Category: Integrating

Singularity Hub has reviewed the best commercial and research lab robots from 2008 and has videos of each and every one.

It’s a fantastic collection that has everything from exoskeletons, to violin playing humanoids, to ultra-lightweight robots that fly by flapping gossamer-thin wings.

The most curious is probably the robot self-reassembling chair or maybe the robo-shapes from the ISI Polymorphic Robotics Laboratory.

Anyway, a fascinating collection and great to see how AI and mechanical engineering are being applied to create the latest in cutting-edge robotics.

Link to ‘A Review of the Best Robots of 2008’ videos.

Monsters existed in the 1800s. They were not mythical creatures, but children born with birth defects who were widely discussed in the medical literature and sometimes cruelly paraded in the travelling freak shows of the time. Curiously, one of the most popular explanations for these congenital deformities concerned the psychology of the expectant mother.

If you had asked a 19th century doctor why some children were born with unusual bodies, or even fairly common birthmarks, you might have been told that they were caused by a frightening incident experienced by the mother during pregnancy.

The theory, known as ‘maternal impression‘, suggested the trauma could symbolically imprint itself on the foetus. The 1896 book Anomalies and Curiosities of Medicine described many such cases in their chapter on obstetric anomalies, and this is a fairly typical example:

Parvin mentions an instance of the influence of maternal impression in the causation of a large, vivid, red mark or splotch on the face: “When the mother was in Ireland she was badly frightened by a fire in which some cattle were burned. Again, during the early months of her pregnancy she was frightened by seeing another woman suddenly light the fire with kerosene, and at that time became firmly impressed with the idea that her child would be marked.’

In another case history, a child with hydrocephalus with a “small and rabbit-shaped” face and deformed eyes is explained by the fact that a rabbit jumped at its mother during pregnancy where she was frightened by its ‘glare’.

Perhaps one of the most curious cases was published in 1817 and concerned a recalcitrant father who denied being responsible for an unwanted pregnancy, causing the mother a great deal of distress. The child was later born, reportedly with the name of date of birth of his father clearly visible in his eyes.

This is a curious mirror of the first, probably mythical, case of maternal impression, where Hippocrates reportedly saved the honour of an adulterous princess by explaining her dark skinned child as due to her having a portrait of a ‘negro’ in her room.

Although the theory enjoyed a long and colourful life, it peacefully passed away in the late 19th century when it became clear that the mind of the mother had no influence on birthmarks or congenital deformities.

For many years the psychological state of the expectant mother was thought to have virtually no effect on the developing child.

But then the Soviet Union invaded Finland in 1939, and that all began to change.

The quickly assembled Finnish force was vastly outnumbered and ominously outgunned but, unlike their Soviet counterparts, they were quick and comfortable in the Artic conditions and made swift and deadly attacks.

In one of history’s great military victories, they defeated the Russians but suffered heavy losses. Many of the dead were young men, and many of the grieving were young pregnant women.

Nearly 40 years later, two Finnish psychiatrists decided to look at the mental health of the children who grew up without fathers. They compared children born to women who grieved during pregnancy, to those born to women who lost their husbands after the child had been born.

Their study, published in 1978, found that mothers who had lost their husbands during pregnancy were much more likely to have children who later developed schizophrenia.

Many similar studies have found that severe maternal stress during pregnancy affects the developing brain of the child, increasing the risk of cognitive or psychiatric problems later in life, possibly due to the effect of the hormonal response of the hypothalamo-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) system.

Thankfully, we no longer think of people as monsters, whatever their size, shape or mental state, and we have long banished the monstrous myths of ‘maternal impression’.

But we do know that the mind of the mother is connected to the development of the unborn baby, and that maternal experiences can still echo through the life of the child.

Our perception of how mentally sharp we are has more to do with how we’re feeling emotionally than how our cognitive functions are actually working.

In other words when someone says, ‘I think my memory has become much worse recently’, research suggests that this tells us almost nothing about how their memory is working, but reliably indicates that their mood has been low.

It’s quite amazing to think that we have such poor insight into the functioning of our own minds that we ‘mistake’ low mood for a bad memory, poor concentration or impaired problem solving but it’s a finding that has been widely replicated in healthy people, both young and old, in psychiatric patients, and most recently in patients with epilepsy – to mention but a few of the studies.

Anosognosia is a condition that can occur after serious brain injury where the patient is unaware of their disability.

In the most striking cases, a patient may be paralysed, amnesic or even blind, but be completely unaware of the fact.

