Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a fancy name for when you experience one of your senses through another. For example, you might hear the name "Alex" and see green. Or you might read the word "street" and taste citrus fruit.

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Dinesh ^club

Even spoken words, though, are not entirely arbitrary. Words sometimes do reflect the shapes of things they name -- that is, there is an iconic component to speech as well as to manual gesture. The German psychologist Wolfgant Kohler showed people drawing of two meaningless objects, one smooth and rounded and the other sharply inflected and spiky, and asked people to choose which one was named “baluma” and which “takete.” Ninety five percent of respondents choose “baluma” for the rounded one and “takete” for the spiky one. This has been repeated many times with slightly different names. Vilayanur Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard attribute this to synesthesia -- a natural (though widely varying) tendency to associate stimuli of different modalities, in this case sound and vision. They also suggest more direct mapping. For instance, the words in various languages for referring to someone in the second person ( ‘you’ in English, ‘tu’ or ‘vous’ in French, ‘thoo’ in Tamil) involve pushing the lips forward to the listener, while words referring to the self ( ‘me’ in English, ‘moi’ in French, ‘nann’ in Tamil) seem to point inward with tongue and lips to the speaker himself. ~ Page 153

2 years ago. Edited 2 years ago.

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