synaesthesia and insight---help please!

Hansen, I imagine that for people born with the condition, like me, it's caused by some kind of different brain wiring (not that I know what or how) rather than how neurotransmitters are flowing at any particular moment.

Synaesthesia is not "stuff" any more than one's ability to see is "stuff".

"I think I have some idea of the excited/agitated quality that that can produce, cause recently I wondered if certain things i were experiencing were actually cause of ADHD or OCD. i started re-thinking of my life up to this point in terms of those, and it started making a lot of sense, and really helped somewhat to deal with the phenomena that i now labeled 'OCD'. thinking about it in that way helped re-phrase it, which helped deal with it, blame myself less for it, etc. however, i think i also went over-board a bit, and caused some identifications with that, which caused me to be depressed, think that it was unfair, wonder how it would affect my practice/whether i'd be able to do it cause of these 'problems', etc... which in the end was also something that had to be dropped."

It's a careful balance that has to be struck when you're thinking about mental health conditions...if you have one, recognizing what it is can surely give you a lot of clarity (in the everyday sense) about why you do the things you do and think the way you do. But of course, if you identify with it, or over-think how much difference it makes in your life, it leads to trouble.

It's good to hear that you struck some kind of balance between the two, especially because it sounds hard to do. (I imagine that the more the label explains stuff about your behavior that you never connected so clearly before, the harder it is to do that.)

Ever tried medication?

Hi EndInSight,

I also have motion-sound synaesthesia (your items 2a and 2b from the 2nd post). I first noticed it on internet forums where people use animated icons, I would often hear little cartoon noises in my head in sync with the movement in the icon. It can be distracting at times, but mostly it doesn't bother me.

I don't have a ceiling fan myself, but I looked up some videos of them on youtube (I'm kind of surprised that people actually take videos of their ceiling fans..., and I did notice a subtle sense of rotation in the abstract inside my mental space. I often get these kinds of kinesthetic sensations in my practice and in daily life too, it just seems to be how my brain is wired I guess. I find this kind of kinesthetic thought useful in computer programming, because I can use it to sense the structure of a program as a whole and feel out how the different parts fit together (or don't fit together, as is often the case).

I'm not sure I know what you mean by "affective experience"? Do you mean that the sounds or the kinetic sensations triggered by seeing motion are secondary to the motion itself?

Cliff, I'd like to ask you more about this spinning sensation; I'll send you a PM in a bit.

You said you hear noises in response to animated icons "often"; does that mean "whenever you bother to notice, which is not always" or "only sometimes"?

About what "affective experience" means, it's a bit of jargon (but really useful in my opinion); I think the best I can do is point you to a recent discussion about it here (beginning with #18): kennethfolkdharma.wetpaint.com/thread/47...fr+Jack%3A+Mahamudra

"It's good to hear that you struck some kind of balance between the two, especially because it sounds hard to do. (I imagine that the more the label explains stuff about your behavior that you never connected so clearly before, the harder it is to do that.)

Ever tried medication?"

I haven't tried any prescription meds, though I do use marijuana pretty frequently, and in combination with meditation, so I wonder if i do that to adjust for that subonsciously or if it's just cause i like it in an everyday sense. but the difference in my meditative abilities when under its influence and when not is still quite large. i remember remarking once recently, while meditating under its influence, "this is how i feel my brain _should_ work"... which was scary cause i wondered if i was just addicted. but shortly after that thought, a phenomenon X came in, and i realized that X caused a lot of problems and was always there when not in a particular state (high + meditating, sometimes sober+meditating, sober+distracted (like talking to people), etc.. basically, whenever it was not-triggered).

X is/was - this weird fixation.. its like a very hard thing in my head area that, once i start 'feeding' it (aka paying attention to it), just gets harder + harder, very hard to control.. got very bad at some point, where i couldn't meditate in any way (HAIETMOBA or samatha or vipassana) cause as soon as i closed my eyes it would happen. i now think it is/was an overabundance of anxiety, which led me to my OCD self-diagnosis.. luckily it seems to have subsided a lot, now. i still get this hard/pressure sensation in my head, which is hard to shake if it starts up, but it's nowhere near as bad. any ideas what it might be? i cycled thinking about it through ADHD (can't focus on anything _but_ it), tourette's (obsession which is lessened if i blink or twitch or move around), OCD (anxiety), and now, i just dnno.

"X is/was - this weird fixation..."