In these cases, we think that the brain damage has impaired our ability to have insight into our own mental functioning, but these studies suggest that we’re actually not very good at this to start with.

Link to one of the many studies in the area.

I’ve just discovered that the eScholarship Editions site that has 500 academic books freely available online, several psychology and psychiatry books among them, including the excellent book ‘Hysteria Beyond Freud’ which takes a historical look at this fascinating and curious condition.

‘Hysteria’ has meant many things in medical history and originally the Ancient Greeks used it to describe what they thought was a ‘wandering womb’. Its modern meaning implies the presence of what seem like neurological symptoms, such as paralysis, seizures or blindness, but without any detectable neurological damage.

Borrowing an idea from Pierre Janet, Freud popularised the idea that these symptoms were physical manifestations of psychological distress or trauma as a way of diverting the psychological pain from the conscious mind – essentially ‘converting’ the emotional energy to something else.

Although the idea of hysteria ‘psychological defence’ or ’emotional conversion’ has not been well supported by the evidence, it certainly seems the case that striking physical impairments can be unconsciously triggered.

Which is amazing if you think about it.

You could go blind, despite all your visual systems seeming to work perfectly, and you’d have no conscious control over it.

Recent evidence suggests this is possibly due to attentional systems in the brain impairing perceptual functions that occur early in the stream of consciousness, but it’s not clear why this happens.

The modern diagnostic manuals label hysteria as ‘conversion disorder’ or ‘dissociative disorder’ but they’re not necessarily good names because there’s still debate about whether the disorder actually involves ‘dissociation’ or ‘conversion’.

Many clinicians and researchers still use the term hysteria, or describe the symptoms as ‘functional’ or ‘psychogenic’, or perhaps even the more mysterious ‘medically unexplained’.

The picture on the left is called ‘The hypnotized patient and the tuning fork’ and was taken in the Salp√™tri√®re Hospital in Paris in 1889, where much early work on hysteria was conducted by neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his colleagues.

It’s featured in a chapter of ‘Hysteria Beyond Freud’ about artistic and photographic depictions of the ‘hysteric’ which contains many such striking images.

Owing to the fact that hysteria is at once a ‘psychological’ and ‘bodily’ condition, images were an early way of studying the condition and popularising it among doctors.

Interestingly, although hysterical symptoms are not consciously produced, they can respond to suggestion. If you’re puzzled by how suggestions can have unconscious effects on the body, think placebo.

‘Hysteria Beyond Freud’ is a fascinating book that tracks the condition through history and there are several other freely available psychology and psychiatry books also available.

Link to chapter ‘The Image of the Hysteric’.

SharpBrains has an interesting interview with neuroscientist Andrew Newberg who discusses his ongoing research into the brain science of meditation.

As we reported last year, research into meditation is really gathering pace and is suggesting that the practice has some immediate and remarkable benefits for our cognitive abilities that are clearly reflected in changes in brain function.

Most of the lab work has focused on how meditation enhances attention while most of the clinical research work on meditation has focused on its ability to prevent relapse in severe depression.

However, Newberg mentions some ongoing work where they’re attempting to apply some of the lab work to boosting cognitive function in people who presumably have dementia or age-related cognitive difficulties:

Scientists are researching, for example, what elements of meditation may help manage stress and improve memory. How breathing and meditation techniques can contribute to health and wellness. For example, my lab is now conducting a study where 15 older adults with memory problems are practicing Kirtan Kriya meditation during 8 weeks, and we have found very promising preliminary outcomes in terms of the impact on brain function. This work is being funded by the Alzheimer’s Research and Prevention Foundation, but we have submitted a grant request to the National Institute of Health as well.

Also, I just that Time magazine had a special issue on the practice and science of meditation in 2003 which is fully available online, including a funky, if not slightly over-simplified, guide to the neuroanatomy of meditation.

Link to SharpBrains interview with Andrew Newberg.
Link to previous Mind Hacks piece on neuroscience of meditation.
Link to 2003 Time special issue of meditation.

The Economist has a fascinating article on how new technology is turning supermarkets into behavioural science labs and how you are an unwitting participant in marketing experiments.

The piece discusses the psychology of big store marketing, touching on three areas: store layout and environment design, ‘neuromarketing‘ and customer tracking.

It’s interesting that much of the fuss in the media has focused on ‘neuromarketing’ – the use of cognitive neuroscience to understand consumer behaviour – when it is clear from this article that it is really quite impotent in the face of the two other powerful techniques.

