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Maxed Out: Seeing Sounds and Tasting Colors
September 23, 2009 |Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
The word synaesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia and synesthesia) is derived from the Greek syn, meaning "together" or "union," and aesthesis or aisthesis, meaning "sensation" or "to perceive." Thus, depending on who you are talking to, synaesthesia can be taken to mean "synthetic experience" or "joined sensation" or "to perceive together." And if you think this is confusing, just wait to see what's to come!
In a nutshell, synaesthesia embraces a variety of different conditions in which the stimulation of one sets of sensory inputs (say, sound) is simultaneously perceived by one or more of the other senses (sight or touch, for example).
There are many different forms of synaesthesia. For our purposes here, we are primarily interested in those that pertain to color vision. One very common type is when folks associate numbers and letters of the alphabet with different colors. For example, consider the way in which a non-synaesthete would see the alphabet printed as black text on white paper as illustrated in Figure 1.
Figure 1. The way a non-synaesthete sees the alphabet (printed as black text on a white background)
Now consider the same alphabet - still presented as black text - as it might be seen by a synaesthete as illustrated in Figure 2.
Figure 2. The way a synaesthete might see the alphabet (still printed as black text on a white background)
Note that the above is simply a representation created by the author of this paper. Every synaesthete (of this type) perceives his or her own color alphabet. Having said this, research on a large number of synaesthetes reveals certain trends, such as the fact that 'a' is often red, 'b; is often blue, 'c' is often yellow, and so forth.
Another interesting point is that some synaesthetes "see" the letters as being black, but "perceive" the colors as being "associated" with the letters. By comparison, other synaesthetes actually do "see/perceive" the letters as having those colors.
And what about words? Well, let's start by considering the way in which a non-synaesthete would see a group of words printed as black text on white paper as illustrated in Figure 3.
Figure 3. The way a non-synaesthete sees words (printed as black text on a white background)
For some synaesthetes, each word will appear as (or be perceived as being associated with) a color that is derived from the individual colors of that word's constituent letters. By comparison, other synaesthetes may "see" or "perceive" the words as having colors that are not related to the letters associated with their particular color alphabet. An example of this latter case might be as illustrated in Figure 4.
Figure 4. The way a synaesthete might perceive words (as before, actually printed as black text on white paper)
As a slightly different example, consider the following illustration, which comprises a random assortment of the numbers 2 and 5. Can you quickly count how many number '2' characters there are?
Now, this is where things start to get interesting. The author of this paper (that would be yours truly) is an electronic and computer design engineer by trade. Over the course of the years, I have spent a lot of time looking at schematic (circuit) diagrams composed of symbols representing Boolean logic functions such as AND, OR, XOR, and NOT. The way in which a non-synaesthete (like me) sees such a schematic diagram printed in black ink on white paper is illustrated in Figure 5.
Figure 5. The way a non-synaesthete sees a gate-level schematic diagram (drawn with black lines on white paper)
I started wondering, are there any synaesthetic digital logic designers out there who would associate different colors with the various symbols. So I began to ask around in various blogs and articles...
First I heard from a logic designer who is synaesthetic with regard to "feeling" music. As he told me: "For me, adjacent keys on the piano have very different subjective personalities." With regard to logic functions as discussed above, he said: "On reflection - now you ask - I do have a different feeling impression of the basic Boolean operators OR, AND, NOT ... but nothing that intrudes into my consciousness during the course of doing my job."
And then I heard from an electrical engineer named Jordan A. Mills who says that he does indeed perceive different colors when looking at gate-level schematic diagrams. Jordan was kind enough to take a black-and-white schematic I created and to modify it to reflect the way in which he perceives it as illustrated in Figure 6.
Figure 6. The way Jordan perceives a gate-level schematic (still drawn with black lines on white paper)
In Jordan's case, the shapes of graphic elements seem to be irrelevant to his synaesthetic perception. A small example is the triangular clock input to the flipflop, which is "yellow and sharp" (Jordan's words). By comparison, the triangular inverter bodies are "red and sharp" while the bobbles on the inverters are "yellow and smooth."
Interestingly enough, Jordan noted that - while adding these colors - if he paused to think about what he was doing, his perception changed. In this case, he had to stop and think about something else for a second and then return to the diagram to make sure his perception wasn't skewed. (Jordan also commented that this does not happen for glyphs that he uses regularly such as letters and numbers - in those cases, his perception is immediate and unchanging.)
I don't know about you, but I find all of this stuff to be absolutely fascinating!
Acknowledgements
This article was abstracted from an ongoing and evergrowing paper on color vision from the author's Web site at www.DIYCalculator.com.
About the authorClive "Max" Maxfield is the author and co author of a number of books, including Bebop to the Boolean Boogie (An Unconventional Guide to Electronics) and How Computers Do Math featuring the pedagogical and phantasmagorical virtual DIY Calculator.