1 / 33

Synesthesia: The Key to Understanding Language, Metaphor and Abstract Thought

Synesthesia: The Key to Understanding Language, Metaphor and Abstract Thought. V. S. Ramachandran Center for Brain and Cognition University of California, San Diego vramacha@ucsd.edu. The Four Key Questions. Is synesthesia real? Is it a genuine sensory phenomenon or a cognitive one?

marva
Download Presentation

Synesthesia: The Key to Understanding Language, Metaphor and Abstract Thought

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Synesthesia: The Key to Understanding Language, Metaphor and Abstract Thought V. S. Ramachandran Center for Brain and Cognition University of California, San Diego vramacha@ucsd.edu

  2. The Four Key Questions • Is synesthesia real? • Is it a genuine sensory phenomenon or a cognitive one? • What are the precise brain mechanisms? • What are its precise broader implications (i.e., what’s the big deal)?

  3. The Seven Pieces of the Puzzle • Runs in families • Angular gyrus and dyscalculia • More common in artists & poets • Synthesthetic metaphors • Increased emotional reactions • Correlation with TLE • Evolution of language

  4. + 2 252 2

  5. + 2 252 2

  6. Phenomenology • The Martian Color Effect and qualia • Patchy colors • Letter precedence effect • Apparent motion

  7. Some Striking Facts! color-blind synesthetes imagining numbers

  8. Galton’s Number Lines: real or bogus?

  9. Number Line 1 11 12 13 14 2 10 15 9 3 8 16 5 6 7 17 18 19

  10. SYNESTHESIA 1) genes 2) brain anatomy 3) perceptual psychophysics 4) metaphor, abstract thought, Shakespeare “hierarchical reductionism: NOT bad reductionism”

  11. Neural Basis of Abstraction

  12. Theories of Language Evolution • Wallace: Divine Intervention • Chomsky: Emergent physical properties • Gould: Specific manifestation of a more general purpose mechanism, such as thinking • Pinker: A mechanism evolved through natural selection as a specific adaptation for communication (i.e. “adaptationism”)

  13. Theories of Language Evolution • Wallace: Divine Intervention • Chomsky: Emergent physical properties • Gould: Specific manifestation of a more general purpose mechanism, such as thinking • Pinker: A mechanism evolved through natural selection as a specific adaptation for communication (i.e. “adaptationism”) • Ramachandran/Hubbard: Synesthetic bootstrapping theory of language

More Related