Neuromarketing is largely the study of financial decision making and typically relies on correlating brain activity with simulated consumer purchasing.

The idea is that it will explain how we make purchase decisions and will give us access to some of the unconscious process that are at work. Once we understand these, it could lead marketers to new techniques that we would never have discovered by studying behaviour or opinions alone.

In other words, it’s a theory generating process, because the bottom line of marketing is to increase sales – an objectively measured, concrete outcome.

If we want to see if a marketing technique has worked, we would want to study what people actually do with their money, so the proof of any insight from neuromarketing is actually in follow-up behavioural experiments or sales figures.

You can see from the article why the media fuss and commercial hype of neuromarketing is often unjustified because its abstract benefit is no match for the behavioural data and this is being gathered in almost frightening detail every time you shop.

Three technologies are mentioned: RFID tags – tiny radiotransmitters that can be used to track individual items in the shop; using mobile phone signals to track shoppers position and path through the store; and face recognition software to track people via the security cameras and record their emotional expressions.

Combine this with the detailed purchase data from the tills, and you have a marketing psychologists dream: the fine detail of how people actually behave in the store, how they interact with individual products, and what they actually purchase.

In other words, it’s possible to see how any changes affect behaviour during decision-making and at the purchase point. The sheer number of shoppers means that the data set is huge – you could not ask for better behaviour science data – and that even quite subtle changes can be tried and tested.

The Economist article does a great job of explaining some of the techniques that are being used to study shoppers, but also some of the techniques that are currently being used to entice / manipulate shoppers (take your pick!) during their visit to the supermarket.

Link to Economist article on the behavioural science of supermarkets.

Neurophilosophy has found a wonderful collection of historic neuropathology drawings from the 1800s that manage to be both gruesome and beautiful in equal measure.

The collection is from an 1831 addition to the book Reports on Medical Cases, Selected with a View to Illustrate the Symptoms and Cure of Diseases by a Reference to Morbid Anatomy.

The medical text was authored by Richard Bright who employed various distinguished painters to create the illustrations, including a royal portrait artist.

Neurophilosophy has selected some of the finest and most striking drawings of the nervous system that make for some compelling viewing.

Link to Neurophilosophy on ‘Beautiful diseased brains’.

The ‘rubber hand illusion’ is where we can be fooled into feeling a sensation in a fake hand. A group of researchers have used this same technique with arm amputees and found that they can induce sensations that seem to be located in the rubber hand even in people who have had their real hand amputated.

The study has just been published online by the neurology journal Brain, and it could have important implications for the development of prosthetic limbs that can relay touch sensations which could seem to be experienced in the mechanical fingers.

The study is from the same team that recently hit the headlines with their virtual reality ‘body swapping’ study, which, like the ‘rubber hand illusion’, is based on the same general principal.

This is the now widely replicated finding that when we see a fake but convincing body part being touched, and we feel a genuine sensation on the actual body part, our brain ‘moves’ the sensation to where the fake body part is.

The ‘body swapping’ study used camera trickery to do this – each person had a camera by their eyes but had goggles which displayed what the person sitting opposite saw. When they shook hands, each person saw themselves from the other person’s perspective and with the genuine touch from the handshake, it produced the illusion that the person was located ‘inside’ their opposite.

However, the ‘rubber hand illusion’ is a much simpler way of producing a similar effect. It requires that you sit with your real hand out of sight, under the table perhaps, and a rubber arm placed on top of the table as if it were in the natural position of your limb.

When both the real hand and the false hand are touched in an identical way, such as the little finger being stroked with a pen, the sensation seems to be located in the rubber hand, despite the fact you know it to be fake and you’re aware your real hand is under the table. There’s a video of it online if you want to see an example of the set-up.

This is obviously a little difficult to do with people who have had their arm amputated, but the researchers used the same procedure but stroked the stump of the amputated limb.

Probably because this stimulates the remaining nerve fibres, the same illusion was triggered, and the sensation ‘moved’ to the rubber hand.

To check the effect wasn’t just the participants saying what the experimenters wanted to hear, they wired the participants up to a skin conductance measure – something known to increase when people are stressed.

They then stabbed the rubber hand with a syringe. When this happened after the illusion was induced, the stress response was significantly greater, indicating that the effect was real and compelling enough to increase anxiety.

Interestingly, the illusion was weaker in people who had their hand amputated for longer periods. This is likely due to the fact that the mapping of how brain areas represent body parts slowly rearranges after amputation.