I can't say I really know for sure what this is. The only thing that comes to mind is some kind of affective tension or pressure or constriction-feeling, associated with affective pain or affective negative emotions...if that's it, then I've had that kind of experience (where continuing to pay attention to it or worry about makes it worse, whereas doing something distracting can make it go away) but very very rarely. The rare times I've had it were times in which I wasn't really able to think straight about what was going on, and so attention would keep getting returned to it because it was so saliently unpleasant, and it would never occur to me that I could force my attention to do something else. Maybe similar to some kind of attention fixation thing you have going.

I notice that there used to be a lot of affect in my head, not necessarily painful, but often "hard", as if I were wearing some kind of metal helmet or something. Not sure if it's related to the above in any way. But I got rid of most of it through the comparison method I described (#25 in this thread)...maybe you could give that a shot. The easiest way for me to find the actual experience of my head was to move it around (which seems to slow down the process of generating affects out of tactile experiences by a tiny bit, just enough to glimpse the actual experience before the affect covers it), so if you can't discern it by default, maybe try some kind of variation on that? A cue to see the actual experience is, as Kenneth says, look for what doesn't hurt.

slowly understanding(?) the synaesthesia:

1) movement in the visual field is interpreted as 'sound'. Interesting.
2) paying closer attention, the sounds appear related to...frequency, in some sense. So, it's a reasonable interpretation of sense data, if a little unnecessary.
3) but it's not just visual movement, touch (stroking) produces the same sounds (which couldn't have anything to do with the ears). And this makes the point about frequency/movement more obvious. So it's an interpretation of movement, and we happen to be visually dominant.
4) now, look at something and have nothing moving. The still image of something can still have a subtle sound, or... is it a feeling? I'm not sure I can tell the difference now. So maybe it's the sensual act of vision itself which is providing a frequency, modulated by the shape or colour of the object, generating a more detailed sensual/sonic landscape, even in 'stillness'.

I'm sorry for not understanding this thread. I can see some 'sonic lanscaping' as being unpleasant, producing even a negative resonance (I used to have a nightmare as a child which involved being freaked out by a movement resolving into a particular, slow but terrible, speed!?) and tracking down it's origin may be confounding. Are you making a clear distinction betwean pain and affect here?

I offer this in case it may be of interest, feel free to pass it by if it is simply off the mark.

Tazmic, just to be clear, you're talking about your own experience, right? I'm not completely clear on that, but I'll assume that's what you meant. (And in that case, thanks for sharing them.)

"4) now, look at something and have nothing moving. The still image of something can still have a subtle sound, or... is it a feeling? I'm not sure I can tell the difference now. "

This is perhaps the same form of synaesthesia that underlies the kinaesthetic feeling I get from a spinning fan. If I look at a stationary object, there is...something. At first I thought it was a sound, because I was investigating this in context of moving objects generating sounds, but I think the most accurate thing to say for myself is that it's a feeling of object-location in relation to my body, affectively inside my body. When the object moves quickly (like a spinning fan), the object-location-feeling moves quickly (affective 'me' spinning).

On the other hand, when I check now, this feeling of object-location does seem to be accompanied by a sound. Perplexing. Yeah, it is hard to tell the difference, somehow.

"3) but it's not just visual movement, touch (stroking) produces the same sounds (which couldn't have anything to do with the ears). "

Is it the tactile sensation of touch or the kinesthetic sensation of moving your hand in order to stroke yourself, independent of actually stroking yourself, that produces a sound? Check.

"Are you making a clear distinction betwean pain and affect here?"

I ultimately found that the non-affective experiences underlying these were wonderful and not painful, although they're hard for me to reliably discern. (See post #46).

There are at least four synaesthetes on KFD (me, Cliff, jhsaintonge, tazmic), and possibly others who haven't spoken up or yet recognized their condition, so here is some practical stuff I've discovered that might be helpful, from my own experience.

One form of synaesthesia involves seeing colors in relation to graphemes (e.g. letters or numbers), and it apparently comes in two varieties, "associator" (seeing the color in the "mind's eye") and "projector" (seeing the color as if it's on the grapheme, albeit not literally in external vision). I don't know whether other forms of synaesthesia vary in this way, but when I look at my own experience of synaesthesia, the only thing in my "mind's eye" are affects, whereas the actual synaesthetic sense objects are projected "out" into reality, "out" into their own private sense modality, albeit somehow inextricably merged with the normal sense objects that generate them. So my experiences, although having nothing to do with seeing colors in relation to graphemes, are like the "projector" variety of that form of synaesthesia...so as a first guess, either the two-variety distinction applies to other forms of synaesthesia, or other forms of synaesthesia are always "projector" forms.

