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<p>Frank - <br>
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<div dir="auto">My elder daughter has severe synesthesia.
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<div dir="auto">Daughter: What's that word for deceitful
testimony? It's yellow.</div>
<div dir="auto"><br>
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<div dir="auto">Me: I have no idea what you're talking about.<br>
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<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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").<br>
</p>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>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).</p>
<p>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. <br>
</p>
<p>I recently discovered the idea of Danko Nikolik's of <i><a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideasthesia">ideasthesia</a>
</i>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 <a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ideaphoria">"ideaphoria"</a>
which I took to be his own coined portmanteau.<br>
</p>
<p>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.<br>
</p>
<p>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).<br>
</p>
- Steve<br>
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