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The Alphabet and Synaesthesia

  
 
Lionheart
13:19 / 04.09.03
*cross-posted from my livejournal*

Maybe the alphabet was created by stoners. By that I mean by people on drugs. Specifically on drugs that induce temporary synaesthesia. What the hell is synaesthesia? Look it up! Dictionary.com defines "Synaesthia" as being: "A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color." Now change the word "colour" into the word "shape" and then a bunch of our hippie acid head ancestors sitting around a fire, high off their asses, going "Oh" and then drawing down, in the sand, the shape which they see in their drug-induced synaesthesia. And thus the alphabet was born!

Well, not really. The problem with my theory is that people with synaesthesia, whether it's drug induced or natural, is that different people experience different shapes/colours/sounds due to their individual brain chemistry and assosiations. So then what's a more likely theory?

Let's jump to Siberia to find out. From my very, very, very, very basic/little/almost non-existant knowledge of Siberia's people I'll gather up the following theory...

The Shaman would eat something or somehow induce synaesthesia and then he'd see shapes. From what I understand the correspondance of senses in synaesthesia doesn't change so basically if the shaman will soon, even without any drugs, associate sounds with shapes. So basically he'll already be using an alphabet. Now if he writes it down in the snow and teaches it to the rest of the tribe then that personal tribal alphabet will become a very important tool for them. Their enemies and neighbors might pass by weird signs in the ground without taking notice but the people in this tribe will knowthat those weird symbols in the ground mean "deer this way" or maybe "Sale at Shaman-Shack. Everything half off."

Put that in your lolly and suck it!
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:29 / 04.09.03
Actually most synaesthetes share common colour-letter, colour-number associations. The number 0, for instance, is almost always clear (like glass), number 2 is often red etc.
 
 
Aertho
13:42 / 04.09.03
It's like this for me:

A : yellow

B : blue

C : red

D : green

These are the only letters that "feel" like consistent colors to me. I thouight it was a just a weird persistent memory from a nursery school standardized test I may have examined long ago, but alphabet colors are the most common form of synaesthesia.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
13:58 / 04.09.03
[threadrot] My alphabet-colour association isn't very strong which is slightly surprising because my number-colour is like woooooo and those new police sirens are making me see a bright white streak of horizontal light across my vision that actually makes me have to stop walking atm. [/threadrot]
 
 
eye landed
00:56 / 05.09.03
And instead of seeing a cat, these stoner cave men would hear "kaht" (or whatever cat is in protohumanic), thus giving rise to language.
 
 
cusm
12:34 / 05.09.03
I know that I hung there
on the windy tree
swung there nights, all of nine gashed with a blade
bloodied by Odin
myself an offering to myself
knotted to that tree
no man knows whither the root of it runs

None gave me bread
None gave me drink
down to the depths I peered
to snatch up runes
with a roaring screech
and fall in a dizzying faint

Wellspring I won
and wisdom too
and grew and joyed in my growth from a word to a word
I was led to a word
from a deed to another deed.

-Lay of the High One (old Norse verse). 138, 139, 141.
 
 
elthe deuro
19:32 / 05.09.03
Anna, you're kidding. There are _common_ number-color associations? The few friends I'd dicussed this with all had different associations, so I assumed mine were singular... but mine match what you've said exactly. 0=clear, 1=white, 2=red, 3=pink, 4=yellow, 5=green, 6=blue, 7=gold, 8=red-brown, 9=dark brown. Are there any theories on what causes this color synchronisity?