(I wonder if every "associator" is really a "projector" who has too much affect over the actual sense, but that's a separate issue, not to be pursued here.)

Now that I can see my synaesthetic experiences more clearly, I notice that they are somehow more real than anything else in my experience. Not in the sense of being more actual, but in the sense of taking up "more" of the experiential field than the normal senses, or being more "intense" than the normal senses. (cont )

"When a subset of [grapheme-->color] synaesthetes were informally asked which led to a more intense experience of color, viewing a color patch or viewing a digit, associator synaesthetes indicated that viewing a color patch yielded a more intense experience of color. The responses of projector synaesthetes were considerably different. For example, C. said that her synaesthetic colors were definitely more intense than the colors induced by color patches. ( www.daysyn.com/Dixonetal2004.pdf )"

This quote shows that grapheme-->color projector synaethetes can experience synaesthetic color more vividly than color seen through the eye, which I believe points to the same phenomenon. Even my motion-->sound experiences, whose affects I described as "very soft", are underlaid by uncannily powerful synaesthetic sense objects.

When I listen to music right now and try to see the synaesthetic sense objects, I get glimpse after glimpse, and every glimpse is nearly a PCE (a *real*, mindblowing one, not a fancy EE), with all the power and glory of that. I can't reproduce this experience right now by trying to see any other sense object in any standard sense modality. The synaesthetic senses seem to loom larger in my mind than anything else. For a phenomenological description...although they are literally just sense experiences, absolutely free of 'being', they seem to transcend everything in the world, having a mystical or religious quality inherent in them, having more richness, more delicacy, more subtlety, and more wonder in them than anything else I know.

There are two possibilities: one is that these sense objects really are "more real" than any others, and another is that, due to the neurobiology of the condition, it's much easier to apperceive these sense objects than normal sense objects, once one gets the hang of it. (cont)

(cont) Either way, as a synaesthete, if you're interested in working with actual sense objects and seeing past your affective experiences (however you conceive of the goal of that practice), it may be a good idea to check to see whether you are a "projector" or "associator" (apart from any affects in your "mind's eye") and whether your actual synaesthetic sense objects have this quality of being "more real", and / or whether they are easy to apperceive once you get the hang of seeing them. If so, it may be extremely important to make sure that you can see them clearly, giving work to attain this clarity at least as much priority as any other thing you do in your practice.

If you're not a synaesthete but you teach synaesthetes (as Owen apparently does), and they are interested in working with actual sense objects, it seems that this kind of assessment of your students is extremely important to do, even if why or how it's important may not be understandable (I don't know how I could possibly describe the "more real" quality of these experiences in a way that would give a deep, non-theoretical, non-intellectual understanding of that quality, and / or why these experiences may lead to apperception so easily). Don't expect that synaesthetes necessarily understand their specific condition by default, any more than any of us understand the general aspects of our condition (the 3 C's, dependent origination, whatever else) by default; and just as you would teach anyone to see the latter, seriously consider whether synaesthetes need to be taught to see some unique aspects of their own experience in the case that they don't.

(EDIT: For clarity, what is "more real" for me is the synaesthetic objects attached to the objects in the standard senses, not the synaesthetic objects alone. The standard objects benefit from the association.)

>Tazmic, just to be clear, you're talking about your own experience, right?

Yes, although I should add I don't pay much attention to this. (It's normal after all.) And I don't find it intrusive or distracting, except for example when talking to someone and they blink, and I perhaps remember I shouldn't' be able to hear that, and then I notice all the other things: their shadow on the wall dancing behind them, the way the corners of their eyes change 'pitch' as the eyes smile, earrings providing their odd accompaniment, perhaps the 'sustained chord' of a fixed expression, different from the last (no immediate movement there, what's that about?) etc.

>Is it the tactile sensation of touch or the kinesthetic sensation of moving your hand in order to stroke yourself, independent of actually stroking yourself, that produces a sound? Check.

It's the tactile sensation of moving touch: rub your fingers together, or slide a finger over a surface. However the movements to accomplish this would be naturally 'tuneful'. But considering this leads me now to think I can't quite distinguish feeling and sound properly.

