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What Color Do You Feel?
Thanks to AntAesthetic for finding this short news item from Germany:
A BLIND woman has baffled scientists by apparently proving that she can distinguish colours by touch.
Gabriele Simon was able to correctly name the colours of volunteers’ T-shirts and blouses in a show on German TV.
The 48-year-old, of Wallenhorst, Lower Saxony, said: “It took me 20 years to master this skill. It is pure learning and concentration.”
But critics say she is a fraud. Hans Peter Brass, of a German association for the blind, said: “Such a thing has never occurred before, not to me or anyone else.”
As Ant points out, the last line in that article is great because it makes plain the assumption that we so often have about unusual occurences: that if they’ve never happened to me, then they just don’t happen!
Synaesthesia (senses blending together) however is one of those things that I suspect is a lot more prevalent among people than we realize. I know I’ve experienced a mild form of it since I was a kid. And on certain occasions where I was stoned, I’ve been able to “taste” things with my fingers. Has anybody else had experiences like this: hearing colors, tasting sounds, etc? Could be either a very subtle kind of impressionistic connection, as in poetry, or something much more overt. I’m curious to collect together many people’s experiences in this area.
Here’s also an article on synaesthesia from Scientific American for anybody who wants to do further research.
October 9th, 2005 at 6:06 pm
germans are a lot of fun. they like thier pictures big, like billboards beside the highway. they obey those. the subtle stuff goes undetected.
i feel colours. there are some colours and combinations of colours that make me physically sick. others calm me and others, such as red, fill me with energy.
October 9th, 2005 at 7:03 pm
this is very similar, can’t remember where i found the link:
human hands emit light
interesting that when i read the german story quoted above i took her ability to be “perception”, which is like a cold scientific fact, right? (whether you believe she can do it or not.) alistair’s comment on the other hand (ha) is about the emotions invoked by colours, which is kinda “fluffy” (no offense, i’m going somewhere with this). which makes me think, what if emotion and perception are precisely the same thing. that is, you can’t feel something unless you really feel it.
ya feel?
October 9th, 2005 at 8:38 pm
Oh wow. that’s really cool, and I’ve never heard that before. According to that article, shouldn’t we be able to see our foreheads and fingernails in the dark at least a little bit?
I’ve heard that parts of our body are a somewhat photosensitive though, and they’ve created alarm clocks to reflect that by getting brighter as the desired wake-time approaches. Me being a night person, I’d doubt they’d really work for me. And even if they did, I’d probably hide under the covers and sneak in a few more hours.
I just realized that I must really like words with æ (I think it’s called an “ash”) in them.
hæhæhæ.
October 9th, 2005 at 8:42 pm
2,247,296 scientists have called me fluffy. science is limited by the boundaries of thier metrics. it doesn`t include consciousness. to be alive is fluffy. i remember the first time i read the term “fuzzy logic” i almost fell off my chair laughing. the scientists want to co-opt consciousness any way they can. from abject denial to quantification. i heard a suggestion once that to measure consciousness sufficiently accurately would take a computer as large as the universe it`s self.
we already have one.
October 9th, 2005 at 9:57 pm
I am a Synaesthete, audio to visual, which means I ’see sounds’ most of the time. Pretty explicitly, at that.
The funniest thing about it, to me, is that I never even realised that it didn’t apply to everyone until I ’slipped up’ once to my mother (I think I said someone’s name was ‘Very green’ or something like that). I’ve also, from talking with other people, found out that not everyone’s got the same connections, and that it’s apparently pretty common (more or less) among Autistics (and I’m High Functioning Autistic). I also know I can’t handle being around colour combos that look like ‘bad’ sounds to me.
And I would be completely unsurprised to find out that it was a lot more common than people thought, especially given that…well, I didn’t know it was weird until I mentioned something to my mother. Hell, how often do you remark on how ‘weird’ it is that grass is green or something? I didn’t remark on the colour of, say, dogs barking for that same reason. I assumed everyone else saw what I saw when I heard things.
October 10th, 2005 at 1:45 am
sometimes when I’m feeling my way around the dark, I’ll see what I’m touching very vaguely, and fleetingly. I’m not sure if it’s something I see in my mind or an image formed by my phosphenes; probably both.