It continues rearranging over time and areas previously used to represent the hand start to be used for representing other existing body parts, making the illusion less compelling. This also explains why phantom limbs often fade or ‘warp’ over time.

UPDATE: I’ve just noticed that Scientific American has a good brief article on the rubber hand illusion that appeared this month.

UPDATE TWO: Neurophilosophy also takes a look at the study and actually does a better job than me!

Link to open-access study from Brain.

The medical journal Movement Disorders reported two case studies of people who were deaf from birth and had the tic disorder Tourettes, leading them to compulsively swear in sign language.

Tourettes is often associated with compulsive swearing, although this only happens in a minority of cases. It is more commonly associated with compulsive actions, that can be non-word vocal sounds, or actions that range from eye-blinks to hair-combing like actions.

However, in some people compulsive swearing, known as coprolalia, does appear, and in these two cases studies, it seems this can even be expressed through sign in people who have sign language as their first language.

This is from a 2001 case study:

Here we present a 31-year-old man with prelingual deafness who had motor and vocal tics as well as coprolalia expressed through sign language. He would feel a compulsion to use the sign for “cunt” (see Fig. 1: [top]) in contexts (grammatical and social) that were not appropriate. This is essentially the sign for the medical term “vagina” except that the sign is pushed toward the person at whom it is aimed and accompanied by threatening body language and facial expression. The patient would then feel embarrassed about the compulsion and aim to disguise it as another sign. Commonly, this would be the sign for “petrol pump” (see Fig. 2: [bottom]). This can also be used to symbolise a small watering can.

There’s also loads of great guides to sign language on the net, including a guide to swearing and a guide to flirting if ever you find yourself wanting to chat up a hot deaf babe or sexy deaf boy.

Link to first case study (vaguely via MeFi).
Link to PubMed entry for same.
Link to second case study (mentioned above).
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Lilliputian hallucinations are where small figures of animals or people appear as visions, often in the bottom half of the visual field, sometimes as dancing, playful creatures. Last year the German Journal of Psychiatry published a fascinating English-language article about these curious perceptual distortions.

They can appear in a number of conditions, including psychosis and schizophrenia, during alcohol withdrawal-induced delirium tremens, or when part of the retina starts to degrade in macular degeneration.

The article has three case studies that give a flavour of these often surprising hallucinations and goes on to discuss what we know about their cause.

Here’s an excerpt from one of the case studies of an alcohol dependent man (who was drinking about 50 units a day!) who suddenly cut-down on his drinking and started experiencing striking withdrawal effects as a result:

Following this, his sleep had markedly reduced and he started seeing little people all over the house. They were about a foot high, with funny colorful dresses, weird faces, big eyes and mouths. Some of them were also wearing spectacles. They would follow him all around the house and he could hear their footsteps. Patient would also see them drinking his blood (did not elaborate further) and complained of physical weakness as a result. Initially, patient attributed his experiences to some evil spirits present in the house and changed the house. But the experience continued.

Perhaps one of the most surprising causes of these hallucinations is macular degeneration, sometimes diagnosed as Charles Bonnet syndrome, owing to the fact that simple damage to the retina can lead to complex hallucinations that seem to take on a life of their own.

Link to ‘Lilliputian Hallucinations. Understanding a strange Phenomenon’.

A list of ingredients found by chemical analysis that have been used to cut street heroin sold in New York City from 1991 to 1996.

As reported in a 2000 review paper on trends in NYC heroin adulterants:

Acetaminophen (Analgesic)
Aminopyrine (Anti-inflammatory)
Amitryptaline (Anti-depressant)
Antipyrine (Body water measurement)
Benzoczine (Anesthetic)
Caffeine (Stimulant)
Cocaine (Stimulant)
d-metamphetamine (Stimulant)
Diphenhydramine (Anti-histamine)
Doxepin (Anesthetic)
Ephedrine (Stimulant)
Lidocaine (Anesthetic)
Hydroxyzine (Anxiety medication)
Methylparben (Chemical preservative)
Methocarbamol (Muscle relaxant)
Nabumetone (Arthritis treatment)
Nicotinamide (Coenzyme)
Phenylbutazone (Anti-inflammant)
Phenylpropanlamine (Dexatrim / caffeine)
Potassiumchloride (Potassium supplement
Rocaine (Local anesthetic)
Propoxyphene (Analgesic – Darvon)
Sodium Bicarbonate (Acid indigestion)
Quinine (Malaria treatment)
Theophylline (Bronchial dialator)
Thiamine (Dietary supplement)
Thiopental (Barbiturate)
Thioridazine (Nausea medication)
Tripolidine (Allergy medication)
Disodium ethylenediame tetraacetic (Chelating agent for metals)

The study notes that the most common non-dope ingredients in street heroin are lactose, milk sugar, sucrose, cellulose, mannitol and other inert ingredients, but there is an increasing trend for heroin to contain psychoactive chemicals or additional substances to alter its effect through changing how it is absorbed into the body.