>I ultimately found that the non-affective experiences underlying these were wonderful and not painful, although they're hard for me to reliably discern. (See post #46).

Interesting. As for the video, I was first distracted by the shadow moving over the hand at around 1 sec in. My attention was taken by the sound of it, then I noticed what the visual movement was that gave rise to it. The head movement you refer to fits well with the music, until in the secondary expression where her eyes do something very different, discordant perhaps.

"I should add I don't pay much attention to this. (It's normal after all.)"

Right, I never noticed it explicitly for many years, and once I did, I never paid much attention to it either. It's wasn't obvious enough, and it seemed as normal as anything else. (EDIT: In retrospect I have no idea how it wasn't obvious enough to me. Times like these are when I think I go through life with my head in the clouds.)

"It's the tactile sensation of moving touch: rub your fingers together, or slide a finger over a surface."

I appear to get a sound from any intentional motion of my body, so I'll need to ask someone else to touch me to distinguish if there's something extra.

"As for the video[...]"

Almost every affective experience of sound or motion that I get from that video seems out of place and ugly. The metaphor of outlines in a children's coloring book is really apt for my experience. But the actual objects are amazing. So, for whatever synaesthetic sounds or kinaesthetic sensations 'you' think fit or don't fit, try to apperceive them, and see if that changes your mind. A hint for how to do it, which works for me, is to look for sounds or motions that are "in" or "near" or "attached to" the visual field, not in your head, not in your ear, not in your body, not "near" or "under" the affective sounds / motions.

To check if you were successful in apperceiving the objects...as I sit here listening to music and trying to apperceive the synaesthesia, in the moment after I do, when 'I' re-form, the memory of the experience is distorted such that it's as if 'I' just had a glimpse of God. Given how distinctive your visual motion-->sound / kinaesthesia experience seems to be to you, look for an experience that has that kind of impact when you reflect on it, on the assumption that your experience will have some similarity to mine. (You may think of it in completely different terms than I do, without the religious terminology, but look for that *kind* of impact, that *kind* of wondrousness.)

>Almost every affective experience of sound or motion that I get from that video seems out of place and ugly.

Perhaps you are more aesthetically refined than I. I found some things ugly, and those were possibly affective readings. But I do not think discordance is necessarily affective, and I do not expect my soundscape to be aesthetically pleasant.

My sounds are always located at their sources. Except... when there is affect, then it's not obvious. Perhaps that is when they get 'dragged inside'.

>There are two possibilities: one is that these sense objects really are "more real" than any others, and another is that, due to the neurobiology of the condition, it's much easier to apperceive these sense objects than normal sense objects, once one gets the hang of it.

I would think that synaesthetically linked experience would be easier for apperception. Anything that links our fairly one dimensional vision (you have to point your eyes to look, and this is our dominant sense*) to a three dimensional landscape would perhaps be apperceptively 'enabling'.

(I've read, perhaps counter intuitively, that losing one's hearing in adulthood is much more likely to lead to mental breakdown, than losing one's vision.)

Apperceptive vision is centreless and three dimensional, much more like the soundscape or the 'feelingscape' or indeed, the world.

(*When people talk of feeling as if 'they' are looking out (from inside their head) at the world, I wonder if they also feel like they are 'hearing out at' the world through their ears...)

Okay, I'll try to see God in the sound of a smile, and get back to you

"Perhaps you are more aesthetically refined than I. I found some things ugly, and those were possibly affective readings. But I do not think discordance is necessarily affective, and I do not expect my soundscape to be aesthetically pleasant."

OK, I thought you meant that when you said one part "fits well, until..." you were talking about some kind of affective dislike that the sound produced.

"My sounds are always located at their sources. Except... when there is affect, then it's not obvious. Perhaps that is when they get 'dragged inside'."

You're better at this than I am, sorry for assuming otherwise! Maybe you should be giving me advice

Do you not have *any* affect over these experiences? Not even a little bit in the moment after you apperceive them?

"I would think that synaesthetically linked experience would be easier for apperception. Anything that links our fairly one dimensional vision[...]to a three dimensional landscape would perhaps be apperceptively 'enabling'."

Hmm, it's an interesting point that synaesthetic vision isn't "flat", even though synaesthetic vision affects are. Will pay attention to that more.

