[FRIAM] Ideasthesia?

[Steve Smith]

Frank -

> My elder daughter has severe synesthesia.
>
> Daughter:  What's that word for deceitful testimony?  It's yellow.
>
> Me:  I have no idea what you're talking about.
>
My sympathies are with her.  I'd be interested in hearing more about her
experience but don't want to invade her/your privacy with specific
questions.  I've not encountered many people with any significant
experience with synaesthesia.    My own experience is more with texture
than with the more common(ly described) "grapheme" and grapheme-color
oriented synaesthesia.

I've never found my own (I call it mild) to be particularly interfering
with everyday life or communication, yet I do find more and more
examples of how it *mildly* interferes with my sociability, my ability
to communicate with others (as with your example below).  For the most
part, it just *adds* to my experience of the world, though it *might*
have been my reason (excuse) for seeming to be more of a daydreamer than
my parents wanted when I was a child (staring into the puddle I was
supposed to walk around, caressing the post I was supposed to be burying
for a fence,  marveling at the clouds in the sky when I was supposed to
be "checking the weather").

I suspect that my strong attraction to (awareness of) metaphorical
constructions in everyday (up to and including most scientific and
mathematical discourse) may be grounded in the same (overly fertile?)
soil.    This morning I had a mild epiphany (hopefully it wasn't just a
mini-stroke) regarding my preference around the house for raw-wood
finishes over painted ones, etc.   I was looking down the (rough-sawn
timber) stair treads from the deck on off of my second floor bedroom and
seeing the various woodgrain patterns which have gotten more pronounced
over the 20 years since I installed them, resisting I don't know how
many people suggesting that i should variously
paint/stain/oil/varnish/seal these 3" thick x 16" deep x 3' wide
treads.   The treads were taken from a couple of 20' long beams that I
bought at a local viga yard not far way, and the grain of the tree they
(both?) came from is significant, leading (over 2 decades) to a mild
cupping in the direction implied by the inner-vs-the-outer orientation
of the donor tree (I believe it to have been a fir tree from the Jemez
which must have been at least 20" in diameter, given the sectioning I
obtained).    Nearly every time I look at these stairs (or maybe more
significantly, climb or descend them, "feeling" their bow/cup, their
texture, and the "spring" in the stringers from ground to (cantilevered
with it's own minor spring) deck.   I have a *visceral* experience of
all of this... I can *almost* feel the texture of the treads under my
bare feet (from one of the times I tread it barefoot) or hands as I look
at it.   When I consider someone's admonition that "you really should
varnish/paint that" I can *feel* the plasticized surface under my
feet/hands whether I happen to be looking at the staircase or not.

Whether I am analytic about the experience (as I report here), these are
the kinds of "feelings" that I have when I apprehend the various
"natural materials" around my home(stead).   The difference of "feel" I
have when I walk across an unfinished mud floor in my sunroom vs the
"feel" of the (less than perfectly) layed/leveled brick floors and the
"feel" of the softwood random-plank (planed 1x6,8,10,12) I layed over
the particle-board floor upstairs, and the "feel" of the engineered
clip-lock bamboo "hardwood" I put into my bedroom last year is deeply
"meaningful"? to me in some (non-analytic) sense.   Similarly, when I
look at or touch the (true) adobe wall of my courtyard vs the stucco'd
frame construction of my house (same color, same surface texture but
very different sense of heat-mass, solidness, larger-scale
uniformity).   I swear I can *smell* the adobe under the stucco of the
courtyard wall vs the same batch of stucco covering the
chicken-wire/tarpaper/OSB/frame/fiberglass-insulation/drywall
construction of the two walls.   Though I suspect this is *inferred*
from my belief (and evidence in heat-mass/solidity/uniformity from other
senses).   I *can* smell the adobe in my sunroom floor (especially if
I've accidentally wetted it while watering plants), but I doubt I can
smell my (40 year's installed) bricks over cement-slab while I *can*
smell the glue-free pine-plank flooring (20 years old) *and* the
engineered bamboo flooring (1 year old) which seems to be *less*
synthetic/glue smell (nominally the brand of bamboo flooring I bought is
*mostly* "glued" together by heat/pressure of the bamboo itself, though
there is a hardwood base that it is "glued" to with something synthetic
(like epoxy resin).

The point here (other than just introspective maundering) is that some
of my sensations are direct/literal, but others are
imputed?/inferred?/induced? by some subliminal interjection by my mental
models of what I'm seeing (and can be analytical about).  I don't know
if this is similar to others with synaesthesia or if what I'm
experiencing isn't synaesthesia at all, but subconscious *conflation* or
*projection* like what I *think* glen accuses/suspects me of when I
apply metaphors everywhere.   I guess I'm admitting that what Glen calls
out *might* be a fundamental/deep pathology in *thinking?* and that this
less linguistic, more experiential thing I'm describing is another face
of it.

I recently discovered the idea of  Danko Nikolik's of /ideasthesia
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideasthesia> /which may have informed
some of these maunderings (about the possible correlation between
synaesthesia and metaphoria?).  In the very limited time I have spent
with a psychoanalyst/therapist, he (a staunch Freudian) did offer me a
diagnosis of "ideaphoria" <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ideaphoria>
which I took to be his own coined portmanteau.

Some of this makes me wonder why *I* am not (more of?) a hypochondriac. 
It seems like this kind of conflation/projection/etc is the perfect
context for "hearing about a condition and abruptly experiencing it"?  
Maybe that is why I eschew most medical engagement, I might get carried
away with it.

It has been useful to be confronted by Glen's doubts about the pervasive
use/utility of metaphor... I can't say I can make a better case for it,
nor do I feel particularly less "loyal" to the thought, but I do feel
like I've explored the space (and it's adjacencies) a little more (and
expect to continue to).

- Steve
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