Synaesthesia

[jennyRater]

It would take a huge adjustment. And it may not be pretty at all.
It would still be interesting though.
And there would certainly be some cases where it is a blessing. A tormenting blessing.
But sometimes it would be only torment.

Like simpler sense disorders - blindness, deafness, titinus, lepresy etc. Sometimes we'd wish not to see or hear various things.. silence can be relaxin, but permanent silence a disabilty.

People learn to cope with these things - they could cope with complex synesthaesia, too :m:

 

[water]

I think she's looking at it from a purely artistic perspective.

Not at all. Metaphors (and with them, synaesthesias) are common in everyday life and language.
It is the classical understanding of metaphors that postulated that metaphors are a matter of poetry. Not at all.

See the Contemporary theory of metaphor: http://www.ac.wwu.edu/~market/semiotic/lkof_met.html

Scroll down to: Basic Semantic Concepts That Are Metaphorical


* * *

I should think that this is not an entirely uncommon experience. At least to a limited extent. The brain is a multimodal sense organ. We combine our senses all the time. Touch with vision. Vision with sound. Proprioception with touch. Much of the brain is taken up by these cross-modal integration areas.

Exactly.
And so it has to be, a "holistic interplay", if we wish to orientate ourselves int he environement more economically.

So, it shouldn't be a shock to have the occasional error.

Or maybe the "error" is actually due to our traditional understanding of the senses -- that they are something separate from one another.
We are culturally conditioned into thinking we have those five senses and that they are something separate. And this analytical understanding of the senses then leads to thinking that synaesthesias are "errors".

But to have a permanent defect would invalidate much of our sensory data and leave us unrooted in a strange world. Until you learn to cope that is. And that's just it. It would be a handicap you'd have to cope with. There might be some benificial side effects but the detrimental effects would far outweigh them.

Hm. There is that story circulating about that experiment where someone was wearing special glasses that turned the picture up-side down -- and then the brain adjusted to it and switched sides so as to keep the sense of up and down.

I don't know whether this is true or not, but I bet that we are very adjustable.


* * *

I have a question:

There are optic tricks -- like when we think a straight line crossing a set of parallel straight lines is jagged etc.
Are such tricks also possible for other senses?

 

[jennyRater]

There are optic tricks -- like when we think a straight line crossing a set of parallel straight lines is jagged etc.
Are such tricks also possible for other senses?

Touching somethin cold can sometimes make you asume its wet. Touch at special stress points on the body can produce feelings in other places. ventriloqitsts modulate their voice to confuse your sense of direction.. I think some substnces can be sweet, but taste salty on a differnt part of your tongue.