"(*When people talk of feeling as if 'they' are looking out (from inside their head) at the world, I wonder if they also feel like they are 'hearing out at' the world through their ears...)"

Well, for much of my life I felt like the world was "hearing in at me" through my ears, and paying attention to sounds was trying to "hear out at" them.

"Okay, I'll try to see God in the sound of a smile, and get back to you "

OK. This may sound like a silly question, but I'm pretty confused about this stuff, so bear with me and please tell me what your experience is. Open to everyone. Just to be totally explicit...knowing how other people experience this will be of great help to my own practice, so please let me know.

When you read words, you also *hear* them affectively / mentally, right? This is typical, isn't it? When you read a book, there is an affective voice that speaks the words?

A separate question, if you have the answer. Supposing you read words and hear an affective sound, what is the actual object underlying it? Is it a mind object, something like "the recognition of the words"?

yes, when i read (and type/think about what to type) there is some kind of inner voice. but i don't know if it's necessarily affective - (pure) thoughts are not affective. thus the actual object underlying it would be a thought.

i've been wondering about some of this stuff. i noticed that if my head is perfectly still, but i move my eyes up + down, something in the sound background will change, hearing it higher pitched if up and lower pitched if down. and if i move them left+right it's like a faint wooshing noise. not sure if i imagine it or not - i seem to not notice usually.

also when i see things moving it's really easy for me to imagine that a sound is happening. like when moving the mouse on the screen, like there's a woosh or something. or if i move it up + down in place.. there seems to definitely be a sound associated with 'down' and with 'up'. if i mouse over the icons on my windows 7 computer, each time it mouses on + off it's like a 'blip' noise/feeling somehow. but again i'm not sure if there's something actual there or it's entirely imagination, but it's really easy to imagine that happening

Beoman, the ultimate test (as I understand it) is to see whether you can *not* hear a sound when seeing motion. Check it out and let us know. (As I understand and experience it, this stuff can't be turned off anymore than one can decide to stop seeing with their eyes.)

Or, check out the link I provided a bunch of posts back, and see if you can hear the pattern of "dots" about as well as you can hear the pattern of beeps.

When you hear a word that you're reading, do you feel your mouth and lips and tongue enunciating it? What about when someone else says a word, or you hear it sung?

"When you read words, you also *hear* them affectively / mentally, right? This is typical, isn't it? When you read a book, there is an affective voice that speaks the words?"
.
Yes, this is absolutely normal, In fact almost everyone pronounces the words they read in their throat, very subtly. It's why people find to hard to speed read - they have to get over this habit. It's called "subvocalization" and you can read about it here:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization

"Subvocalization, or silent speech, is defined as the internal speech made when reading a word, thus allowing the reader to imagine the sound of the word as it is read.[1] This is a natural process when reading and helps to reduce cognitive load, and it helps the mind to access meanings to enable it to comprehend and remember what is read.[2] Although some people associate subvocalization with moving one's lips, the actual term refers primarily to the movement of muscles associated with speaking, not the literal moving of lips. Most subvocalization is undetectable (without the aid of machines) even by the person doing the subvocalizing[2]"


That link may also answer your second question.

Chris, I've heard about subvocalization, but thanks for the link. (EDIT: I guess I should have thought about it before posting, duh.)

The particular thing I'm working on is whether, when I hear a word, the actual object is a sensation in my body, OR (this appears to be more and more likely as I look) the actual object is a sensation of the sound itself "enunciating".

When I hear a musical instrument, I often feel my mouth and lips and throat and tongue moving as if to produce the sound (as if I could produce it with my voice).

EDIT: Chris, do you feel this movement in your mouth? If so, is it an enunciation of the entire word, about as clearly as it would feel if you actually said it, or something subtler?

I guess I'm confused about the difference between what you're asking and describing and subvocalization. But that's fine. My error.

I think that my original question (about internal speech) is subvocalization; you aren't confused about that.

The new question relates to the kinaesthetic feeling of enunciating speech or sounds.

"... do you feel this movement in your mouth?"

No, I do not. I cannot feel the subvocalizing going on, either, but I can "hear" the words as objects as I read along, being "heard" in mind.

Do you have any idea about what the actual object underlying the sound of words is? A sound? A thought? Beoman seems to suggest it may be a thought.

I, myself, am clueless at the moment.

EDIT: Looking back, I see that I didn't write the last few posts in the clearest way. My apologies for any confusion!