PearlD's posterous http://pearld.posterous.com Most recent posts at PearlD's posterous posterous.com Thu, 18 Mar 2010 20:39:34 -0700 Merging sounds and sight to understand. http://pearld.posterous.com/merging-sounds-and-sight-to-understand http://pearld.posterous.com/merging-sounds-and-sight-to-understand

As a person who's always been fascinated with Synesthesia because of a BBC documentary and becasue I did a Science and writing project on the topic, Steven Connor's article "Edison's Teeth: Touching Hearing" caught my attention with the mention of synesthesia. But then a part of me just got lost...as expected, I suppose.

I think the interesting part of the article had to be the part that says, "hearing tends to ask questions that get answered by evidence of the eyes". Really?

First of all, because of the previous reading assigned for this week, it'll have to be "listening" in the place of "hearing".

But anyway, do we really need to see something physical/real (like photos)  to make sense of the noises that we hear? Well, I don't really think it has to be a physical image present in the world. What about images that we create in our minds when we listen to things?

When we listen to a podcast, even with the lack of imagery, if we hear a lot of sound effects we create an image in our heads in order to make sense of things.

But do those imagined images count as evidence that help us understand things we hear? Well technically, our imagination is shaped and inspired by images around us. For instance, we "know" what a dragon looks like because of people's physical interpretations of such things.

So then I guess, the brain created images when we hear things can be considered a type of evidence because they're based on real life images/things.

But do imaginary images answer questions from listening? Sort of. In the case of images conjured by our minds- they don't really give us the right answers. I remember listening to Jericho's podcast and the intro song made me imagine a car ad. I spent a while trying to figure out which car ad it was from.Going through his shownotes- I found the intro music was from a movie OST that had nothing to do with cars.

On another note, what does Edison's teeth have to do with anything?

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