Has anyone read a book called 'Kamikaze L'Amour' by Richard Kadrey? It concerns a pair of synaesthetes in future San Fransisco trying to create the ultimate musical/visual experience through sampling jungle sounds... interesting novel, in any case. Disappointing ending, but then I'm frequently disappointed by novel endings.
 
 
netbanshee
19:53 / 05.09.03
Approaching from a different angle... been reading a book, "The Cosmic Serpent", where an anthropologist studied and worked with a native a Peruvian culture where the use of a local hallucinogin opened up curious levels of knowledge. Images of structures like DNA and serpents, complex concoctions for healing medicines, and interesting uses of language were supplied to these people from the use of tobacco and ayahuasca. A sort of spiritual guide if you will. Also commented on the knowledge of "primitive" cultures that was considered well beyond their grasp... supplied of course from other similar drug uses. Decent read... and taken from a fairly conscientious perspective.

So... to pull in, there's plenty of evidence that culture derived many language and communication structures through interaction with the environment and the deep knowledge that's thought to live under the surface. I like the fact that there seems to be a coomon tie in between this reading and some of your perspectives out there.
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
22:34 / 05.09.03
Right. I just found an absolutely fascinating paper on the neuroscience of synaesthesia (PDF). These guys have a lot of interesting things to say, and many of the things they’ve discovered are just *wow*, at least to me. They don’t think the alphabet comes from synaesthesia- rather they think language itself originates in a process they call synaesthetic bootstrapping.

Here are some highlights, in case you don’t have time to read it all(it is rather long). I can’t quote the bit on language origins ‘cos it has diagrams-it’s towards the end of the paper tho'. Comments from some of the synaesthetes here would be fascinating.

1.Colours not in real world/ colour-blind synaesthetes

Synaesthetes often report ‘odd’ or weird colours they cannot see in the real world but see only in association with numbers. We even saw a colour-blind subject recently who saw certain colours only upon seeing numbers

2.Synaesthesia can be induced by graphemes not perceived at a conscious level.

We have found that even ‘invisible graphemes’ can induce synaesthetic
colours. Individual graphemes presented in the periphery are easily identified.
However, when other letters flank the target, it is difficult to identify the target
Grapheme. This effect (‘crowding’) is not due to the low
visual acuity in the periphery (Bouma, 1970; He et al., 1996). In fact, the target
grapheme is large enough to be resolved clearly and can be readily identified if
the flankers are not present.We have found that the crowded grapheme nevertheless
evoked the appropriate colour; a curious new form of blindsight (Hubbard
& Ramachandran, 2001; Ramachandran & Hubbard, 2001b). The subject
said, ‘I can’t see that middle letter but it must be an “O” because it looks blue.’

3.A possible neuroanatomical/physiological explanation

The key insight comes from
anatomical, physiological and imaging studies in both humans and monkeys,
which show that colour areas in the brain (V4; Lueck et al., 1989; Zeki & Marini,
1998 and V8; Hadjikhani et al., 1998) are in the fusiform gyrus. We were struck
by the fact that, remarkably, the visual grapheme area is also in the fusiform
(Allison et al., 1994; Nobre et al., 1994; Pesenti et al., 2000), especially in the left
hemisphere (Tarkiainen et al., 1999), adjacent to V4 (fig. 4; back cover). Can it be
a coincidence that the most common form of synaesthesia involves graphemes
and colours and the brain areas corresponding to these are right next to each
other? We propose, therefore, that synaesthesia is caused by cross-wiring between
these two areas

4.Imagination versus perception

We find that most synaesthetes report that when they imagine the numbers, the
corresponding colours are evoked more strongly than by actual numbers,
although we have seen occasional exceptions to this rule.

5.Higher and Lower Synaesthesia

The findings we have discussed so far were true for the first two synaesthetes we
tested: They both saw colours only in central vision and only with Arabic numbers.
However, we have subsequently encountered other synaesthetes in whom
even the Roman numeral or a cluster of dots elicited the colour. In them it is the
concept of numerical magnitude that seemed to generate colours. Intriguingly, in
some synaesthetes, even days of the week or months of the year were coloured.
Could it be that there is a brain region that encodes the abstract numerical sequence
or cardinality — in whatever form — and perhaps in these synaesthetes, it is this
higher or more abstract number area that is cross-wired to the colour area?
 
