door_of_time | Entries tagged with synaesthesia

"I used to liked yellow but I got fed up with it."

What flower colours do birds and bees prefer? (ABC, 16 November 2016) Bees see blue, green, and ultraviolet; some birds are "violet-sensitive", seeing red, blue, green, and violet, and some are "ultraviolet-sensitive" and see that part of the spectrum as well. Most Australian pollinating birds are violet-sensitive; plants may have red hues which attract birds, their preferred pollinators, but not bees. The flies that do the pollinating on Macquarie Island prefer a "yellow-green-cream colour".

A Lost Purple Pigment, Where Quantum Physics and the Terracotta Warriors Collide (Hyperallergic, 17 December 2014)

How Glistening Egyptian Blue Pigment Was Forgotten then Lost (Smithsonian magazine, 31 August 2015)

Female lemurs with color vision provide advantages for their group (phys.org, 5 December 2016) About a quarter of the female Verreaux's sifakas were trichromats, able to distinguish green and red; females tend to lead groups in foraging.

Disordered nanonetwork produces robust and vibrant colors for vehicles, biomimetic tissues and camouflage (phys.org, 28 November 2016). Borrowing the structure of the cotinga's brilliant feathers to create "metamaterials".

these are colorblind glasses.

This Artist Is the Only Person Banned From Using the World’s Pinkest Pink (Smithsonian magazine, 16 December 2016) The feud behind this is a riot.

"'I’m color-blind, but I can pick out that blue anywhere,' [Eddie] Redmayne said and walked toward the painting in a sort of trance. 'I wrote 30,000 words on this color, and I never grew tired of it. The pigment is staggering. It’s amazing that a color can be so emotional. One can only hope to achieve that intensity in acting.'" (W, 1 April 2013). Presumably Redmayne is red-green colourblind. It'd be interesting to know if and how this affects his experience of International Klein Blue. But my understanding of the science of colour vision is still crap. See also: Double filters allow for tetrachromatic vision in humans (TechXplore, 23 March 2017))

Listen with your eyes: one in five of us may 'hear' flashes of light (Guardian Australia, 17 January 2017). "One in five people is affected by a synaesthesia-like phenomenon in which visual movements or flashes of light are 'heard' as faint sounds, according to scientists."

The Colorful Stories of 5 Obsolete Art Pigments (Hyperallergic, 2 July 2013) | More Vibrant Tales of Obsolete Pigments (Hyperallergic, 8 July 2013). Maya blue, Tyrian purple, white lead, lapis lazuli, dragon's blood, mummy brown, Indian yellow, Scheele's green, orpiment, hartshorn, ivory black, Paris green, iris green, sepia ink, smalt, uranium yellow, gamboge, and verdigris. Whew!

As I was making this posting, I realised I was remembering the dates of the articles partly by the colour of the years - that is, I have Grapheme-colour synaesthesia, and associate a colour with the last digit of the year; deep brown for "6", for example. I often find it difficult to keep the date in mind as I move between the original article and my posting - I wonder if this is a way my brain can divide up the work a bit.

ETA:

Colour and Culture Among the Aztecs (1) (Mexicolore, 11 October 2015) | Colour and Culture Among the Aztecs (2) (Mexicolore, 12 October 2015)

The vision thing: how babies colour in the world (The Guardian, 11 April 2017)

Spectral discrimination in color blind animals via chromatic aberration and pupil shape (PNAS 113(29) 23 May 2016). A different way to see colour.

New paint colors invented by neural network (lewisandquark.tumblr.com, June 2017). Everything from "Light of Blast" to "Turdly".

Notes on synaesthesia: How seeing music changes everything (SMH, 7 July 2017)

Synaesthesia could help us understand how the brain processes language (The Guardian, 26 February 2016)

How we all could benefit from synaesthesia (The Guardian, 27 April 2014)

Ingrid Sundberg's Color Thesaurus

Mummy Brown and Other Historical Colors

The Chemistry of Permanent Hair Dyes

Cosmic Latte: the average colour of the universe

The mystery of tetrachromacy: If 12% of women have four cone types in their eyes, why do so few of them actually see more colours? (Neurosphere blog, 17 December 2015)

Yves Klein: the Man Who Invented a Colour (BBC, 28 August 2014)

A Year Ago, The Dress Murdered the Idea of Objective Color: "... color is a proxy for understanding the difference between objective reality and the version of it that people perceive with their senses and create in their brains." (Wired, February 2016)

Transgenic zebrafish forms technicolour 'skinbow': Fluorescent proteins used to track individual skin cells in real time.

Colour: the Spectrum of Science

The Harvard Library That Protects The World's Rarest Colors

The Extraordinary Iridescent Details of Peacock Feathers Captured Under a Microscope

The Search for Our Missing Colors

First evidence that synaesthesia gives colour to sign language (New Scientist, 1 July 2016)

A Chemist Accidentally Creates A New Blue. Then What? (NPR, 16 July 2016)

'You could disappear into it': Anish Kapoor on his exclusive rights to the 'blackest black' (Guardian Australia, 26 September 2016)

Sex and color language

Pearlescent Sky Blue (the official colour of Kpop boy band SHINee)

On Colour, and on the necessity for a general diffusion of taste among all classes by Sir John Gardner Wilkinson (1858)

Causes of Color

Radiolab episode about Colors

From the words of an albino, a brilliant blend of color - Georg Sachs and synaesthesia

Jay Neitz: My life goal is to cure colour blindness

Seeing synaesthetic stars during sex

Are We All Synesthetes?

