Synaesthesia

She's Touch, Smell, Sight, Taste, and Sound: Evidence for the “Common Sense” of Aristotle in Modern Neuroscience and the Application of that Understanding to Solving the Molyneux Problem

by Thomas Sundaram

No bibliography required for the class, all sources used cited in notes.

More Seminal Ethics Implications

by Mark Singer

Tandem works include: "Seminal Ethics," "Kant Concept Art," "Addendum - More Seminal Ethics Implications" - also on this site.

These implications are: moral, epistemology, love, happiness, time and space, psychological, art, education, medical, economic, war, capital punishment, and abortion.

"Addendum - More Seminal Ethics Implications" includes additional categories.

Look Lively: The Amplification of Objects' Agency through Synaesthetic Personification

by Emma Welter

Dissertation: MA Material and Visual Culture
Department of Anthropology, UCL
September 2011
(Unedited since submission)

Academic interest in synaesthesia – an anomalous neurological condition that causes one sensory stimulus to trigger... more Academic interest in synaesthesia – an anomalous neurological condition that causes one sensory stimulus to trigger another – has experienced an upsurge in recent years as issues of individual and cultural perception are revisited. There has been a smattering of anthropological documentation of synaesthesia within specific cultures, but its personification-affiliated forms (OP/OLP), in which objects or components of ordered sequences such as numbers, letters, or colors are perceived as possessing distinct personalities and genders, have yet to be integrated within material and visual culture studies despite their potentially immense significance to the discipline: they are an extreme amplification of discussions, pioneered by Alfred Gell, surrounding the “agentic” qualities of objects. Between June and September 2011, I interviewed four women who experienced these types of synaesthesia in an effort to understand how their perceptions differed from cultural instances of personification and to what extent living in a “personified world” impacted their memories and relationships with objects, others, and themselves. Subsequently, I have investigated ethnographic reports of personification throughout myriad cultures, applied them to theories exploring the possibility of objects’ autonomy, and incorporated them with the accounts of my informants.

Sobre o conceito de pseudomorfose em Theodor Adorno

by Rodrigo Duarte

Sobre a relação entre os media

by Rodrigo Duarte

Kinetic Synaesthesia: Experiencing Dance in Multimedia Scenographies

by Marc Boucher

Published in 'Contemporary Aesthetics', 2004

The contrasting kinetic values between dancer and projected moving image in multimedia scenographies provide the... more The contrasting kinetic values between dancer and projected moving image in multimedia scenographies provide the viewer with a particular type of synaesthetic experience. It results from the interaction of kinesthesis proper to each medium, the dancing body and the moving image. The extensive use of projected moving images in performing arts is part of a cultural trend that priviledges a fundamental yet little understood aspect of aesthetic experience. Kinetic synaesthesia is a transdisciplinary concept formulated in light of psychological, physiological, and phenomenological accounts of both synaesthesia and kinesthesis.

La pensée synesthésique dans le Paris fin-de-siècle: la musique et ses rapports avec la littérature et les arts plastiques

by Sonsoles Hernandez Barbosa

PhD dissertation research (Universidad Complutense de Madrid / Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris 4)

Review Forum on Cook's Analysing Musical Multimedia

by Joshua B. Mailman

The synaesthetic turn

by Tarja Laine

Seeing sounds and tingling tongues: Qualia in synaesthesia and sensory substitution

by Michael Proulx

Synthetic synaesthesia and sensory substitution

by Michael Proulx

Conscious Cogn. 2010 Mar;19(1):501-3. Epub 2010 Jan 6.

Visual information can be provided to blind users through sensory substitution devices that convert images into sound.... more Visual information can be provided to blind users through sensory substitution devices that convert images into sound. Through extensive use to develop expertise, some blind users have reported visual experiences when using such a device. These blind expert users have also reported visual phenomenology to other sounds even when not using the device. The blind users acquired synthetic synaesthesia, with visual experience evoked by sounds only after gaining such expertise. Sensorimotor learning may facilitate and perhaps even be required to develop expertise in the use of multimodal information. Furthermore, other areas where expertise is acquired in dividing attention amongst cross-modal information or integrating such information might also give rise to synthetic synaesthesia.

