Synaesthesia

The ability to select and apply type sensitively is an art form that requires an astute knowledge of the communicative complexity of letterforms. However, as a designer and design educator, I have observed that many designers frequently select and apply typefaces inappropriately or arbitrarily because they are simply unaware of the complex meanings underlying letterforms, as well as the power of the communicative choices they make. Many designers with even a basic understanding of type still tend to prefer to use illustration, illustrative graphics, icons or photography as their primary media of communication. In the event that type is indeed used, designers tend to choose ‘clean’ typefaces because they appear to detract less from the communicative aspects of other rhetorical texts already at play in their design. In other instances, letterforms may be chosen to achieve an array of elaborately intricate design layouts that are often superficially strewn across decorative, trite and eye-candied designs.

From these observations, I have therefore dedicated my study to delineating and discussing two default modes or methods used for selecting and applying type – type as experiential form and type as iconic form – in order to illustrate the powerful, yet intricate communicative facets of the letterform. The first mode relates to how designers select type based on a typeface’s experiential form. By this, I refer to the connotations that we derive from our physical and sensual perceptions of letterform shapes. I refer to George Laukoff’s experiential metaphor theory, as well as sound-image symbolism theory (synesthesia) in order to identify reminiscent and intuitive letterform perception. The second describes several ways in which designers invoke symbolic connotation by selecting iconic typefaces. Here, I investigate historical and cultural narratives woven into iconic typefaces and how these narratives may be signified, resignified and repurposed.

As a means of understanding the interconnected nature of meaning embodied by the letterform, my final objective is to highlight letterform communication from a visual rhetorical perspective. By conducting an in-depth case study of the Fraktur typeface (as communicating at once
experientially and symbolically), I stress several tensions that exist as a result of overlapping meaning and the interconnected nature of the two default modes of type selection. I thereby argue that designers need be aware of the communicative implications of their default modes or strategies to typeface selection. My point of departure is that a more holistic approach to selecting and applying typefaces could be followed and that rhetorical theory may provide an analytical framework for such an inclusive perspective. I maintain that if the communicative
complexity of letterforms is viewed from a visual rhetorical perspective, where rhetorical intricacies of meaning embodied in the letterform are thoughtfully and holistically considered (where designers may question their default modes of type selection), designers can be more strategic in directing meaning through type.

Synästhesie als ästhetisches Phänomen verweist zunächst auf eine Durchdringung der ver-schiedenen Sinne. Die meist in einem Modell isolierter Wahrnehmung untersuchten Sinne geraten hierbei in einen Austausch, wobei sich häufig die Frage nach der Möglichkeit eines aktiven Erlernens jener Fähigkeiten stellt.

Im Mittelpunkt dieses Bandes steht die Frage nach einer in diversen Medien ermöglichten intermodalen Erfahrung. Dieser Punkt ist für den Film, der als multisensorisches Medium immer auch multimodale Wahrnehmung produziert, von grundlegender Bedeutung.
Es geht darum, das Kino und andere Medien als besondere Räume, als Schauplätze zu erkennen, an denen die sogenannte metaphorische Synästhesie ausgebildet wird.

This book is about representations of the body in all fields (fine art, medicine, ethnography, racial studies, biology). It is intended for artists, art students, and people interested in theories of art.

This is the 2021 revision. Every couple of years I rewrite and update this book. The original was published by Stanford University Press in 1999 and is now out of print. This revision (the third "edition") includes examples from contemporary art, and assignments for classroom use.

All comments & questions are welcome!

Este libro quiere proporcionar una imagen actualizada de los  conocimientos adquiridos en dos siglos de estudio, desde  comienzos del siglo XIX hasta hoy, sobre la sinestesia. Está  dirigido a los estudiosos, a los estudiantes de universidad y a conservatorios, a los que, incluso en contextos disciplinares diferentes, quieren descubrir los orígenes históricos de la sinestesia, las explicaciones neuroscientíficas, o experimentar con sus posibles aplicaciones en el lenguaje, las artes y el diseño.
El libro es el resultado de la colaboración internacional de un acreditado grupo de estudiosos que han participado en al menos en uno de los Congresos de Sinestesia: Ciencias y Arte (2005) 2007, 2009, 2012, organizado por la Fundación Internacional Artecittà, il Politecnico di Milano, la Universidad de Granada, y Universidad de Almería.

Luke, D. (2015, July). Psychedelic synaesthesia: New light on an old phenomenon. Paper presented at Breaking Convention: The 3rd International Conference on Psychedelic Consciousness, University of  Greenwich, London, 10-12th July.

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The neurobiology of synaesthesia is receiving growing attention in the search for insights into consciousness, such as the binding problem. The cognitive processes and phenomenology of congenital synaesthesia have been much explored, yet virtually nothing exists concerning the phenomenological topography of psychedelically-induced experiences, despite the recent renaissance in psychedelic research. Results are presented of an online survey into the prevalence, type and frequency of psychedelic synaesthesia experiences along with accounts of three people reporting permanent psychedelically-induced synaesthesia – a phenomenon as yet unreported in the literature but which may have important implications for our neuroscientific understanding of the congenital condition.

