Discovering Synesthetic Abstraction

I studied design in an art college. If you have a background in design education, you know how frustrating that can be. An art college views design from the point of view of applied art, or ‘applying art to commerce’. It doesn’t sound too bad until you realize that the educators are all out of work painters, perspective artists and poets. While philosophy was abundant, there was absolutely no rationale or logic, business or otherwise. Design approval was arbitrary.

After the first 2 years of art college education, I began to feel irritated with the lack of accurate feedback. The internet wasn’t available to me at the time, and our college library only had art books. British library was ok, but I couldn’t decipher head or tail of the science books there because popular books on neuro-science weren’t as widely available. It was frustrating because, like any student I developed theories of my own on why some visuals appealed to some and not to others. Some worked and did what they had to, others fell flat, and there was no way of objectively verifying my theories…

For example, when it came to shapes, I was pretty sure that I could manipulate people to assume a certain mental stance or feeling about a shape. The problem was in defining the borders between these feelings. For instance, could I present a board with various shapes and have people delineate their feelings about each in an objective sense. It was important that the shapes were just abstract forms and not immediately symbolic about anything specific. Slowly I created a system of cross-checking my theories by conducting research.

I would hand out forms with images on them, and people would tick off criteria. Other exercises included associations between mathematics and emotions or personal feelings. The biggest problem I faced was getting people to not cerebrate over the questionnaire. I knew that if they spent too long a time on each question, the results would be junk because it was not spontaneous so I crudely imposed some kind of time limit on each question. But the final results of my survey amazed me.

For the first time, I had clear objective proof that I was making the right associations. The test paper basically featured random shapes, some with sharp edgy lines. Others had soft, pliable forms. The treatment though was the same, all were black outlines of the same thickness. My ‘audience’ basically had to point out friends from not so friendly shapes (imagine they were people!). The next question featured various architectural shapes with similar deliverables required from the participants.

The results showed that an overwhelming 98% made choices exactly as I had predicted and in the very same order as well. This showed that people were associating the forms with some kind of sense that allowed them to tag it as ‘friendly’. Since ‘friendly’ isn’t so much a visible feature as much as it is a characteristic, it made for strange logic. Advertisers are used to inserting images as anchors or hooks to aid brand recall at the point of sale. But this test proved that there was some other aspect of perception at play that could read character even into abstract shapes devoid of any inherent emotional-characteristic of their own.

Of course, since I’m a design student, far away from the vocabulary of mind sciences, I didn’t stay on the topic long. I didn’t tell too many people about it either. But I never forgot that lesson.

Yesterday, almost a decade later, I was watching Vilayanur Ramachandran on TED speak about Synesthesia. I have read his Phantoms in the brain, so I was looking forward to this genius speak about my favorite subject. Imagine my surprise when Ramachandran recreates the very same experiment in front of the audience. This time with V.R explaining what really happens, my experiment makes a lot more sense.

CROSS MODAL SYNESTHETIC ABSTRACTION

Ramachandran shows the audience two shapes. One sharp and ragged, the other a smoother shape, but both being abstract forms. Ramachandran tells them that these are martian alphabets and asks the audience which one they think is called kiki and which one booba. A 98% of the audience point out the smooth shape as Booba and the sharp one as Kiki.

Owing to the sharp inflection of the word KIKI, there is an excitation in the auditory cortex which corresponds to our visual of the jagged shape. In Ramachandran’s words, our brains are able to extract the common denominator between the sound and the visual. We use this ability all the time in judging everything in the world around us. The appearance of a stranger, the appreciation of a metaphor. Every time we make a connect, we use this ability to create sense out of abstraction.

Ramachandran points out that this proves that we are all synesthetes varying in certain degrees from each other.

I found this video online, Chris Gordon singling Accapello. Watch how he literally moulds the song with his hands and overall body language.

While these sensibilities have always featured in the vocabulary of the designer, (Aaah, thats a friendly shape!), there is no attempt by designers to isolate this phenomenon and study it in a psychological sense. Trends research in product design makes heavy use of this insight (in cross modal abstraction) when conducting form studies, and results make their way directly from the designer to shelf with very little empirical data about the design solution. Most times, the designer presents a rationale which is couched in the descriptive language of design or even art.

If I had to step away from the physiological aspects (only for just a minute!) of the brain function and slip into Philosophy of Mind, then I’d say that V.S Ramachandran’s 4 laws to correlate actual neural events with Qualia, easily apply to this phenomena of synesthetic abstracton. The 4 rules are:

1. “Qualia are irrevocable and indubitable. You don’t say ‘maybe it is red but I can visualize it as green if I want to’. An explicit neural representation of red is created that invariably and automatically ‘reports’ this to higher brain centres.
2. “Once the representation is created, what can be done with it is open-ended. You have the luxury of choice, e.g., if you have the percept of an apple you can use it to tempt Adam, to keep the doctor away, bake a pie, or even just to eat. Even though the representation at the input level is immutable and automatic, the output is potentially infinite. This isn’t true for, say, a spinal reflex arc where the output is also inevitable and automatic. Indeed, a paraplegic can even have an erection and ejaculate without an orgasm.
3. “Short-term memory. The input invariably creates a representation that persists in short-term memory — long enough to allow time for choice of output. Without this component, again, you get just a reflex arc.
4. “Attention. Qualia and attention are closely linked. You need attention to fulfil criterion number two; to choose. A study of circuits involved in attention, therefore, will shed much light on the riddle of qualia.”
   ^{from Wikipedia page on Qualia}
   

The split second association is more than enough to sway 99% of the audience with the keeki and booba mind game. This raises some interesting possibilities for the designer. Both in purposeful inclusion and in ‘happy-accidents’ in design concepts.

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I left this post to visit my parent’s home for a birthday party. My mom teaches hearing impaired children. I wonder how the Keeki and Booba experiment would work with them. I asked mom if there was a pattern of other noticeable ‘abnormalities’ in the children that she teaches. She said there were. Some suffered from Cerebral Palsy or other spastic disorders. A possible future project would be to try the experiment there and document it on camera.

Obvious questions right now are how do they accommodate the loss of hearing. Do other synesthetic effects come into play? How do they make up for auditory input through other means? I also have to plan on how to collect correct data since an intermediary will be involved. (The children are also speech disabled.)

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You can download the PPT used by VS Ramachandran here.

Or read the lecture transcript and hear the audio version here,

Watch the entire video…