 
Perfect Tommy
19:13 / 06.09.03
Seems to me that emotions are a kind of 'sense', of the internal processes of your mind and body. Which makes me want to believe that art that works is inherently synaesthetic, and that the more senses that activate when you work with specific abstract concepts, the better you will be at working with those concepts. For example, numbers have subtle emotional resonances with me (7 is untrustworthy, 8 is friendly, 6 is okay but arrogant), and when I work with graphing functions I get a kinesthetic sense (hard to explain, but when I'm working with a graph, I sort of imagine running my hands over it as though it were carved out of wood), so obviously I do better at math than someone who just sees a squiggle on the page and knows what it means, but doesn't have multiple simultaneous methods of attaching it to hir brain. Does that make sense?

It's possible I'm just talking a bunch of crap; I haven't talked to enough people about their artistic processes to know if there's any correlation between multisensing of things and talent.
 
 
BioDynamo
00:33 / 07.09.03

I've been led to understand, that the (first) alphabet was created by accountants in Sumeria or something, not stoners in Siberia. I think we would be using a more interesting alphabet if the latter were true.
 
 
diz
03:24 / 07.09.03
how many synaesthetes are there on here? have you all been diagnosed and tested and all that?
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
15:47 / 07.09.03
[slight threadrot] What colours do the synaesthetes here see when listening to the White Stripes?[/slight threadrot]
 
 
Bomb The Past
23:13 / 07.09.03
Me and some of my friends noted down our synaesthetic associations not long ago (and again earlier today before I saw this thread, oddly enough) partially prompted by the last thread on synaesthesia. We came up with pretty similar results such as the 0=clear, 1=white, 2=red thing almost universally.

Lionheart, I reckon your theory is pretty plausible and wouldn't even require synaesthetic inducing drugs to work. Vilayanur Ramachandran, the muchly cool neuroscience guy, did one of his Reith lectures this year on synaesthesia (it's online if you want to read or listen to it). Ramachandran uses synaesthesia to try to explain the appearance of language. I'll pick out a few excerpts:

I'm going to show all of you that synesthesia is not just a quirk in some people's brain. All of you here are synesthetes, and I'm going to do an experiment. I want all of you to visualise in front of you, a bulbous amoeboid shape which has lots of curves on it, undulating curves. And right next to it imagine a jagged, like a piece of shattered glass with jagged shapes. [...] One of these shapes is kiki and the other is booba, and I want you to tell me which is which.

98% of people associate kiki with the jagged one and booba with the curvy one, which Ramachandran thinks is because in the kiki case there is the sharp inflexion of sound which the brain associates with jaggedness.

[This] shows there is a pre-existing translation between the visual appearance of the object represented in the fusiform gyrus and the auditory representation in the auditory cortex. In other words there's already a synesthetic cross-modal abstraction going on, a pre-existing translation if you like between the visual appearance and the auditory representation. Now admittedly this is a very small bias, but that's all you need in evolution to get it started and then you can start embellishing it.

The idea that we are all synaesthetes to a certain degree might allow us to remove Lionheart's Shaman from the picture. Although it may have been crusading proto-wasters who first ushered in the revolution.

I'm going to argue, there's also a pre-existing built-in cross-activation. Just as there is between visual and auditory, the booba/kiki effect, there's also between visual in the fusiform and the motor brocas area in the front of the brain that controls the sequence of activations of muscles of vocalisation, phonation and articulation - lips, tongue and mouth. How do I know that? Well let's take an example. Let's take the example of something tiny, say teeny weeny, un peu, diminutive - look at what my lips are doing. The amazing thing is they're actually physically mimicking the visual appearance of the object - versus enormous, large. We're actually physically mimicking the visual appearance of the object so what I'm arguing is that also again a pre-existing bias to map certain visual shapes onto certain sounds in the motor maps in the brocas area.

