Touch | Sight| Relocated Self

By deliberately scrambling a person's visual and tactile senses, it is possible for scientists to give them an out-of-body experience.

Most popular of this type of perceptual illusion is the "Rubber Hand Illusion."



New Scientist cites the next demonstration, also performed by UCL's Henrik Ehrsson. Cameras and projections are set up to confuse subjects into experiencing that they are standing somewhere else in the room, reinforcing the idea that peoples' perception of 'self' is tightly bound to how information is processed by the senses.





In these experiments, the sense of touch is synchronized with visual movement. These perceptions are put in conflict with where the synchronization is happening. The brain defaults to vision, which is the most informationally rich sensory modality. As the self is no longer 'within its borders', subjects feel like they're having an out-of-body experience.

Here's a DIY version, brought to you from the guys at Mind Hacks:

"Sit at a table with a friend at your side. Put one hand on your knee, out of sight under the table. Your friend’s job is to tap, touch, and stoke your hidden hand and—with identical movements using her other hand—to tap the top of the table directly above. Do this for a couple of minutes. It helps if you concentrate on the table where your friend is touching, and it's important you don't get hints of how your friend is touching your hidden hand. The more irregular the pattern and the better synchronized the movements on your hand and on the table, the greater the chance this will work for you. About 50% of people begin to feel as if the tapping sensation is arising from the table, where they can see the tapping happening before their very eyes. If you're lucky, the simultaneous touching and visual input have led the table to be incorporated into your body image."

Beyond the practical applications of creating more realistic avatars in virtual reality games, and for doctors' performing remote surgery, these experiments explore the question, 'Why do we feel we own our body?' They indicates that "self" is closely tied to a "within-body" position, which is dependent on information from the senses. Swiss researcher Olaf Blanke concludes, "We look at 'self' with regard to spatial characteristics, and maybe they form the basis upon which self-consciousness has evolved."


SEE ALSO:
Evolving Perception: Tele-Synesthesia and Touch Technology

via Mind Hacks

Do You See What I See?

Try out the following online tests & experiments for synesthesia:

• David Eagleman's 'Synesthesia Battery' is the most comprehensive synesthesia test I've found so far & excellent for synesthetes who want explore a possibly extended range of their gifts, especially as research is showing that 40% of synesthetes have more than one form of synesthesia. The site lists a wide range of possible synesthetic combinations for testing, including musical-instruments>color, sound>smell, Chinese grapheme>color and orgasm>color. Disappointingly, when I checked the box that applied to me, sound>taste, I was immediately directed to a Results page which thanked me for my participation. For me, took about 1 minute to complete.
  
  
  
• The BBC's charmingly named Do you see what I see?, from which I appropriated the title of this post, hosts a single test for grapheme-color synesthesia and spatial-sequence (number form) synesthesia. About 10 minutes.
  
  

• BU's Synesthesia Project has a great test for non-graphemic shapes>color synesthesia. The Project's research on grapheme-color synesthesia found that many synesthetes report having colored basic shapes, including triangles and squares, in addition to their colored letters and/or numbers. Are you one of them? Take the 'Non-Graphemic Shape Battery' here. About 20 minutes.
  

Customizing Sensory Reality

At October's Simplicity Event, Philips demonstrated its concept Active Glass Dynamic Daylight Window, in the context of a simulated hotel room. This energy-efficient digital lifestyle product allows for guests to use sweeping intuitive gestures to create a personalized sensory environment.

"I like to think of Philips' Dynamic Daylight Window as a practical representation of a much different
future then we might be expecting. Where we live in increasingly
beautiful and interesting environments that keep us fully distracted
from reality. Much more practical then virtual reality. The over
whelming of the senses to create fully synthetic realities is totally
impractical for the near future, but customizing reality to overwhelm
the senses, perfect."

Thx to Oliver for the submission.

Fusiform Gyrus Sounds Good

While I’m not a synesthete myself, 'fusiform gyrus' has got to be one of the yummiest phrases around. It takes the mouth so many places, & sounds like an onomatopoeic compression of Goldfrapp’s Strict Machine.



To neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran, the fusiform gyrus section of the brain may be the key to the ‘linked senses’ phenomenon of synesthesia. The fusiform gyrus is part of the temporal lobe and houses the areas responsible for color and number perception, which happen to be next to one another. Noting the hereditary nature of the condition, Ramachandran posits that in synesthetes there is cross-wiring between these two areas resulting in simultaneous perception of sensory input and very often, enhanced creativity.

Ramachandran is a dynamic and entertaining speaker. In the TED Talk below he expands on this theory. The section on synesthesia starts at 17:53.

