Consensitivity: Why you don't have synesthesia.

Semantic Saturday

Different But Alike Painting by Susan DeLain

Semantic Saturday

Hi there! If you’re new to the blog, today is Semantic Saturday. On Saturdays round these parts, we like to propose new words. You know- flim flam, jibberjabber, mouth jazz - we get our neolojism everywhere. Previously I proposed the word “ligural” to mean “simultaneously literal and figurative.” Today, I want to talk about a popular tweet from 2020:

Laureen Bazzi @laureenbazzi

idk how to explain this but thursday, october, and 8:00pm are all the same

Thursday, October, and 8pm are the same

If for some reason you can’t read the twitter thread yourself, Kim LaCapria inexplicability decided to report on it 12 days after the tweet blew up. The article is basically a blogification of a twitter thread, which I guess has to do on a slow news day.

The major consensus among commenters is that all 3 of them represent a point about 5/6 of the way through a set period of time (hr/day, day/week, month/year). Others in the thread pointed at spatial-sequence synesthesia and time-space synesthesia. As is always the case, people who’s entire personality is defined by the fact that they think the number 5 tastes blue came out to tell other people that they were wrong about having synesthesia because only they have synesthesia and are thus the only ones who are mommy’s special child.¹

That’s not what synesthesia is, say “ideasthesia” instead

The word “synesthesia” has become bloated and overblown with additional meaning it is not suited to carry. Synesthesia derives from two Greek words: σύν and αἴσθησις, meaning 'union of the senses.' It was initially described to me as “hearing colors and smelling sounds,” and is still often described as “a crossing of the senses.” If you’ve ever had the pleasure of doing good drugs, you may have had the phantasmal experience of wires in your brain crossing to produce the smell of sausage as sound or the feeling of a lover’s touch as a visual hallucination.

Unfortunately, the majority of what people refer to as synesthetic is in no way related to the experience of a misjoinder of sensory input. A quick glance at the wikipedia article gives you a laundry list of conceptual thought mapped to sensory experience or vice-versa. The concept of “Wednesday” is not a sensory perception, and thus can’t be synesthetic; even if you think it “feels orange”.

Thankfully, in 2009 Danko Nikolić proposed a much better name: Ideasthesia. which even the most popular website dedicate to synesthesia admits is “more adequate” for describe the myriad effects of such an overextended term. Ideasthesia more adequately matches the effects described by self-identified synesthetes:

Ideasthesia: a neuropsychological phenomenon in which activations of concepts (inducers) evoke perception-like sensory experiences (concurrents).

Grapheme-color synesthesia, lexical-gustatory synesthesia, number-form synesthesia, the list goes on— all of them are actually concept-sensory mappings, and thus ideastheastic, not synesthetic.

However, a grim reality threatens the specialness of synesthetes when we correctly describe what’s happening in their brains: most human thought works through abstraction and concept association. Having senses as one of the concepts associated isn’t abnormal- it’s just how the neural anatomy evolved. Areas of the brain used to interpreting sensory stimuli are the same areas that are used in metaphorical conceptual thought. Here’s the man, the legend Robert Sapolsky² doing this subject more justice than I’ll ever be able to:

Let’s look at another way in which sensory metaphor isn’t limited to synthesia: the Bouba/Kiki effect.

Bouba and Kiki

One of these shapes is named “Bouba” and one of them is name “Kiki”. If you had to guess, which would be named which? Please say the names out loud before you decide. I’ll give you a moment to name and draw happy little faces on them.

If you named the pointy one “Kiki” and the goopy one “Bouba,” congratulations- you’re in the 95% percent of the English-speaking population that does the same. I love this experiment because it really brings sound symbolism to the forefront and suggests that there’s a non-arbitrary mapping between concepts and their names. Just like the hot and cold personality metaphors and disgusting morality Sapolsky brings up, these names might have strong associations with their shapes because of the angular vs. round shapes our moth makes when pronouncing the name. Similar experiments have even shown a linking of long-vowel sounds to long objects and short-vowel sounds to short objects!

So what’s going on here? It’s not at all proven, but Nikolić, the proposer of “ideasthesia” has also proposed “Practopoesis”, by which hierarchical adaptive mechanisms rely on components to produce novel effects. In other words, you’re brain doesn’t generate a new connections for the formation of new knowledge- it routes it through existing infrastructure; already understood semantic concepts, like colors, shapes, and sounds. At least one study has backed this theory by showing potential conceptual mediation in synesthetic color association, which is around 200ms slower than direct visual perception.

Back to October, Thursday, and 8pm

To finally return to the tweet that started this whole mess, I think it’s utterly uninteresting to search for a proposed conceptual link in similar number ratios or synesthetic thought. The tweet is interesting because the ideas have an immediately graspable but difficult to state congruence. That congruence is the interesting idea here.

We don’t have a good term to talk about concepts that just vibe together. Saying they are similar is too vague, looking for their similarities misses the forest for the trees.³ Instead I’d like to do what I do best— propose a new word that no one asked for:

Consensitivity

Con (together) sense (feel). The property of sharing similarity in feeling.

• Kiki consenses with the pointy shape.

• Bouba and the round shape consense.

• October, Thursday, and 8pm have consensitivity.

I also quite like that it “consense” plays alongside “consensus”. An idea particularly sticky, perhaps even apophenic, could be said to be “consensitive”, or particularly sensitive to agreement. Here’s a brief list of other things that are apparently consensitive:

Albhedo @albhedoo

Same energy

• Optimus prime and Dr. Eggman.

• Warm water is round and cold water is sharp.

• 5X5=25 and Friday.

• Boys named Michael and Colgate Toothpaste.

• Nutella and Peanut Butter.

• The Great British Bake-off and being inside on a rainy day.

• TV Static and your arm falling asleep.

• Mondays and Apples.

• Right is even, left is odd.

• The number 7 and the letter T.

• The color yellow and triangles.

• Target and Chik-fil-a.

• The name “Kate” and the color navy blue.

• Checkered floors and roller skates.

• Harry Potter and Ed Sheeran.

• Barber shops and black licorice.

• Pizza hut is a 40 year old man.

• New Balance shoes and the first day of school.

• Looking for a seat on the bus and being under/overdressed.

• The Grinch and Vecna.

  

Incidentally, the meme “is giving” lines up very well with “consensitive.” I still like mine better.

Conclusion

• “Synesthesia” is out, “Ideasthesia” is in.

• Things that are all giving the same vibe are consensitive; they display consensitivity.

• Your brain wires information through existing concepts.

• “Kiki” is pointy, “Bouba” is round.

• This has been a meme for a while now.

Let me know in the comments or on twitter what you do and don’t agree with on that consensitivity list. I certainly have some opinions of my own . Be sure to show your friends so we can get a representative sample 😜.

1. Yes, there was a child in my class growing up who spoke about his synesthesia at every living moment he could and it was frustrating.

2. If you haven’t, consider watching Sapolsky’s 2011 lecture series on Behavioral Biology. It will change the way you think about human behavior. I’ll likely be doing a writeup on it in the near future.

3. Heh cool rhyme.