Interestingly, the paper also notes that professional heroin cutters are expensive, charging up to $20,000 for a kilo of heroin. This is likely due to the skill and knowledge needed to select ingredients that will have certain effects, which can be different for ‘smokers’, ‘snorters’ and ‘injectors’.

Ingredients that affect the vaporisation point of heroin will be more important for smokers, while adulterants that increase absorption through the nasal passages will obviously be more important for snorters.

For injectors, cutters need to be able to select ingredients that aren’t going to gum up needles or cause too much damage to the users’ veins.

Additionally, some ingredients are added purely for their psychoactive effect to give a different experience and ‘brand’ the dope.

However, owing to the cost of a professional cutter, some dealers just cut it themselves with whatever they think is reasonable, meaning all kinds of potentially fatal ingredients end up in the average bag of smack.

Link to closed-access paper ‘The Re-Engineering of Heroin’.

Synaesthesia is well studied in adults and is thought to be a result of unusual connections created during brain development, but it has been hardly studied in children – until now.

A new study published online in Brain searched for letter-colour synaesthetes in 6-8 year old children and found not only are they relatively common, but that the condition changes as the children grow.

Synaesthesia is where the senses are crossed, so perceiving something in one sense triggers a perception in one of the other senses. The type targeted by this study was letter-colour synaesthesia where people perceive colours when they see certain letters.

Synaesthesia is known to be partly inherited and there is brain imaging evidence that people with the letter-colour type have greater number of white matter connections between brain areas known to be involved in word and colour perception.

A popular theory is that synaesthesia results from an unusual form of brain development where certain connections in the brain are not ‘cut’ or ‘pruned’ during the early months of life.

However, letter-colour synaesthesia requires that the person can read and understand letters, which usually doesn’t happen until much latter, so it is likely that there is something going on throughout the critical learning period when children begin to learn to read.

This new study, led by psychologist Julia Simner, tested over six hundred six to seven year-old children with a computerised test that showed them letters and numbers and asked them to select a colour which best fitted the character on screen.

After 10 seconds, the test was repeated. One of the hallmarks of people with letter-colour synaesthesia is that their associations remain constant, so this helped pick out who was the most consistent.

Children who did better than average on this were tested again with a surprise test at 12 months, and those who were more consistent at 12 months than the average child at 10 seconds were classified as having synaesthesia.

Using this, admittedly strict, criteria 1.3% of children had letter-colour synaesthesia and the total number of children with any form of synaesthesia is likely to be greater owing to the fact that the researchers only tested one for one type.

The study also allowed the researchers to see how synaesthesia had developed over the year. Interestingly, the synaesthetic children showed an average of 10.5 stable letter-colour associations aged 6-7 years, but 16.9 aged 7-8, suggesting that the condition is developing and growing over time.

Although not able to confirm it statistically, the study hinted that some people may actually lose synaesthesia over time.

The researchers note that in anecdotal reports adults have described synaesthesia in childhood that died out, while the reverse pattern – synaesthesia spontaneously appearing in adulthood that didn’t exist in childhood, is not reported. A further hint is that in the study, the number of children who had synaesthesia at ages six and seven outnumbered those who had it at ages seven and eight by 2.5 to 1.

Link to study.
Link to PubMed entry for same.

Psychologist Mih√°ly Cs√≠kszentmih√°lyi is best known for his research on ‘flow‘. Sometimes known as being ‘in the zone’, it’s where people lose themselves in their particular talent. His talk to the TED conference has just been put online where he describes how he’s being trying to capture this particular form of peak experience.

The Hungarian psychologist was one of the pioneers of positive psychology, that aims to understand our most valuable attributes and experiences, before it was even thought of as a separate specialism.

Cs√≠kszentmih√°lyi is apparently pronounced ‘chick sent me high e’ which always sounds to me like it should be the title of an Oasis song.

Link to TED video lecture on flow.