The audiovisual history charted in chapter two is here revoiced in terms of spatial expansion. It is argued that video technology did not initiate a new form of creative engagement with its performance spaces, but rather represented the peak of a spatial expansion that had been gathering pace throughout the twentieth century. As musicians explored their spatial parameters and artists included time in their work, attention was drawn to traditional viewing and listening procedures. Drawing on the theories of László Moholy-Nagy, Siegfried Giedion, Christopher Small and Brian O’Doherty, this chapter compares the conventions of gallery exhibition and display, viewing procedures and audience behaviour with the customs and aesthetics of listening in the traditional concert hall. Performance and installation art, aleatoric music and communal composition are used to propose a theory of spatialised creativity, audience activation and performativity.

In this article, the rapidly growing body of research that has been published recently on the topic of crossmodal correspondences that involve auditory and gustatory stimuli is critically reviewed. The evidence demonstrates that people reliably match different tastes/flavours to auditory stimuli varying in both their psychoacoustic (e.g., pitch) and musical (e.g., timbre) properties. In order to stimulate progress in this relatively young research field, the present article aims at consolidating prior findings concerning specific auditory gustatory mappings, whereby special attention is given to highlighting a) any conflicts in the existing experimental evidence, and b) any potential caveats with regard to the most appropriate interpretation of prior studies. Next, potential mechanisms underlying auditory-gustatory crossmodal correspondences are discussed. Finally, a number of potentially fruitful avenues for future research are outlined.

It is axiomatic that colour is about more than just lightwaves hitting the retina. In ancient philosophical circles, colour was often described as the primary object of vision: it was the external ‘skin’ that existed at the surface of an object, and what made the object visible or ‘sensible’ to a viewer. And yet, Greco-Roman literature is riddled with examples of colour categories that do not make sense simply in visual terms: from Homer’s ‘wine-dark sea’  (oinops pontos) to ‘whey-coloured’ (orōdēs) skin in Hippocratic medicine, from blushing (rubens) faces to the honey-coloured hair (mellei crines) and marbled skin of coveted girls in Augustan elegy, and from the saffron garments of decadent easterners to the expensive fishy-smelling purple robes of the late-antique imperial court, colours appealed not just to sight, but also to smell, touch and taste. This chapter uses arguments and ideas explored in my recent monograph Colour and Meaning in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2009) to suggest that colours in pre-modern societies such as Greece and Rome, because of their close ties to specific objects and phenomena (rather than just parts of the spectrum), were frequently synaesthetic experiences which appealed to multiple senses and mobilized more than just eyesight. The chapter draws upon case studies from a range of genres and contexts (Homeric epic, artistic ekphrasis, philosophical epistemology, political rhetoric, elegy and late antique legislation) to demonstrate not only that colour was a multi-sensory experience, but also that the nature of this experience was a central preoccupation of ancient thought in several areas of activity in the Greco-Roman world.  An understanding of this principle, then, can do more than just help us to translate and understand difficult Greek and Latin colour terms: colour was a basic sensory unit of information through which ancients experienced and evaluated the world around them, and the collaboration of the senses in these experiences suggests an approach to perception, knowledge and understanding which could be very different from that employed in the modern west.

Ce livre développe, à partir de Merleau-Ponty, Henry et Sartre, une phénoménologie décrivant la vie perceptive du point de vue du désir d'éprouver qui s'y déploie. L'auteur interroge, selon différents chemins tout à la fois opposés et noués les uns aux autres, le rapport de la vie perceptive à l'imaginaire et à la théâtralité originaire du corps. Il montre comment chaque expérience perceptive est la mise en jeu d'un désir de vivre, comment elle est susceptible d'accroître ou d'affaiblir la capacité des individus à se laisser affecter en profondeur par leur situation, à l'endurer, à y ouvrir du possible.

Contenu : Maurice Merleau-Ponty : La perception comme toucher à distance - La texture imaginaire du réel - Violence et événementialité de la vision - La théâtralité originaire du corps - Michel Henry : La vulnérabilité intrinsèque du pâtir - Affectivité, sensibilité, temporalité - Vie et possibilité - Impression et réalité - La texture imaginaire des impressions - Jean-Paul Sartre : Immanence, affectivité et intentionnalité - L'imaginaire et le retard originaire de la conscience - Émotion et imagination - Liberté et théâtralité.