Introduction: Synaesthesia and Kinaesthetics

by Joerg Fingerhut

Synaesthetic experience and kinaesthetics, the experience of the posture and the movement of the body, are key... more Synaesthetic experience and kinaesthetics, the experience of the posture and the movement of the body, are key concepts in the understanding of the interplay between the habitus of the organism and its habitat. Both denote synthetic achievements of the sensing human organism. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously noted: “[s]ynaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking feel […].” The original unity in sense perception, in his view, was grounded in the living body constituting a ‘système synergique’ linked together in the action of being in the world and thus constituting the kinaesthetically experienced ‘lived body’ of the embodied subject.

The present third volume of the series Habitus in Habitat does not just address synaesthesia and kinaesthetics from the point of view of the organism or a psychologically and phenomenologically construed philosophy of perception and the knowledge that this perspective brings. It also aims at an understanding of the several interfaces of habitat and experience. A theoretical approach that intends to include the sensually and emotionally charged environment (i.e. what it affords, what it offers and the interaction it enables) brings into view artistic, cultural, and social renderings of synaesthetic and kinaesthetic phenomena. It is the very habitus of the human organism to engage, to share, to express itself, and by following this habitus it creates a social and cultural habitat. This habitat, the social structures and urban patterns of cities, the complex unfoldings of artworks, the sensual environment of everyday life, all mark elements of synthesis which can be enlightened by theories of organismic capabilities, but also mark phenomena in their own right. The knowledge embedded in these ways of differentiating and combining modalities and the ways of making their interplay explicit in multimodal artworks and kinaesthetic artistic practices, transforms our experiences in various ways and calls for specific scientific and intellectual means to bring this specific knowledge into view. The Habitus in Habitat project aims to take both the specific ways of constructing this habitat and its very properties as well as the theories concerned with the engaging organism and its habitus into focus without committing the error of unheedingly foregrounding only one of
these two intrinsically intertwined aspects.

This only recently has come to be appreciated within the growing field of the cognitive sciences and has found expression in their recognition of the need for a new science of the mind which takes the embodied, embedded, enactive, extended and affective subject seriously, as has been proposed in the philosophy of the embodied mind. For example, in philosophy itself, this approach has been put to work in understanding social and political phenomena by bringing together social constructivism and biological foundations, the social and the somatic. This alternative picture of the human mind distances itself from the methodological solipsism and the strict boundaries of the neuroscientific disciplines that investigate local phenomena and generalize about the human mind and nature based on these findings. No comprehensive theory of mind and human practice can evolve by turning away from the embeddedness of its results in the wider biological, social or cultural settings. The social sciences, political theory, art history, media theory, and film studies – among many others – also have to be taken into account. It is fair to say that the very disciplines just mentioned have already gained in influence
(as the limitations of a too narrowly construed biological theory have become manifest) and nowadays are seen more and more as what they are and always have been: congruent theories of human nature. As such they restore insight into humans as bio-cultural beings and correct the shortcomings of some neurobiology and its view of the ‘naked brain’ as the single explanans. In taking the more comprehensive stance, the boundaries of the sciences are becoming more and more permeable, though not without keeping the methodological
principles of the respective disciplines intact. Those principles sometimes even are more fully explicated when adjacent theoretical achievements of different disciplines are compared and differentiated. The present volume of Habitus in Habitat follows such a line of thought with its transdisciplinary endeavour to explore synaesthesia and kinaesthetics.