Molecular Cuisine - Alchemy of the Senses

When Oliver Hess of Silverlake's Materials & Applications described bacon lard ice cream as incredible, I was dubious. Of course, like so many things in life, it's about the context.

Molecular cuisine is the end product of molecular gastronomy. Since the 80s, chefs & scientists have been collaborating to experiment with breaking foods down into their most basic components – molecules – seeking scientific explanations to age-old culinary mysteries -- how do our brains interpret signals from the five senses to tell us the “flavor” of food; why is that some foods combine well, while others don’t -- and applying that knowledge to creating new tastes and textures.

Molecular gastronomy is intricately tied to how the human body interprets sensory input. Try chef and researcher Paul Barham's ice cream experiment: Most of us find that a spoonful of ice cream tastes good. Now, close your eyes eating the same ice cream while stroking a piece of velvet, and you'll find that it tastes much creamier. Repeat the same experiment with sandpaper & the ice cream's texture will be grittier.

A watershed moment for molecular cuisine came in 1999, when Heston Blumenthal, chef at the Fat Duck restaurant at Bray-on-Thames in England, shocked the dining world with his fusion of white chocolate and caviar, a combination whose success was explained by the surprisingly similar chemical compositions of the two foods.

Restaurants in New York, Toronto and Tokyo are popularizing the cuisine. Most famous is Ferran Adrià's El Bulli in Barcelona. In the unlikely event of getting a table, look forward to sampling cocoa butter with crispy ears of rabbit; Kellogg’s paella, which consists of Rice Krispies, shrimp heads and vanilla-flavored mashed potatoes; white garlic and almond sorbet; and tobacco-flavored blackberry crushed ice. And for that added dimension, don't forget your fabric swatches.

Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes

Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon whereby otherwise normal people have 'tangled' senses. The real information gathered by one sense (e.g. sight) is accompanied by a perception in another sense (e.g. touch or sound).

Imagine that every time you saw the number 4, it would be eggshell blue; or every time you heard an F tone you saw a crisp purple arc half a foot in front of you.

Synesthetic perception can occur between any 2 senses. Probably the most common type of synesthesia is grapheme—color (chromatographemic) synesthesia. For the life of the synesthete, letters and numbers are tinged with a particular shade or color. Attending a cocktail party a few years ago, I was chatting about the subject when a handsome stranger suddenly blurted: ”4 is Green! Lettuce is 4!” In his 40s, this eavesdropping attorney had never known there was a name for this peculiarity in his perception. Like most synesthetes, he assumed everyone saw the way he did until an experience at school had him realize he was ‘different’, & he had never mentioned it to anyone until the day we spoke. He later discovered that his father also saw certain letters and numbers shaded. Research does indicate that synesthesia is to some extent hereditary.

Synesthesia usually doesn’t interfere with day to day life. There are 8 times as many synesthetes working in the creative professions – artists, poets, writers, musicians – than in the general population.

Many synesthetes find that having linked senses assists them in tasks of memorization. Musician Noriko Nagata who sees colors in sounds (chromestesia – colored-hearing synesthesia) reports, “As I was receiving professional education in music (I also have a sense of perfect pitch), the resonance of a sound and the image of a color have always been deeply connected. When it came to composing music, I would think, "I will make blue colored music", or think, "What were these codes I remembered in pink and beige?" during a test on guessing the right code names of tension codes. It has been my habit since I was small to feel colors and memorize things in colors using this way.”

Examples of some more elaborate forms of synesthesia follow:

Some synesthetes taste shapes: ergo the statement, ‘There aren’t enough points in the chicken.’ The taste of roast chicken made this synesthete feel a round shape in his hands, as if he were rubbing a bowling ball instead of feeling the prickly shape he expected. (Cytowic, “The Man who Tasted Shapes”, MIT Press p.11)

Others upon hearing a sound see light, color and identifiable images. ‘Presented with a tone pitched @ 250Hz amplitude 64db, S saw a velvet cord with fibres jutting out on all sides. The cord was tinged with a delicate, pleasant pink-orange hue… Presented with a tone pitched @ 3000Hz amplitude 113db, he saw a whisk broom that was of a fiery color, while the rod attached to the whisks seemed to be scattering off into fiery points. The experiments were repeated during several days and invariably the same stimuli produced identical experiences.” (Baron-Cohen & Harrison, "Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings", Blackwell Publishers, Cambridge, MA, p.102)

MIT's 'The Synesthetic Experience' has a couple of on-line demos simulating synesthetic experience, and accounts of first-hand experiences of synesthesia.