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Through recent artistic practices and technology of interactive systems for music, composition and improvisation have more and more blended and interconnected with each other – a sui generis situation now called comprovisation. The concept of comprovisation applies equally well to the spontaneous generation and manipulation of computer graphics, especially as such graphics are systematically coordinated audio-visually, while being subject to spontaneous manipulation by a performer.
This is explained in terms of the Fluxations and FluxNoisations Human Body Interfaces, interactive dance systems that generate music and graphics spontaneously in response to hand and body movement. They enable spontaneous expressive shaping of coherent complexity and variety. Thus a multi-layered multimodal experience arises. The aesthetic experience of this multimedia spectacle relates to experiences of various prior music and visual art of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, as well as to hypothetical physical realities. Thus a kind of cybernetic phenomenology of art is pursued and enacted through an embodied cybersynthesis of art with simulated alternate reality. Call it a pragmatic speculative realism, an adventurous technoetic ‘what if.’ As compared to more traditional forms of improvisation, the opportunities for risk-taking and aesthetic exploration rise to a new level of uncertainty, as the reactions of the improviser simultaneously draw from and target both visual and aural modalities, such that the intentions toward each fuse together."

By means of Vivian Sobchack's semiotic film phenomenology, we may examine our immediate perceptual acts in film experience in order to determine the ways that the primordial language of embodied existence found at this primary level grounds the secondary level of the more explicit interpretations we give to the film's elements. Although Gilles Deleuze is openly defiant toward the phenomenological tradition, his studies of film experience can serve this purpose as well, because he is interested in the direct and pre-verbal significance of cinematic images. To bring his observations more fruitfully into film phenomenological studies, I will examine his notion of the discordantly operating body and as well offer a phenomenological interpretation for his notion of cinematic signs. I then apply this Deleuzian semiotic film phenomenology to his analysis of deep focus cinematography in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941). When watching one particular scene, different layers of our film experience, namely, those of visual and of temporal depth, collide in such a way that they provide the phenomenal basis for us to produce a temporal interpretation of the spatial relations held between the displayed images.

Although examples of work investigating the perceptual relationship and possibilities of sound and image are common, relatively little work has been carried out into multimedia works combining sound and three-dimensional objects. A practice-based investigation into this subject is presented, with original artworks and contextual material from sound art, sculpture, moving image and psychology. The project sets out to more examine the perception of multimedia work, specifically through the creation and analysis of artworks combining sound and physical objects. It considers three main areas of study: sound’s ability to draw attention to, or modify, the existing properties of an object; techniques which encourage sound and object to appear cohesively as part of the same work; and a discussion of cognitive effects that may occur as a result of their simultaneous perception. Using the concept of the search space from evolutionary computing as an example, the case is made that multimedia artworks can present a larger field of creative opportunity than single-media works, due to the enhanced interplay between the two media and the viewer’s a priori knowledge. The roles of balance, dynamism and interactivity in multimedia work are also explored. Throughout the thesis examples of original artworks are given which exemplify the issues raised. The main outcome of the study is a proposed framework for categorising and analysing the perception of multimedia artworks, based on increasing semantic separation between the sensory elements. It is claimed that as the relationship between these elements becomes less obvious, more work is demanded of the viewer’s imagination in trying to reconcile the gap, leading to active engagement and the possibility of extra
imaginary forms which do not exist in the original material. It is proposed that the framework and ideas in this document will be applicable beyond the sound/object focus of this study, and it is hoped they will inform research into multimedia work in other forms.

Considering the interrelations between sight, touch, and imagination, this book surveys classical, late antique, and medieval theories of vision to elaborate on how various spheres of the Byzantine world categorized and comprehended sensation and perception. Revisiting scholarly assumptions about the tactility of sight in the Byzantine world, it demonstrates how the haptic language associated with vision referred to the cognitive actions of the viewer as they grasped sensory data in the mind in order to comprehend and produce working imaginations of objects for thought and memory. At stake is how the affordances and limitations of the senses came to delineate and cultivate the manner in which art and rhetoric was understood as mediating the realities they wished to convey. This would similarly come to contour how Byzantine religious culture could also go about accessing the sacred, the image serving as a site of desire for the mediated representation of the divine.

Terhune, D. B., Luke, D. P., & Cohen Kadosh, R. (2017). The induction of synaesthesia in non-synaesthetes. In O. Deroy (Ed.), Sensory blending: On synaesthesia and related phenomena. (pp.215-247). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Internally focalized passages in narrative often employ metaphors to capture the experiential states of the focalizing character. My investigation of these metaphors—‘phenomenological metaphors’, as I call them—has two important precedents in the fields of narratology and literary stylistics: Dorrit Cohn’s (1978) treatment of ‘psycho-analogies’ and Semino and Swindlehurst’s (1996) approach to metaphor and ‘mind style’. After positioning phenomenological metaphors vis-à-vis these related concepts, I put forward the central claim of this article: metaphorical language plays a role in readers’ engagement with focalizing characters because it can sustain readers’ illusion of experiencing a storyworld through the consciousness of a fictional being. But what is it about metaphorical language that makes it especially suited to bring about this effect on readers? In order to answer this question, I use Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) as a case study, presenting two different lines of argument. First, I contend that metaphors reflect, at a linguistic level, the seamless integration of perception, emotion and language that characterizes our everyday transactions with the world. Second, I look at the relationship between understanding metaphorical language and readers’ empathy for characters, arguing that the continuity between these psychological processes is grounded in their perspectival nature: just as metaphors invite recipients to adopt a new perspective on a conceptual domain, engaging with a focalizing character encourages readers to ‘try on’ his or her experiential perspective and worldview. Taken together, these hypotheses provide an explanation for the effectiveness of phenomenological metaphors at conveying to readers the qualitative ‘feel’ of characters’ experiences.

