原创 Understanding synaesthesia (Part 1)

I have this ever-evolving paper on Color Vision, which I am quite proud of.  Have you checked it out? For example, if you do a search for "Color Vision" on Google, this paper currently comes up as the seventh entry, which is rather good going when you consider the abundance of information that's now available on the web.

Anyway, one of the topics in this paper is titled "Seeing sounds and tasting colors". This refers to something called synaesthesia, 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).

As you will see (below), I actually found an engineer who sees black-and-white gate-level schematics in colour. Anyway, I was just thinking about how cool context-sensitive editors are – you know, the ones like Verilog editors where the various syntactical elements are displayed in different colours – and I started to wonder if there were any synaesthete design engineers who see black-and-white RTL in colour. Read on and you'll see that I mean...

The following is abstracted from my Color Vision paper:

Synaesthesia
The word synaesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia and synesthesia) is derived from the Greek syn, meaning "together" or "union", and aesthesis or aisthesis, meaning "senzation" 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 colour vision. One very common type is when folks associate numbers and letters of the alphabet with different colours. For example, consider the way in which a non-synaesthete would see the alphabet printed as black text on white paper as illustrated below:

Now consider the same alphabet – still presented as black text – as it might be seen by a synaesthete as illustrated below:

Note that the above is simply a representation I created in Visio. Every synaesthete (of this type) perceives his or her own colour 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 colours as being "associated" with the letters. By comparison, other synaesthetes actually do "see/perceive" the letters as having those colours.

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 below:

For some synaesthetes, each word will appear as (or be perceived as being associated with) a colour that is derived from the individual colours of that word's constituent letters. By comparison, other synaesthetes may "see" or "perceive" the words as having colours that are not related to the letters associated with their particular colour alphabet. An example of this latter case might be as illustrated below:

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?

For the non-synaesthetes amongst us, counting the number of '2' characters in the illustration above may require a little concentration ("Did I already get that one?"). Well, now consider the way a synaesthete might perceive this same image as shown below:

Wow! Now (assuming you're not colour blind), it's really easy to see that there are only eight number '2' characters surrounded by a plethora of number '5' characters. How cool!

It's important to note that synaesthesia is additive; that is, it "overlays" the primary senses. Also, we should remind ourselves that there are many different types of synaesthesia. For example, when some synaesthetes hear music, they might see patterns of colours hovering about three feet in front of them. A trill of the flute may appear as a collection of purple triangles and small pink dots, for example. (It is said that if a non-synaesthete wants to get a feel for what this might be like to experience, a good start would be to watch appropriate portions of the original Fantasia movie by Walt Disney.)

So how many of us are synaesthetes? This is really difficult to pin down, because there are so many different types (listening to music can cause a tickling sensation of touch, or a perception of different smells, or ...), and different folks can be affected to lesser or greater amounts (a "feel" of a colour versus actually "seeing" that colour). Some estimates put synaesthetes as being roughly one in 25,000, while others say one in 2,000, and still others say as many as one in 100 may by synaesthetic.

Does this latter value seem high to you? Well, consider that if people are asked to associate different colours with different notes on a piano, the vast majority of us will associate darker colours with lower notes and lighter colours with higher notes. Why should this be (considering that colours and tones have nothing intrinsically to do with each other) unless we are all synaesthetic to at least some small degree?

Now, this is where things start to get interesting. I'm 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.

[To be continued on Understanding synaesthesia (Part 1)]