Unsolicited Advice

Richard Cytowic's Big Book o' Brain Things is beginning to annoy me. All the technical neurology is fascinating and useful, but he keeps poking at things and getting interesting results, then wandering away and forgetting about them again, probably because they're not strictly synaesthesia and therefore not romantic enough. z. B.: A suspiciously high proportion of synaesthetics report that they have a crap sense of direction and/or some variety of crippling inability to decipher maps. So do I, sort of. I'm neither ignorant nor dyslexic here; I can read the map, and I know perfectly well what it says. My memory isn't pixel-perfect photographic -- pretty much nobody's is -- but it is eidetic, and I can retain thumbnails of stuff I look up on Google Maps just fine. The problem is that I have a hell of a time orienting myself in 3D space using a 2D representation. I have the snapshot image and I know I need to turn east on Main Street, but fuck me if I know wheth...

One of my commenters suggested I read some of the synaesthesia research published by Richard Cytowic, so of course I immediately went and got basically everything he ever wrote -- well, the books, anyway; I haven't been through the papers -- through the Boston Public Library system. (To steal a quote from Moggie, I don't know how to like things casually.) The Central Library is under construction right now and I am a lazy bastard, so if I want specific volumes I just put a hold on them and have the librarians pull them for pickup. Wandering aimlessly through the shelves is for when I want something to read but don't know what. Boredom is a known hazard with me. The library card has joined my T pass, ID, and debit card in the phone case, as part of the minimum possible set of items I might need to keep myself out of trouble at any given moment -- I can't go anywhere without a music player, which means I can't go anywhere without the phone, which means I can't go ...

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that thing with the songs and the colors was in fact what other people call synaesthesia. There are two broad classes of synaesthetes: Projectors and associators. "Projectors" perceive the synaesthetic experience to be outside of their own head, superimposed on the literal experience that brings it up. "Associators" perceive the synaesthetic experience to be inside, visible to 'the mind's eye', but not physically applied to the literal experience of whatever is coming in from outside. An associator looks at the Wednesday heading on the calendar and "knows" that Wednesday is feminine and solemn; a projector looks at the Wednesday heading and "sees" that although the print is physically black, it is simultaneously also a bright scarlet red. Now that I know the difference, when I read pop-sci articles I can usually pick out which kind of synaesthetic experience the interviewee is talkin...

People ask me from time to time how I can pick up languages so quickly. My best guess is that it's down to a very high-order synaesthesia. I think we're calling them 'ideaesthesias' now. The basic form of synaesthesia is crossed wires between two senses; the classic case is of letters or numbers acquiring their own colors. Typically, one says that a synaesthetic 'sees' R as yellow, or something like that, but it's not quite that literal. The R flickers, as if one eye is seeing the real black ink it's printed in, and the other one sees it in yellow, and they go back and forth on dominance. If you've ever done those spot-the-difference puzzles by just crossing your eyes and superimposing them like a stereogram, then you've seen the way the differences sort of shimmer or glitter -- it's much like that. [If you haven't ever done a spot-the-difference puzzle like that, then congratulations on learning a new trick. It's a brilliant way to...

Have reminded Jazmin once again that PC + HDD + HDTV = S-T-E-R-E-O. She's enough younger than I am that she might just have generally grown up with everyone using their own Walkmans and MP3 players and iPod docks, I suppose; or possibly I just had an aggressively teenage and self-centered mother who enjoyed sharing her music with the neighbors at window-rattling volumes. I used to have a proper component stereo, with a real amp and a couple sets of speakers, but I eventually gave it up in favor of being able to move, which I had to do frequently, without giving myself a hernia. In any case, Milkdrop looks pretty bitchin' in 1080p. I recently had a run-in with a group of performance artists who espoused the philosophy that one should let dance/movement pieces grow "organically" out of a key concept. Failure was had when I tried to explain that they needed to give me some better parameters than "anything that comes into your head" when confronted with the ...

I lose my brain to Cracked every so often, and sometimes they even publish something useful. http://www.cracked.com/article_20629_6-ways-life-insanely-different-when-you-hear-colors.html I didn't realize #4 was a synaesthetic thing, although I really should have -- I do know how eyes work. I suppose that explains my eternal frustration at not being able to color things to match what I see in my head. And also why other people have no idea what I mean when I describe something as 'that peculiar shade of teal-purple'. It does happen with purely imaginary colors -- pterry's octarine is a color which is pumpkin orange and at the same time kelly green, hth -- but it also kicks in sometimes with things that exist in the real world. I gather from the common descriptions of colors "shifting" that  most people perceive things like peacock feathers and opals and iridescent glass beads as magically changing from one color to another as their viewing angle changes. ...