learning somewhere that the Russian composer Scriabin had
that problem, and it affected his compositions. The late pianist
Vladimir Horowitz championed Scriabin's work.

Antonio Francisco Rodr�guez Hern�ndez wrote:
> 
> A case about a person who perceives colours when listening pure sounds
> was presented in "news" some time ago.I would thank any information about
> it or about any other similar case where stimulation with sounds produce
> any kind of visual response.
>                                Thanks in advance.
> Antonio Rodr�guez Hern�ndez.

Antonio Francisco Rodr�guez Hern�ndez wrote:
> 
> A case about a person who perceives colours when listening pure sounds
> was presented in "news" some time ago.I would thank any information
> about it or about any other similar case where stimulation with sounds
> produce any kind of visual response.
>                                Thanks in advance.
> Antonio Rodr�guez Hern�ndez.

This is called synesthasia. It's not that uncommon, and usually relates
to abnormalities of the limbic system, most particularly the hipocampus. 

Sound to sight and sight to sound are the most common forms. Usually,
the synesthasia sufferer only gets one of those two, but lucky me, I get
both.

If you want web resources, look at Dr. Cytowic's synesthasia home page.

   http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html

-- 
 Joseph S. Wisniewski | Views expressed are my own, and don't reflect
  Ford Motor Company  |   those of the Ford Motor Co. or affiliates. 
   Project Sapphire   | LeMans, Daytona, Bonneville, and Sebring are
  jwisniew@ford.com   |   just races, won by people driving Ford cars!

On Mon, 28 Apr 1997 12:12:10 +0100, Antonio Francisco Rodr�guez
Hern�ndez <arguez@iac.es> wrote:

>A case about a person who perceives colours when listening pure sounds
>was presented in "news" some time ago.I would thank any information about
>it or about any other similar case where stimulation with sounds produce
>any kind of visual response.
>                               Thanks in advance.
>Antonio Rodr�guez Hern�ndez.


It's called "synesthsthesia" 

Rob

Hi Antonio,

If you find some information about this, I would be very interested,
because cases of spontaneous multimodal perception might teach us 
something more about possibly dormant neural pathways that could play 
a role in sensory substitution. Please post or mail any resources 
you find.

Best wishes,

Peter Meijer

Soundscapes from The vOICe - Seeing with your Ears?
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Peter_Meijer/


Antonio Francisco Rodr�guez Hern�ndez wrote:
> 
> A case about a person who perceives colours when listening pure sounds
> was presented in "news" some time ago.I would thank any information about
> it or about any other similar case where stimulation with sounds produce
> any kind of visual response.
>                                Thanks in advance.
> Antonio Rodr�guez Hern�ndez.

Antonio Francisco Rodr�guez Hern�ndez <arguez@iac.es> wrote in article
<3364860A.6F55@iac.es>...
> A case about a person who perceives colours when listening pure sounds
> was presented in "news" some time ago.I would thank any information
about
> it or about any other similar case where stimulation with sounds
produce
> any kind of visual response.
>                                Thanks in advance.
> Antonio Rodr�guez Hern�ndez.
> 

It is told that Sibelius saw of felt the opposite: colors and paintings
as tones or music.

regards

Kari Pesonen

In article <3364860A.6F55@iac.es> Antonio Francisco Rodr�guez Hern�ndez <arguez@iac.es> writes:
 >From: Antonio Francisco Rodr�guez Hern�ndez <arguez@iac.es>
 >Subject: SEEING SOUNDS
 >Date: Mon, 28 Apr 1997 12:12:10 +0100
 
 >A case about a person who perceives colours when listening pure sounds
 >was presented in "news" some time ago.I would thank any information about
 >it or about any other similar case where stimulation with sounds produce
 >any kind of visual response.
 >                               Thanks in advance.
 >Antonio Rodr�guez Hern�ndez.
 
The reason I am getting in here is because of the color organs
I used to build. probably has nothing to do with your question.
I used to assign bassy frequencies to deep purple colors. On
up the scale would be more deep colors, red, darker blues and
greens. The colors lighten up and go to yellows and almost whites
at the higher frequencies.

Perhaps DRUGS can cause this? Maybe a crisscrossing of nerves.
Why is it when I'm chewing some hard candy and look at my monitor,
I see some flashes and blanks on the screen? Perhaps the sound can
modulate or interfere with the optic nerves or retina? Perhaps
the people who see colors are just using some brain functions a
little strangely.  

greg

rflor@gte.net (Rob) wrote:

>On Mon, 28 Apr 1997 12:12:10 +0100, Antonio Francisco Rodr�guez
>Hern�ndez <arguez@iac.es> wrote:
>
>>A case about a person who perceives colours when listening pure sounds
>>was presented in "news" some time ago.I would thank any information about
>>it or about any other similar case where stimulation with sounds produce
>>any kind of visual response.
>>                               Thanks in advance.
>>Antonio Rodr�guez Hern�ndez.
>
>
>It's called "synesthsthesia" 

Well, something like that.  And if you can think of a name for it, it
just *has* to exist.  ;-)

Ray

szekeres+@pitt.edu (Greg Szekeres) wrote:

>
..................
>
>Why is it when I'm chewing some hard candy and look at my monitor,
>I see some flashes and blanks on the screen? 