How is creativity related to health and mental illness? What is the relationship between the nature of the unconscious and the predisposition to both creativity and mental illness? These questions are explored with reference to research on: creativity, imagination and primary process thinking, intuition and unconscious processes, dream sleep, and aspects of schizophrenia. A positive model of mental health that sees creativity as an aspect of self-realisation is outlined in terms of homeostasis and the importance of information flow between neuropsychological systems. The role of executive function and attention in controlling information flow between the cerebellar unconscious and the cerebral conscious is noted, with reference to

justify the forum almost entirely on their own. Then there is the book. It inaugurates its own sub-discipline which reaches into several disciplines besides mainstream music theory, such as music perception and cognition, human physiology, cognitive science, film studies, cultural history--even television marketing. Of course the book invites reaction from so many angles.

Synesthetes are people who report having perceptual experiences that are very unusual, such as “seeing” sounds as colors or “smelling” colors as odors. It is commonly assumed these days that such synesthetic experiences must be instances of misperceptions. Against this widespread assumption, I will highlight that there is reason to think that at least some synesthetic experiences can be viewed as truly veridical perceptions, and not as illusions or hallucinations. On this view, which I will back up by conceptual arguments and empirical data, synesthesia does sometimes enable the individual to truly pick up on worldly features. In failing to take this possibility on board, the participants in this debate have thus unduly restricted the scope of dialectical options. Finally, the reassessment of synesthetic experiences that I defend in this paper will turn out to have important ramifications not just for synesthesia research, but also for perception theories more generally.

Today an enriching museum visit is likely to leave a great many visual and
increasingly also auditory and tactile impressions. Different genres of museums go about the challenge of engaging visitors sensuously in different ways, and ethnographic museums seem to be at the forefront, whereas fine art museums may show a little more hesitancy in respect of engaging visitors in a diversified sensory display. Nevertheless, the tendency is clear: more and more often, museum-goers are invited to participate in museum activities through various senses, and just since this research project was launched a few years ago innovative multisensory exhibitions seem to have popped up all over, hereby varying the historical predominant visual mode of expression in the museum world.
The evocative power of smell engulfing one’s state of being has also led to an increasing interest being shown in the exploitation of smell in order to add an atmospheric ‘touch’ to the museum visit. Yet, there seem to be some weighty challenges for the museum world to deal with if it is to provide us with olfactory museum experiences in the way it intends. For as enriching as museum-staged olfactory experiences potentially are, they are just as likely to fall flat, turning into some kind of toe-curling gimmick. This challenge seems to reflect a lack of knowledge mirrored in the academic field of museology that fails to account for the context-dependency of smell in experience. We experience smell in accordance with the surroundings in which it occurs; the significance of smell is never static and even the same odorous compounds may be associated very differently when the context changes.
In order to take into account a socio-cultural understanding of the world of
odour, this article-based PhD dissertation seeks to expand the knowledge of atmospheric smell sensations within a dual framework including the museum venue and the given everyday culture about which it seeks to communicate with its visitors. The work offers a conceptual discussion of atmospheric smell in situ and ex situ within contemporary medical culture, that is, hospital-based and museum-staged. Prompted by the ambition to acknowledge the museum’s need to have its activities rooted in thorough investigation of the given culture on show, the dual analytical disposition is a sine qua non spanning varied fields and disciplines. The conceptual discussion offered in the thesis is spurred on by philosophical phenomenology predominantly paired with sociological and anthropological theory. It finds support in empirical work from both a hospital and a museum setting. Thus, it draws on a three-month ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2012 in a Danish hospital, including auto ethnographic observations from roughly two hundred and fifty operations with patients and health care providers interacting in the operating theatres. Beyond self-experienced curating, the analysis is further informed by a hundred and fifty short-length visitor interviews conducted in an art gallery.
Conceptually, the thesis suggests how smell is experienced as atmosphere
touching mood-wise in accordance with the given situation in which it occurs. In the hospital, neither patients nor doctors in general gave much voice to smell; patients were troubled, worried or confused, and doctors habitually turned their attention away from smell—as skilled inattentive noses—in order to focus on their more important work. Intruding body odours breaching the uniform ‘scentless silence’ of the environment, however, provoked explicit handlings to avoid discomfort observed in the interaction between nurses and patients. Undesirable smells were handled through washing, airing, changing sheets and covering up, but also through the employment of humour demanding from the nurses a socio-cultural competence in controlling the signal value of smell. Moreover, the thesis suggests not only how queries about the material presence or absence of smell show a significance in marking the atmosphere and social interaction between patients and medical health care workers, but also how the
presence of absence of smell crucially shows the way in which the hospital
atmosphere is perceived as a lack of or longing for homeliness, or is taken as the relief of any unpleasant smell, signalling ‘cleanliness’. In the museum, in turn, visitors were less troubled, at a distance from the cultural norms of a restricted olfactory hospital environment, plus encouraged by the museum venue to show a raised sensuous awareness. Subsequently, visitor interviews revealed how a museum-staged hospital atmosphere of an art installation was directly addressed owing to its smell. Curiously, this observation speaks against prevailing literature portraying smell as the ‘mute sense’, and what is more, the museum display did not alter smell curatorially. Rather, smell was gestured through non-olfactory effects and it was put in words metonymically, gesturing a reversibly synaesthetic atmosphere of a hospital. Visitor conversations revealed how smell could be poignantly picked up in situ, yet not until frequenting the museum venue ex situ was the olfactory atmosphere of a hospital addressed with greater awareness; relived and digested. Both in situ and ex situ settings were
characterised by atmospheric smell experiences that were independent of the material presence of smell.
Over the last decade museology has shown increasing interest in the inclusion of smell in exhibitions, and often questions revolve around how olfactory displays can be technically installed. Phenomenological analysis of atmospheric smell in and ex situ renders the possibility of varying and qualifying this debate. It argues that atmospheric smell is experienced independently of its physical presence.
Atmospheric exhibitions might smell, but not all scent- and smell-based
exhibitions are atmospheric in the way intended. Subsequently, this knowledge holds the potential to enrich the visitors’ engagement with cultures on display.

