Dirty Light - Marko Ciciliani

- The fact that drugs can induce synaesthetic perception shows that the separation
between the senses is not a final one but that the connections can temporarily be
reanimated (provided that the same neurological processes are involved as with true
synaesthesia; see remark above).
- Ur-synaesthesias are an evidence of intersensory connections. They are reflected in
countless figures of speech and linguistic synaesthetic metaphors. 26 The French
phenomenological philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) argued that
synaesthetic metaphors are abstractions from a preconscious unified synaesthetic
experience. His ideas were inspired by the German Gestalttheorie 27 and are supported
by recent research by V.S. Ramachandran and E.M. Hubbard (see below).
- Scientists made tests where words in different colours are shown to people for a few
milliseconds. 28 Even non-synaesthetes need more time to recognise the word ‘green’
when it is shown in a different colour than green or black. When the colour
contradicts to the displayed word, the process of recognition is slowed down. This
phenomenon is also known as interference in perception.
- Visual Thinking: means of visualisation have had a strong influence on the
development of abstract ideas. The famous physicists Albert Einstein (1879-1955)
and Richard Feynman (1918-1988) both reported that they had essential mathematical
insights after trying to visualise abstract ideas.
Several scientists argue that synaesthetic brain processes are also responsible for the
formation of linguistic metaphors. Metaphors have the potential to “introduce
a sensory logic at the semantic level alluding to a more complex scenario of interrelated
meanings and experiences of the world”. 29
These researches have gone so far as to argue that these processes led to the very formation of
language. V.S. Ramachandran and E.M. Hubbard have proposed the existence of a sensoryto-motor
synaesthesia; a better name might be synkinesia. They argue that lip, tongue and
mouth movements might be linked to objects and events in close ways and that this might
have led to the creation of a proto-language. Very often, words that refer to something small
use sounds that make something small with the lips and narrow the vocal tract, like “tiny”,
“little”, “petite” whereas the opposite is true for words denoting large or enormous objects.
26 For example: sharp cheese, bitter cold, dark voice, thick air, sharp sound etc..
27 After Campen, Cretien van: The Hidden Sense, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2008), 98.
28 These test are called Stroop tests, based on their inventor, the psychologist John Ridley Stroop (1897-1973).
29 Cacciari, Cristina: “Why Do We Speak Metaphorically Reflections on the Functions of
Metaphor in Discourse and Reasoning”, in Katz, Albert N., Cacciari, Cristina; Gibbs, Raymond
W. Jr.; Turner, Mark.: Figurative Language and Thought. New York & Oxford: Oxford
University Press (1998), 128.
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