I think there's also a pre-existing cross-activation between the hand area and the mouth area because they are right next to each other in the Penfield motor map in the brain and let me give you an example, and I got scooped. Charles Darwin first described this. What he showed was when people cut with a pair of scissors you clench and unclench your jaws unconsciously as if to echo or mimic the movements of the fingers.

I think Ramachandran confines his specualtion to spoken language but the pathways that he ends up with—hand to mouth, mouth in brocas area to visual appearance in the fusiform and auditory cortex, and auditory to visual—seem to suggest that synaesthesia could lead to written languages too. Combined with the notion of common or shared synaesthetic experiences, this would explain why a certain grapheme would be accepted as a preferred representation of a spoken word (via the brocas area, actually moving your lips to make the right noise) or an acoustic image (via the auditory cortex). This implies that certain languages and alphabets have an intrisic memetic advantage over others.

Any thoughts?
 
 
Grand Panjandrum of the Pointless
13:41 / 08.09.03
Also Cf the Ramachandran article linked to above
 
 
Lionheart
05:26 / 10.09.03
I remember reading that the earliest "writing" found dates to 4 thousand years ago. It was graffitti written on the walls in Egypt using which merchants told each other about the best place where to trade. Ofcourse the alphabet didn't originate in one place. For example the Mayan alphabet originated separatly from the Euro-Asia-African alphabets.

So why did I use the Siberia example? Cause I wanted to use the word "shaman" (a Siberian word) and I wanted to mention Amanita Muscaria.

Now to address the following:

"Actually most synaesthetes share common colour-letter, colour-number associations."

I'm not so sure about that. Why? Well, first of all, that statement should read "most English speaking synaesthetes". People who speak other languages and use other alphabets will have different colour-letter associations and I wouldn't be suprised if their colour-number associations differed from English speakers as well.

How do I know that none English speakers wil have different letter-colour associations? Through math. For example: English has 26 letters in its alphabet while Russia has 34.

Also, will the associations differ with different dialects?

Now to address the need of inducing the synaesthesia:

Vilayanur Ramachandran (I'll call him "Vila Rama" from now on) makes some good points. I do have a few questions though:

When he says "[this] shows there is a pre-existing translation between the visual appearance of the object represented in the fusiform gyrus and the auditory representation in the auditory cortex" I have to disagree. Why? Because, like Dead Flower said, "which Ramachandran thinks is because in the kiki case there is the sharp inflexion of sound which the brain associates with jaggedness." This shows that the brain associates sound with feeling. The word "gig" sounds hard/rough while the word "wee" sounds soft. (Interesting, isn't it? A perfect example of everyday synaesthesia. "sounds soft" and "sounds hard". As if words have a physical quality to them.) But Vila Rama says that it's the visual and auditory senses that are cross-wired.

Also, while letters and numbers invoke colour, does colour invoke letters and numbers?

Anyways, back to the inducement of synaesthesia... considering that language was very fragmented back then I'll assume that different villages in a, let's say for example, a 50 mile area, would have different variations in their language. Thus, if there were any synesthesiacs present in separate villages then they'd have different associations. Hell, they'd probably have diiferent synaesthisias all together. One guy/gal might be sound-colour while another gal/guy, from a separate village, might have colour-feel. All of the other villagers who, if Vila Rama is correct, are all synaesthisiacs don't have such vivid synaesthesia and are probably not aware of it.

Now I don't know the percentage of the world's population who are full-blown synaesthesiacs but I'm guessing that it's pretty small. So, thousands of years ago the world's population was even smaller. So it's unlikely that there were that many synaesthesiacs who had the needed sound-shape association. (Holy crap! This statement just made me realize something. I'll cover it later.) Now some of the holy people in the early communities might've been synaesthesiacs. If they were then some of them might've created an alphabet without any need of inducing synaesthesia but that's the less likely possibility. The more likely possiblity is that the synaesthesia was induced. But, hey, I'm just guessing.