Regaining the Rainbow: A Gene Therapy Approach to Color Blindness

Weird links with words and colours in the mind

ETA: Color Wheels are wrong? How color vision actually works

Color Vision

The CMYK Color Wheel

There is no pink light

Colour words in many languages

Denis Diderot, from 'Letter on the Deaf and Dumb', 1751

Yves Klein: Les Monochromes de l'Époque Bleue (1955-1962)

Chemistry puts the color back in art

Hearing the voices of colours

Black Bile and Black Dogs - colour and depression

Regaining the Rainbow: A Gene Therapy Approach to Color Blindness

The Colour Range in Atelier Interactive

Like the colours of the prism - Mindhacks on a 1904 account of synaesthesia

The colors of antiquity. "Egyptian blue was a synthetic pigment created through various manufacturing phases that included copper silica and calcium."

The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft

Aristotle's Meteorology. "There are never more than two rainbows at one time. Each of them is three-coloured; the colours are the same in both and their number is the same, but in the outer rainbow they are fainter and their position is reversed. In the inner rainbow the first and largest band is red; in the outer rainbow the band that is nearest to this one and smallest is of the same colour: the other bands correspond on the same principle. These are almost the only colours which painters cannot manufacture: for there are colours which they create by mixing, but no mixing will give red, green, or purple. These are the colours of the rainbow, though between the red and the green an orange colour is often seen."

Emotion-colour synaesthesia

Synaesthesia - crossovers in the senses, Guardian 19 November 2010

The "colours" tag at my tumblr

Tinted lenses bring words into living colour, Sydney Morning Herald, July 2009
Morality and colour, The Economist, July 2009
People may be able to taste words. BBC News, May 2009
Genetic roots of synaesthesia unearthed, New Scientist, January 2009
Weird links with words and colours in the mind, New Scientist, 2004
The blue and the green: striking optical illusion demonstrates colour constancy

In Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing, researcher Jon Harrison considers whether the synaesthesia caused by hallucinogens is the same as "idiopathic synaesthesia", the type you're born with. Probably not, he says: "recent PET studies of the effect of LSD suggest that the areas typically activated are not those that lit up in our PET experiment. This suggests that the neural substrates of auditory visual events as a result of drug use are not the same as the substrates of idiopathic synaesthesia. In fact, it is not clear why we should expect any similarity; the subjective accounts given by hallucinogen users and synaesthetes are, after all, quite markedly different". (pp 207-8)

It's an "unlikely concidence," says Ramachandran, that "the most common type of synaesthesia is number/color synaesthesia and the number area and color areas are right next to each other in the same part of the brain." Experiments showed that when numbers were shown to people with this form of synaesthesia, V4, the colour area, was activated, supporting the idea that there were connections between the two areas. The researchers also met a colour-blind synaesthete: "Because of a deficiency in his cone pigments (in the retina) he couldn't see he full range of colors in the world. Yet when looking at numbers he could see colors that he could never experience otherwise. He referred to them charmingly as 'Martian colours'." His eyes couldn't see those colours, but his brain could.

Another test showed that it wasn't the concept of the numbers which triggered the synaethesia, but the shape of the numbers: the subjects saw no colours when shown Roman numerals (V and VI) instead of Arabic numerals (5 and 6). (I see the colours associated with the letters!)

Colour processing is done in the brain in a series of steps, moving through different areas. Ramanchandran suggests that different kinds of synaesthesia might involve cross-wiring at different steps: for example, a synaesthete who associated colours with days of the week might have a cross-connection in the next step up from V4, the TPO junction, which handles the concept of sequences - a kind of "higher synaesthesia" which is "driven by numerical concept rather than visual appearance."

Ramanchandran suggests that the cross-wiring is the result of a faulty gene which hasn't done its job, in the forming brain, of pruning away excess connections. Faulty genes are normally weeded out by natural selection, so perhaps this one is actually doing something useful. Synaesthesia is much more common in "artists, poets, and novelists". Different kinds of synaesthesia result when the gene is expressed in different parts of the brain, but what it it's expressed throughout the brain? That would make "that person more prone to metaphor, the ability to link seemingly unrelated things." If "high level" concepts are processed in specific parts of the brain, like sequences are in the TPO junction, then "artistic people, with their excess connections, can make these associations much more fluidly and effortlessly". These are fascinating speculations. Ramachandran goes on to suggest that language may have arisen from these sorts of metaphorical connections.

Japanese colour terms (search for the word colour to find them)

Japanese traditional colour names

Japanese Color Guide

Hungarian has two words for red

Postage stamp colour names

sinople means both "red" and "green"

Australian Aboriginal artist Minnie Pwerle

Imaging of connectivity in the synaesthetic brain at the blog Neurophilosophy; more at the blog Madam Fathom.

'Can anyone hear that picture?', BBC News, 7 August 2008.

Why I and O are dull for synaesthetes: the researcher found that "frequently used letters are most likely to evoke colours, while letters such as Q and X are less likely to do so. However, Eagleman spotted two frequently used letters that bucked this trend: I and O. He also noticed that the numbers 1 and 0 are often not coloured. Eagleman thinks this may be because these characters are made up from natural shapes that we learn to recognise before mastering the alphabet or learning to count."

I did wonder!