Slide 1] The first mention of the poet and painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882) is often followed by the familiar tale of this figure's involvement with nineteenthcentury Pre-Raphaelitism. A young Rossetti, courageous and determined, worked with his fellow artists, John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt, to found the new and avant-garde Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.

The purpose of this article is to develop a critical and extended understanding of practices in organization from a phenomenological point of view. It explores the relevance of Merleau-Ponty’s advanced phenomenology and ontology for understanding the role of the lived body and embodiment for practices in organisational life-worlds. Based on an embodied relational approach, the concept of an emergent and responsive “inter-practice’ in organisations will be developed. For showing a possible enactment of this embodied inter-practicing, improvisation is explored. Finally, some practical, political, theoretical and methodological implications and perspectives on embodied responsive and responsible inter-practices in organisations are discussed.

This keynote paper for Workshops on Psychoanalysis & Art History raises questions about the ability of neuroscientific theory to replace older psychoanalytic models. On the one hand, scholars in the arts and humanities have raised important doubts about the ability of brain science to offer real insights into such complex cultural phenomena as the history of art. If neuroscience turns out only to offer very limited theoretical tools, then it is likely we are not going to abandon psychoanalysis any time soon. On the other hand, a growing number of art historians, especially new researchers, find neuroscience more robust and ‘of the moment’ than psychoanalysis and are beginning to apply neuroaesthetic ideas to art-historical problems. Concepts such as ‘mirror neurons’ and ‘neuroplasticity’, for example, suggest new ways of understanding behavioural responses to works of art and the importance to artists of the natural environment. This paper, however, urges caution. It is argued that rather than abandoning psychoanalytic approaches to the history of art we should instead review the method. The greatest value of the current excitement about neuroscientific ‘discoveries’ might be to make us question what actually constitutes a psychoanalytic approach and to update the concepts that we all too habitually employ.

"Dalla IV di copertina

Sentire il design significa cogliere sensazioni con l'orecchio, ma anche tastare, odorare, vedere, gustare il progetto. L'abilità del progettista visivo sta certo nel far vedere, nel definire gerarchie percettive fra scritture e figure, ma anche nella capacità di orchestrare i registri sensoriali e di scegliere cosa lasciar catturare all'occhio e cosa invece agli altri sensi. Ciò non vale solo per artefatti pluriregistro come i multimedia; anche un libro comporta un coinvolgimento sensoriale plurimo, ha una tattilità, un peso, un odore, produce sonorità nell'azione dello sfogliare. Il volume mostra l'importanza, i caratteri e i modi di una progettazione mirata alla totalità del sensorio. Affronta gli aspetti fondamentali che legano sinestesia, comunicazione visiva e formazione del designer, delineando le conoscenze scientifiche sull'interazione sensoriale e sulla sinestesia ed esemplificando manifestazioni e casi propri della scrittura e, più in generale, del design della comunicazione. L'autrice rilegge alcuni esempi storici della grafica - dalla tipografia futurista alle esperienze formative del Bauhaus, fino ai recenti sviluppi indotti dal digitale con artefatti cinetici e interattivi - cercando ogni volta di ricostruire le relazioni fra gli intrecci fenomenici e i corrispettivi linguistici, tra le sensazioni e le parole. "