Now on to the "holy crap" thingie. I realized that if the synaesthisea-alphabet theory is correct then the first alphabet might not have been drawn shapes (not sound-shape synaesthesia) but instead something else! Maybe, and this wouldn't suprise me at all, the first alphabet (or maybe some alphabets. Not necessarily the first alphabet but one of them) was sound-colour. That is, colours were used to represent sound. Like using 26 coloured markers to represent 26 letters or 26 sounds (yes, I know that English has more than 26 sounds but I'm just giving an example.) A, B, C turns into Green, Blue, Red.

And/Or, maybe, some of the first alphabets was sound-feel. Just like the synaesthisia mentioned in Vila Rama's quotes. You can just imagine people sitting on their asses, grinding things to different textures. Or maybe objects represented sounds by their texture. A, B, C becomes Rock, palm leaf, mushroom.

Just a thought.
 
 
The Knights Templar Boogie Machine
22:42 / 11.09.03
lyall watson in his infamous book 'supernature' hit upon some research where the researchers found that the intonation of certain letters, an obvious one being the vowel 'o', produced exactly the same picture in soundwaves. This would suggest that ancients would have some sense/technology that enabled them to 'see' sound. This obviously is a refrence to some direct perception, not the world of synaethesia, which is expereinced more in a minds eye/other sense kind of way..
There was a brilliant program on C4 a couple of yrs back about a cybernetics team who investigated silbury hill. They found the cave there had been made to resonate at a certain frequency,the chord 'c'. This was stumbled on when they used spectroscopic and otherdevices that measured vibration. Having a knowledge that the ancient culture would have been utilising ritual drimming in the cave, they found that when playing drums it created an acoustic feedback that tuned the vibrations into 'c'. Although this may seem a bit far fetched there was evidence in one segemnt of the cave where rocks had been embedded at different levels quite haphazardly, it would seem that this had been an attempt to add material that altered the structure of the cave and due to its positioning affected the fine tone of the resonance,as if these few extra slates added were the final touches in tuning the cave to 'c'.
Also in the cave where ritualistic designs, some similar to the traditional celtic knotwork designs and traditional shamnanic curved lines. One researcher noticed how the wavy lines seemed to resemble soundwaves, and after further research it was revealed that fires were lit in the cave for the the ritual cerenomys that took place there. What they eventually stumbled upon was that when they lit a fire in the cave and let it fill with smoke and let someone drum, the soundwaves produced in the thick smoke produced the same patterns inscribed on the wall!Could this then be the way the ancients had access to seeing soundwave and vibration? How much esoteric art could be derived from this process? The ancients could have garnered a masterful knowledge of the invisible geometry of waveforms and their relationship with another.....Hence some of our alpha-bet(a)ical letters could be symbols derived from this process...maybe...
On synaethesia:
Neurological Research into new born children shows that we are probably immersed in a world of synaethesia in our early years, possibly filtering out to degrees that vary from individual to individual when we reach three upwards...Before synaptic connections are made in the brain and we start engineering order out of chaos, we do not categorise our senses into ordered patterns. Obviously this ordering is essential to exist in a civillised world, but most of us still have traces of this boundaryless perception. Psychedelics appear re-open these old sense patterns and this probably accounts for odd deja vu like quality of psychedleic trips, that ' i've felt this before somewhere' feeling that can permeate such trips. Also if our experience when infants is synaethesic, and therefore psychedelic, it could account for why we often don't remember our very early years as it would appear as chaos to an ordered rational mind.
For the record(!), i have quite a high degree of synaesthesia but have not found my associations to be the same as other synaesthetes, thus backing up what lionheart is saying. It may have a key role on some subconcious level on the development and syntax of language, but maybe not of the alphabet...Maybe the fetch can help us with the origins of alphabets.....
Oh and A is green, B is yellow, and C is black with a tinge of white...
 
 
The Knights Templar Boogie Machine
22:45 / 11.09.03
The white stripes? Definitely an intense white,black and red...
 
  
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