Synaesthesia
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Synaesthesia, an abnormal condition of the brain, causes sensory perceptions to blend. Thus a synaesthete may smell a color. To study this condition is to understand some of the unique connections the digital network can create in multimedia. The phenomenon undermines the notion that the impulses that trigger these senses are distinct or different. Thus, who is to say that sound waves create sound instead of vision? Under normal conditions, a sense organ such as the eye or ear stimulates nerves, which send impulses to a particular region of the brain. Like a number in a digital file, this pulse is not the color blue, or the "dot dot dot dash" of Beethoven's (Ludwig van Beethoven, German composer, 1770-1827) Fifth Symphony; rather, it is merely electric energy, a representation of the color or sound in the nervous system.
What makes one impulse indicate smell and another indicate touch is dependent on which neural pathways are stimulated. The condition of synaesthesia suggests that the path from stimuli to sensation can be altered. Synaesthesia has been a recurrent theme of the modernist movement. Wassily Kandinsky (early twentieth-century Russian abstract painter, 1866-1944) actively attempted to depict music in color. The Italian Futurist group Art of Noise; the Bolshevik use of Agitprop layering of media; Vladimir Nabokov's (Russian-born novelist, 1899-1977) autobiography Speak, Memory, wherein he saw the sound of each letter as a different color or texture— all attempt to blend media together. The electrical impulses of the brain are similar to those of the digital file: they have no implicit value until interpreted.
When is Synaesthesia not Synaesthesia? When it's a metaphor. - John Harrison (English clockmaker and longitude-recording device inventor, 1693-1776)
See Also
- Cathedral
- Mosque
- Synaesthesia
- Chinese Painting
- Mandalas