Disruption (direct jaw-muscular effect, induced blinking, head motion)
of your eye saccades not synchronized with the raster scanning?  But
then, maybe it's what's in that candy?  ;-)

>
.............
>

Ray

Raymond A. Chamberlin wrote:
> 
> rflor@gte.net (Rob) wrote:
> 
> >On Mon, 28 Apr 1997 12:12:10 +0100, Antonio Francisco Rodr�guez
> >Hern�ndez <arguez@iac.es> wrote:
> >
> >>A case about a person who perceives colours when listening pure
> >>sounds was presented in "news" some time ago.
> >>
> >>Antonio Rodr�guez Hern�ndez.
> >
> >It's called "synesthsthesia"
> 
> Well, something like that.  And if you can think of a name for it, it
> just *has* to exist.  ;-)
> 
> Ray

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

-- 
 Joseph S. Wisniewski | Views expressed are my own, and don't reflect
  Ford Motor Company  |   those of the Ford Motor Co. or affiliates. 
   Project Sapphire   | LeMans, Daytona, Bonneville, and Sebring are
  jwisniew@ford.com   |   just races, won by people driving Ford cars!

"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

As did composer Oliver Messiaen.  While reading his program notes,
you can start to think you're reading about a painter describing 
his canvases.

"dlubman@ix.netcom.com"@popd.ix.netcom.com sayeth:
>I remember learning somewhere that the Russian composer Scriabin had
>that problem, and it affected his compositions. The late pianist
>Vladimir Horowitz championed Scriabin's work.
>
>Antonio Francisco Rodr�guez Hern�ndez wrote:
>> 
>> A case about a person who perceives colours when listening pure sounds
>> was presented in "news" some time ago.I would thank any information about
>> it or about any other similar case where stimulation with sounds produce
>> any kind of visual response.
>>                                Thanks in advance.
>> Antonio Rodr�guez Hern�ndez.


-- 
Curt Siffert
siffert at tangrams dot com
Magic is to science as metaphors are to literals.

raych@sirius.com (Raymond A. Chamberlin) wrote:

>
...................
>
>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.

I'm back. . .and I recant most of what I said here.  Cytowic's
document drifts about as far away from science as you can get.  It is
*science*, you recall,  to which you referenced your complaint as to
the attitude of my post.  He claims to have authored an earlier book
which contained significant neurobiology, without reading it, based on
his paper that I read, it becomes highly suspect.

Anything written on the senses, of course, can't limit itself to an
objective science alone, but has to relate to a subjective world in
some way, in a psychophysic (a half-science).  Well, psychophysics can
be useful where subjective reports can be shown to have good
statistics over many subjects, in closing the loop back through the
mind/brain to objectivity, enduring varied amounts and sorts of
neuroprocessing.  This process relies on statistics around a human
normal centralized processor / brain.  By definition, however (despite
some of Cytowic's efforts to claim synethesia is a "normal" function),
the subject here is a centralized-processor abnormality, not an
abnormality of a sensory organ peripheral to the centralized processor
/  brain, and therefore, nobody knows what to do with the subjective
reports of it coming out of that processor.  You can do anything you
want with them, as psychologists regularly do with subjective reports
supposed to provide information on the brain.  Their explanations are
not science and seldom agree with each other.

Well, Cytowic's paper on the Net is philosophy, not science, and goes
way beyond just couching some science in related philosophy.  It even
proceeds to argue his emotional sentiments about how thinking on the
subject, however you categorize it, should justify his own emotional
desires.  It is not clear whether he himself is synesthetic, as he
defines it in the narrow sense, as an abnormality.  I believe you, who
are riding on his emotional choo-choo train, have commented that *you*
are so.  His last sentence even establishes the overall unspecificity
of his Web document:  "If this is correct, then we are all unknowingly
synesthetic."  The more I read of his work, the more it smells.  Hey,
wait a minute. . .

C tries to correlate synesthesia to a whole slew of unusual
non-learned behaviors and other innate uncommon attributes of humans.
He sure doesn't provide much to convince anyone such associations are
valid in any scientific sense.  I was about to accept his word that he
was speaking science, after he came up with the female abductee of
aliens, who, after a little pleasuring by them, was never thereafter
able to be sexually satisfied by human males ( ;-b ), but. . .when he
pushed Kandinsky's recommendation to "stop thinking", I stopped
thinking he was scientifically oriented at all.  His finding that
seizures can produce many of the symptoms he claims for synethesia he
somehow takes imply that seizures produce synethesia.  How's that for
scientific thinking?

His section on "Neural Basis" wanders around, but never really gets
into, neurobiology, while tripping out on a claim that altered
consciousness from LSD is similar to synesthesia, because they both
involve the hippocampus.  So it's science to dump everything that
involves the hippocampus into the same bag?  I think it's halucinating
without any acid.