Sensorimotor Signature, Skill, and Synaesthesia. Two Challenges for Enactive Theories of Perception

by Joerg Fingerhut

penultimate draft; published in: Synaesthesia and Kinaesthetics. Habitus in Habitat III (ed. Joerg Fingerhut, Sabine Flach & Jan Soeffner ), Bern & New York 2011, pp. 101-120. (pagination as in the published version)

The condition of ‘genuine perceptual synaesthesia’ has been a focus of attention in research in psychology and... more The condition of ‘genuine perceptual synaesthesia’ has been a focus of attention in research in psychology and neuroscience over the last decades. For subjects in this condition stimulation in one modality automatically and consistently over the subject’s lifespan triggers a percept in another modality. In hearing→colour synaesthesia, for example, a specific sound experience evokes a perception of a specific colour. In this paper, I discuss questions and challenges that the phenomenon of synaesthetic experience raises for theories of perceptual experience in general, and for theories that see the content and modality of conscious experience as being constituted and determined by the active and skilful exploration of the environment in particular. The focus of my paper will be on the latter, ‘enactive’ view of perception and its theory of what determines the modality-specific ‘feel’ of a perceptual experience

In the first part of the paper I introduce the phenomenon of ‘genuine perceptual synaesthesia’. I then, in the second part, sketch the theory of active perception that I want to endorse: enactivism. This is done by focusing on two basic assumptions underlying enactivism, and by defining two claims that a rather narrow ‘sensorimotor enactivism’ derives from these assumptions. These claims are: (a) the modality of a perceptual experience is constituted by the sensorimotor signature (i.e. the specific dependencies relating movements to stimulations) and the larger body-involving cycle underlying this modality; and: (b) distorting ele-ments get integrated and become transparent for the perceptual systems over a learning time span. These claims are challenged by cases of genuine synaesthesia. In part three, I discuss possible replies of the more narrowly defined sensorimotor enactivism to the first challenge and show that those replies either fail or betray important enactive insights. I will argue in particular that a promising way to meet the challenge (i.e. to claim that synaesthetic colours lack the properties of ‘bodiliness’ and ‘grabbiness’ of normal perceptual experience) fails. In part four, I suggest that enactivism, because it is unable to explain the perception-like experiences in cases of genuine perceptual synaesthesia, has to focus, instead, on typical realizers of perceptual experiences and on a more general enactivism in order to meet the two challenges. I show that this goes hand in hand with the inclusion of other adaptive time spans (in the course of which the perceptual system of an organism is shaped) in the explanations of phenomena like synaesthesia. In my view enactivism has not made this recourse to longer time spans as opposed to the ‘here-and-now’ explicit enough, though it is inherent to enactivism, even in the narrower, sensorimotor version of the theory. In order to explain and integrate certain atypical expressions of a perceptual mechanism – as I will argue in the last part of the paper – it is necessary to also take into view the embodiment of cognitive solutions shaped over evolutionary time spans and to adopt a heuristics and engineering perspective on such phenomena. This, I conclude, allows us to meet the challenges and hold on to central tenets of an enactive theory of perception.

A Brief Survey of Olivier Messiaen’s Harmonic Practise

by James Wilson

THE CORRESPONDENCES BETWEEN SOUND AND LIGHT AND COLOUR-MUSIC: SKB "PROMETEI"

by Paulo Quadros

Portraits in the Mind

by Mark Singer

"Portraits in the Mind" - composed mostly of art - is based on research at Kendall College of Art & Design (USA) in which this new link was discovered:

> 1:10 art students reported synaesthesia

> 1:3 of the above demographic reported co-consciousness.

Portraits in the Mind

by Mark Singer

"Portraits in the Mind" - composed mostly of art - is based on research at Kendall College of Art & Design (USA) in which this new link was discovered:

> 1:10 art students reported synaesthesia

> 1:3 of the above demographic reported co-consciousness.

Kant Concept Art

by Mark Singer

Tandem works include: "Seminal Ethics," "More Seminal Ethics Implications," "Addendum - More Seminal Ethics Implications" - also on this site.

The artist is P. Patten (USA).

Seminal Ethics

by Mark Singer

Tandem works include: "Kant Concept Art," "More Seminal Ethics Implications," "Addendum - More Seminal Ethics Implications" - also on this site.

Additional implications include: moral, epistemology, love, happiness, time and space, psychological, art, education, medical, economic, war, capital punishment, abortion, and possibility.

Discovering Your Ethical Core

by Mark Singer

Related works include: "Seminal Ethics," "Kant Concept Art," "More Seminal Ethics Implications," "Addendum - More Seminal Ethics Implications" - also on this site.