Terhune, D. B., Luke, D. P., Kaelen, M., Bolstridge, M., Feilding, A., Nutt, D., Carhart-Harris, R., Ward, J. (2016). A placebo-controlled investigation of synaesthesia-like experiences under LSD. Neuropsychologia, 88, 28-34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2016.04.005

Most contemporary text books of neurology and of psychology pay little attention to the function of the cerebellum beyond noting it to be an organ of motor control. A historical overview of research on cerebellar function is presented, from pre-Sherrinton suggestions of sensory and motor function, through the post-Sherrinton and dominant 20 th . Century view of "motor" function, to the 21 st . century perspective of "sensorimotor" function. The intrinsic capability of the cerebellum is briefly considered in terms of: its size/complexity/capacity; its information representation/processing characteristics (with "a particular computational function"); its sensory information processing capability; and, its role in sensorimotor regulatory control. It is suggested that the cerebellum can process sensorimotor stimulus information in a statistical (connectionist type) manner and respond to in on the basis of its own learning based sensorimotor representations, albeit at a "level" that does not necessarily involve cerebral "awareness".

This article is an attempt to synthesize the current knowledge about synaesthesia from many fields such as literature, arts, multimedia, medicine, or psychology. The main goal of this paper is to classify various types and forms of synaesthesia. Besides developmental synaesthesia being likely to play a crucial role in developing cognitive functions (constitutional or neonatal synaesthesia) there are types of synaesthesia acquired during adulthood (e.g., phantom or artificial synaesthesia), momentary synaesthesia triggered temporarily in people who do not show signs of synaesthesia every day (e.g., virtual, narcotic, or posthypnotic synaesthesia), and associational synaesthesia which, semantically speaking, refers to some universal sense relations (e.g., literary, artistic, and multimedia synaesthesia). There is a hypothesis that every kind of synaesthesia holds a different function-compensatory or integrative. It was suggested that synaesthesia can be described in one dimension, showing the intensity of this phenomenon. The stronger types of synaesthesia are: semantic, conceptual, intermodal, synthetic, comprehensive, external and bidirectional. The weaker types of synaesthesia are: sensory, perceptual, intramodal, analytic, partial, internal and unidirectional. There are huge individual differences in the manner that synaesthesia presents itself. By including a classification of kinds, types, and forms of synaesthesia into future experimental research will ensure a better understanding of the nature of this phenomenon, its mechanisms and the role that it plays in developing cognitive processes.

A historical "dual systems" perspectives on dreaming is revisited. Some contemporary perspectives are outlined in which dreams are considered in terms of : virtual reality simulations; memory processing; a way of "thinking". Reference is made to recent research indicating that REM sleep is involved in information processing of memories, learning, and problem solving. The traditional role of the brain stem in relation to the neurophysiological "origins" of dreaming is summaried. Some research and opinions indicating that the cerebellum may be a contributor to D/REM sleep are listed. Finally, iIt is proposed that the cerebellum is the very source of the sensorimotor information sequence that is exported, via the brain stem, to the cerebral cortex, and which is experienced in its reception at cerebral level as a dream.

This chapter examines the earliest fully realised abstract animated films, produced in Germany in the 1920s by Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling and Walther Ruttman.  The time-based medium of film offered these artists an opportunity to expand the musical concerns of Modernism, their use of musical vocabulary in film titles (Symphonie Diagonal, Rhythmus 21,  Opus 1) revealing its influence.  Music was central to all the artists discussed here; Richter’s interest in counterpoint was provoked by discussions with composer Ferruccio Busoni; Busoni also proved an influence on Eggeling who was a pianist and whose father owned a music shop; Ruttmann was a cellist and violinist.

Beneath this apparently simple unity of intention, however, lay a number of complex and at times oppositional issues.  The influence of music was understood in two very different ways; for Richter and Eggeling the non-representational quality of music could be seen as an inspiration to explore the unique qualities of the artists’ own medium, music served as an analogy for the interrogation of the non-representational qualities of painting or film.  Conversely, for Ruttman music was tightly integrated into film in an attempt to synthesise the visual and the aural, to create a synaesthetic mingling of the senses which denied the differences in art forms that the music as analogy approach erects.

This chapter argues that these differences reflected not only aesthetic choice but broader cultural concerns, Richter’s and Eggeling’s work embodying the ‘separation of the senses’ (Crary) that resulted from 19th century scientific investigation of vision. In contrast Ruttman’s films can be seen to reflect not only 19th century aesthetic concerns with synaesthesia and the Gesamtkunstwerk, but also the emergence of Gestalt psychology.

"Synaesthesia: The Mystical Sense of Law." In Routledge Research Handbook on Law and Theory. Ed. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos. Lonon: Routledge, 2018. 179-201.