I can't figure out what the heck he sticks under his term 'form
constant' and during the many times I've watched fireworks, it has
never occurred to me to describe any feeling I've gotten (you mean
like a mild 'wow'?) as "salience" or experience "recognition" (of
what?).  The only salience and recognition here are ones of complete
lack of science.  He marvels over some guy named Ommaya who describes
consciousness as a type of emotion and emotion as acting as a
"cognitive homeostat".  Well, my cognition stopped dead on that note.

As an example of how weirdly far from scientific thought patterns C's
reasoning is, dig this:  He first says humans are the only mammals
that have both well-developed limbic and neocortical brain suborgans.
He then claims that this situation alone establishes in humans
nonhierarchical interaction between the cortical and "sub"cortical
parts of the brain, while other mammals have pretty much a straight
hierarchy of the cortex down to the subcortical regions.  I'm sure
such structure prevails in humans, but just making two things big or
complex doesn't necessarily make them interact more.  (English and
Russian are arguably the two largest and most complex languages, but
they don't interact much.)

C's writing is basically political:  "Our insistence on a
third-person, "objective" understanding of the world has just about
swept aside all other forms of knowledge."  Well, that type of
"understanding" is inherent in the notion of science and scientific
objectivity.  What's C wants is inherently *un*scientific.  C also
states that the predominance of women synesthetics in the UK is much
greater than in the US, and then follows this with, "It is doubtful
that transatlantic genetic differences contribute to this disparity."
Why should he find this potential cause doubtful?  I don't about the
truth of the data, but surely the racial / varietal complement of the
US is considerably different from that of the UK.

C ties in a correlation of synesthesia to abnormalities in visual
fields, particularly as sampled manually, as opposed to the use the
results of automated perimetry.  That discussion sounds pretty
unscientific also.  He next claims 10% of synetsthetes are gay.  So?
Isn't that approximately the percentage of the general population that
is gay?

C makes the strange statement, "If such an unfounded worry [that of
dying during a seizure] preoccupies [as he claims it does] their
[epileptics] thoughts, it is not hard to suppose that synesthetic
experience might make them think that they are losing their mind."
Why should that worry be considered "unfounded" in the first place?
Someone with the potential of losing control of his behavior during
any activity certainly is more apt to lose same in circumstances with
a fairly high probability of death resulting, where one's behavior is
inadequate to survival under the given circumstances -- than is
someone who does not have such potential.  C claims this "unfounded"
worry would correlate to worrying about losing one's mind upon
experiencing syesthesia.

C now considers that synesthesia may be more common in children than
in adults, in contrast to what he previously thought in this vein --
merely as a result of having heard adults say that they "haven't
thought of synesthesis "since [they were] a child or "since [their]
bar mitzvah[s]."  So, many Western Jews are higher strung than the
average American and apparently have more complex emotional goings-on
in their minds as children than do other children.  So why shouldn't
this evidence support the conclusion that such patterns in children's
minds are not built into the framework as a synesthetic structure, but
rather are developmental stages toward a certain type of adult
mentality?

C states:  "Linguists no doubt could pose more sohisticated and
probing experiments."  Linguistics is not science and linguists are
all that sophisticated.  Then C prefers the hermeneutic over the
scientific and says, "If you think that the mind is some disembodied,
abstract program that can be instantiated on any hardware capable of
running it, then you can ignore the biological complexities of neural
tissue," and then claims such a tactic is "convenient and lazy".
Well, instantiating *anything* on "hardware capable of running it", by
definition, requires only a means of tranferring it to such hardware
in order to run it.  Well, a mind, as experienced by another mind
usually has quite a high degree of complexity resultant from all
possible permutations of behavior from a highly complex organ already
of high complexity, but some useful theory can result, by ignoring
much specifics of neural tissue.

C repeatedly complains about associating computationality with the
brain and relates it to behaviorism.  He then uses a term
'microgenesis'.  What is that word supposed to mean?  It's not in my
dictionary.

Lastly, C gets very poetic and metaphoric in pushing holism in the
description of perception -- off into the sculpting of statues, even
-- where "synesthesia is the conscious awareness of a normally
holistic process prematurely displayed."  Is he just declaring it
unanalyzable?  Some scientist!

Yep!  Now I get it in full first person, experiencially:  Words that
conger nonscience trigger my olfactory cells negatively, so that
Cytowic's literary work transforms me into a damn synesthete.  Wow,
his "science" stinks!  :-[  

Ray

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

As far as the cortical remapping there is a large amount
of animal research looking at the remapping of
visual, auditory, and somatosensory areas after peripheral
receptor damage.

I wrote a paper that goes over some of the auditory
remapping studies at
http://www.utdallas.edu/~dybala/

but just look in MEDLINE under
cortex & plasticity and you will get a bunch of stuff


meijer (meijer@natlab.research.philips.com) wrote:
> 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

--
Thank you for your support,
Paul Dybala
dybala@utdallas.edu
http://www.utdallas.edu/~dybala