The New York Times discusses a new theory on the link between schizophrenia and autism that suggests that each may depend on the outcome of a battle between the genetic information we inherit from each parent. According to the theory – more genes from the father increases the chance of autistic traits, while more from the mother increases the tendency to experience psychotic experiences.

The theory is proposed by sociologist Christopher Badcock and biologist Bernard Crespi who recently wrote an opinion piece in Nature outlining their idea a few months ago (we discussed it here).

There idea is based on a known effect called genomic imprinting, where the same genes inherited from one parent can have a different effect when compared to when they’re inherited from the other parent.

However, they’re not the first to suggest that autism and schizophrenia may be different sides of the same coin.

Neuropsychologist Chris Frith wrote an influential 1992 book with the snappy title of The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia where he suggested that the core problem in both schizophrenia and autism was an impairment in ‘metarepresentation’ – that is, the ability of the mind to monitor and represent mental states in both ourselves and other people.

Frith argued that schizophrenia is where a working metarepresentation system goes wrong, so affected people lose a sense of ownership of their own thoughts and make impaired inferences about the intentions of others. He further suggested that autism is where the metarepresentation never develops properly, so affected people barely develop the ability to understand the perspective of other people.

Interestingly, the word ‘autism’ itself was first used to describe an aspect of schizophrenia. Eugen Bleuler coined it to capture the introverted withdrawn behaviour seen in some people diagnosed with schizophrenia, and it was later adopted by Hans Asperger to describe the withdrawn introverted behaviour of a group of children he was studying who would now likely be diagnosed with autism of Asperger syndrome.

Link to NYT article on Crespi and Baddock theory.

I’ve just discovered this fantastic 1990 study from The Lancet that investigated near death experiences reported by patients. However, it did something quite different from most other studies – it actually checked to see whether the patients were actually near death or not – and many of them weren’t.

The study looked at the experiences of 58 people who believed they were about to die during a medical procedure and had subsequently reported a ‘near death experience‘ – often the classic ‘light at the end of the tunnel’ experience, the feeling of the consciousness had left the body like an outside observer, enhanced clarity of thought and the flashback of life’s memories.

The researchers then looked through the medical records of each person to see whether they had really been ‘near death’. Of the 58 in the study, 30 patients were never in danger of dying, despite their belief at the time.

The study then went on to compare whether certain experiences were more likely to appear in those patients who were genuinely near death.

The experiences were largely the same across both groups, but those who were really at risk of dying were more likely to experience an intense light and enhanced mental clarity.

The authors say they’re not sure why this might be. The explanation that is usually thrown around is that ‘restricted oxygen to the brain causes light sensations’ but I’ve no idea whether this is anything more than a convenient hypothesis and has any scientific data to back it up.

Link to study paper.
Link to PubMed entry.

Artist and researcher Mitchell Whitelaw wrote an interesting and in-depth article on the links between audio-visual fusion art and synaesthesia for the Senses and Society journal. Whitelaw has just put the piece online, has illustrated it with embedded videos of some of the stunning pieces he references, but also discusses the neuroscience of synaesthesia with considerable care and insight.

In the age of ubiquitous digital media, synesthesia is everywhere. In human, neurological form, it is rare: for perhaps three in a hundred people, a stimulus in one sensory modality automatically induces a sensation in another. Auditory-to-visual synesthesia, or ‚Äúcolored hearing‚Äù is much rarer still. Yet now this phenomenon is realised, apparently, inside every digital music player, on VJ screens in every club, in robot lightshows. On these screens sound is transformed into visual pattern and form instantly and automatically; an exotic perceptual phenomenon becomes a technically mediated commonplace…

Synesthesia is widely used as an analogy around this work. The analogy provides a mapping that aligns subjective sensation with audiovisual signals; it maps perceptual or even neurological structures onto technical structures. The analogy also plays another role, foregrounding sensation in the reception of the artworks; proposing to operate, for the subject, at the level of direct sensation…

This paper‚Äôs main aim is to test this analogy, and the related historical drive that Strick suggests; to consider if, and how, such practice can be thought of as synesthetic, and examine structural parallels between synesthesia as a perceptual and neurological phenomenon, and the automatic or transcoded linking of audio and visual media…

The article is quite dense in places but well worth the effort as it carefully picks out whether these digital artworks tell us anything about synaesthesia or are just dropping neurological buzz words to sound cutting-edge.

BTW, the image is a still from a fantastic piece by artist Robert Hodgin which is embedded in the article, but which you can also view here.

Link to ‘Synesthesia and Cross-Modality in Contemporary Audiovisuals’ (thanks Alex!).