For to everyone who senses something there comes about, in addition to the apprehension of the thing that he is sensing, also a certain self-awareness [ sunaisthesis] of [the fact] that he is sensing. – Alexander of Aphrodisias

“Synaesthetic perception is the rule [la règle]” (Merleau-Ponty 2002: 237). The question of the relation between law and the senses necessarily touches upon the synaesthetic nature of all perception. As law itself is not something properly observable, but is rather a principle operative through a non-circumscribable matrix of material, imaginal, and intellectual forms, so the sensing of law is unintelligible without reference to the principle of synthesis which governs sensation, that is, the common sense and sensing of sense first named by Aristotle’s commentators as synaesthesia. “Formed by the addition of the prefix ‘with’ (sun-) to the verb ‘to sense’ or ‘to perceive’ (aisthanesthai), the expression in all likelihood designated a ‘feeling in common,’ a perception shared by more than one” (Heller-Roazen 2007: 81). That it is the glossators and not the philosopher who coin the term, reveals the proportion between the with-sensing of perception and the with-thinking of commentary (from com-minisci, to invent) as a reflective act of searching out “the animating element in . . . textual objects that bears no name,” of “find[ing] the secret source of incompletion sealed in every work of thought” (Heller-Roazen 2007: 80). Like the formal inseparability of law and commentary, this synaesthesia of ‘synaesthesia’ indexes the broader perceptual sphere wherein our sensing of law’s being (what law is and that law is) is an activity that takes place within the traditionary margin of the given, “the gap between the thing to be transmitted and the act of transmission” (Agamben 1999: 107). The essential unboundedness of this margin, and with it the uncircumscribable nature of law itself, is captured in Nietzsche’s definition of consciousness as commentary: “All our so-called consciousness is a more or less fantastic commentary on an unknown, perhaps unknowable, but felt text” (Nietzsche 1997: 78). So synaesthesia touches upon the mystical sense of things, that mysterious sense of a we-know-not-what that: “Not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is” (Wittgenstein 1998: 6.44). In sum, both the origin of the concept of synaesthesia and the commentarial nature of awareness point to the need for understanding synaesthesia as not only an aspect of law’s relation to the senses but as the very interface between the sense of law and the law of sense. Synaesthesia is the law because synaesthesia senses, without sensing it as such, law per se . . .

Synaesthetic experience and kinaesthetics, the experience of the posture and the movement of the body, are key concepts in the understanding of the interplay between the habitus of the organism and its habitat. Both denote synthetic achievements of the sensing human organism. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously noted: “[s]ynaesthetic perception is the rule, and we are unaware of it only because scientific knowledge shifts the centre of gravity of experience, so that we have unlearned how to see, hear, and generally speaking feel […].” The original unity in sense perception, in his view, was grounded in the living body constituting a ‘système synergique’ linked together in the action of being in the world and thus constituting the kinaesthetically experienced ‘lived body’ of the embodied subject.

The present third volume of the series Habitus in Habitat does not just address synaesthesia and kinaesthetics from the point of view of the organism or a psychologically and phenomenologically construed philosophy of perception and the knowledge that this perspective brings. It also aims at an understanding of the several interfaces of habitat and experience. A theoretical approach that intends to include the sensually and emotionally charged environment (i.e. what it affords, what it offers and the interaction it enables) brings into view artistic, cultural, and social renderings of synaesthetic and kinaesthetic phenomena. It is the very habitus of the human organism to engage, to share, to express itself, and by following this habitus it creates a social and cultural habitat. This habitat, the social structures and urban patterns of cities, the complex unfoldings of artworks, the sensual environment of everyday life, all mark elements of synthesis which can be enlightened by theories of organismic capabilities, but also mark phenomena in their own right. The knowledge embedded in these ways of differentiating and combining modalities and the ways of making their interplay explicit in multimodal artworks and kinaesthetic artistic practices, transforms our experiences in various ways and calls for specific scientific and intellectual means to bring this specific knowledge into view. The Habitus in Habitat project aims to take both the specific ways of constructing this habitat and its very properties as well as the theories concerned with the engaging organism and its habitus into focus without committing the error of unheedingly foregrounding only one of
these two intrinsically intertwined aspects.

This only recently has come to be appreciated within the growing field of the cognitive sciences and has found expression in their recognition of the need for a new science of the mind which takes the embodied, embedded, enactive, extended and affective subject seriously, as has been proposed in the philosophy of the embodied mind. For example, in philosophy itself, this approach has been put to work in understanding social and political phenomena by bringing together social constructivism and biological foundations, the social and the somatic. This alternative picture of the human mind distances itself from the methodological solipsism and the strict boundaries of the neuroscientific disciplines that investigate local phenomena and generalize about the human mind and nature based on these findings. No comprehensive theory of mind and human practice can evolve by turning away from the embeddedness of its results in the wider biological, social or cultural settings. The social sciences, political theory, art history, media theory, and film studies – among many others – also have to be taken into account. It is fair to say that the very disciplines just mentioned have already gained in influence
(as the limitations of a too narrowly construed biological theory have become manifest) and nowadays are seen more and more as what they are and always have been: congruent theories of human nature. As such they restore insight into humans as bio-cultural beings and correct the shortcomings of some neurobiology and its view of the ‘naked brain’ as the single explanans. In taking the more comprehensive stance, the boundaries of the sciences are becoming more and more permeable, though not without keeping the methodological
principles of the respective disciplines intact. Those principles sometimes even are more fully explicated when adjacent theoretical achievements of different disciplines are compared and differentiated. The present volume of Habitus in Habitat follows such a line of thought with its transdisciplinary endeavour to explore synaesthesia and kinaesthetics.

This paper explores the intersections of, and interactions around, sound, space, and policing and popular resistance in the pre-restoration Pelourinho Historical Center of Salvador, Brazil.  It focuses on theories of agency, communication, and materiality (as well as absent materiality) in dialogue with the semeiotics of C.S. Peirce.

Clinical synesthesia is commonly defined as the experience of having perceptions in one sensory modality triggered by a stimulus from another. This paper adopts a particular orientation toward synesthesia, exploring it as a cultural phenomenon common to us all, as an ability that can be learnt instead of an accidental neurological condition. If synesthesia is both a capacity that we are not fully aware of and a way to access what is stored in memory even at the unconscious level, can art help us to bring this awareness back? Bearing upon a close reading of selected artworks created by Johannes Deutsch, a multi-media artist who has been experimenting with synesthesia, the paper argues that synesthesia can become a tool in the hands of contemporary artists to revitalize the Wagnerian ideal of a “total work of art”. This is to be understood as a politics of the senses based on communality rather than individualism, not as an ideology of totalitarian tendencies. Ultimately, the transformative potential of certain art resides in its capacity to foster a pedagogy of the image that is based upon multi-sensoriality, memory and history.

The condition of ‘genuine perceptual synaesthesia’ has been a focus of attention in research in psychology and neuroscience over the last decades. For subjects in this condition stimulation in one modality automatically and consistently over the subject’s lifespan triggers a percept in another modality. In hearing→colour synaesthesia, for example, a specific sound experience evokes a perception of a specific colour. In this paper, I discuss questions and challenges that the phenomenon of synaesthetic experience raises for theories of perceptual experience in general, and for theories that see the content and modality of conscious experience as being constituted and determined by the active and skilful exploration of the environment in particular. The focus of my paper will be on the latter, ‘enactive’ view of perception and its theory of what determines the modality-specific ‘feel’ of a perceptual experience

In the first part of the paper I introduce the phenomenon of ‘genuine perceptual synaesthesia’. I then, in the second part, sketch the theory of active perception that I want to endorse: enactivism. This is done by focusing on two basic assumptions underlying enactivism, and by defining two claims that a rather narrow ‘sensorimotor enactivism’ derives from these assumptions. These claims are: (a) the modality of a perceptual experience is constituted by the sensorimotor signature (i.e. the specific dependencies relating movements to stimulations) and the larger body-involving cycle underlying this modality; and: (b) distorting ele-ments get integrated and become transparent for the perceptual systems over a learning time span. These claims are challenged by cases of genuine synaesthesia. In part three, I discuss possible replies of the more narrowly defined sensorimotor enactivism to the first challenge and show that those replies either fail or betray important enactive insights. I will argue in particular that a promising way to meet the challenge (i.e. to claim that synaesthetic colours lack the properties of ‘bodiliness’ and ‘grabbiness’ of normal perceptual experience) fails. In part four, I suggest that enactivism, because it is unable to explain the perception-like experiences in cases of genuine perceptual synaesthesia, has to focus, instead, on typical realizers of perceptual experiences and on a more general enactivism in order to meet the two challenges. I show that this goes hand in hand with the inclusion of other adaptive time spans (in the course of which the perceptual system of an organism is shaped) in the explanations of phenomena like synaesthesia. In my view enactivism has not made this recourse to longer time spans as opposed to the ‘here-and-now’ explicit enough, though it is inherent to enactivism, even in the narrower, sensorimotor version of the theory. In order to explain and integrate certain atypical expressions of a perceptual mechanism – as I will argue in the last part of the paper – it is necessary to also take into view the embodiment of cognitive solutions shaped over evolutionary time spans and to adopt a heuristics and engineering perspective on such phenomena. This, I conclude, allows us to meet the challenges and hold on to central tenets of an enactive theory of perception.

Synaesthesia is considered here as a cognitive phenomenon in the context of developmental, neuropathological and linguistic perspectives. Developmental synaesthesia seems to arise as an effect of interplay between genotype and phenotype, during the implicit learning process in childhood, in those individuals who possess an inborn susceptibility to it. Some connections between synaesthesia and extraordinary experiences, brain restructuration and pain, are examined. Acquired types of synaesthesia may be related to sensory deprivation. The somatosensory cortex may be significant for cognitive synaesthesia, with especial importance placed on a mirror system. It is suggested here that synaesthesia might play a compensatory role during the sensorimotor stage of development. Linguistic-colour synaesthesia seems to be an abstract type of association that may characterize people with a hypersensitive colour perceptual system. In the present view synaesthesia may be seen as an effect of some deficiency that concerns double integrative processes.