Author: Matt

Making sense of shared senses

I have always enjoyed finding (or making) connections between things that don’t seem to go together. So I have a special fondness for metaphor—especially when it’s indirect and novel. A number of years ago, a friend suggested we go out to dinner together. I asked what kind of place he had in mind, and he said, “Oh, I was thinking we’d go to a green restaurant.” I didn’t know what relevance a restaurant’s color could have, and the usual metaphorical meanings of green (“environmentally sensitive,” “inexperienced,” “nauseated,” etc.) didn’t seem to apply. Noticing my confusion, my friend explained his unusual usage of the term. “There’s a class of restaurants,” he said, “whose décor consists mainly of antiques hung on the walls and brass railings. There’s always a central bar, a lively atmosphere, pub-style food, and an excessively cheerful wait staff. You know the type—T.G.I. Friday’s, Chili’s, Bennigan’s, Applebees…” I nodded. I knew the type. He continued, “These restaurants also typically have green awnings. Thus: ‘green restaurants.’” Ever since then, I’ve referred to this class of restaurants as “green,” even when the awnings are red-and-white striped, when there are no awnings at all, or when other details differ from the canonical example. I like that description, because it’s the most compact way I can think of to describe that type of restaurant.

That Name Rings a Bell

For some people, though, the word “restaurant” may literally cause them to experience the color green—or a particular texture, smell, or taste. This is just one example of a phenomenon known as synesthesia, in which senses blend together or trigger each other in one way or another. In one of the more common forms of synesthesia, a given letter or number invariably appears to be a certain color. In other cases, a certain kind of sound may cause someone to see a color or experience a tactile sensation, or a texture or color may provoke the experience of a taste.

There are at least 50 different types of synesthesia, involving various combinations of senses both as the triggering stimulus and the secondary response. Some forms of synesthesia are experienced as multiple modalities of a single physical sense. For example, seeing a number might evoke a certain color for one synesthete, while in another person the same number might cause a different visual sensation, such as a pattern or shape. One sense may also trigger another, as in a tactile sensation that has a taste. But not all synesthetic experiences are restricted to the five senses. In some synesthetes, a word or sound might evoke a sensation of motion, or even a kinesthetic response, inducing the person to assume a particular physical position. There are also cases in which abstract concepts, such as days of the week or months of the year, cause the sensation of shapes, colors, or other experiences.

Survey Says…

Estimates vary widely as to what percentage of the population experiences synesthesia. I’ve read claims that as few as 1 in 25,000 or as many as 1 in 300 people have at least one pair of overlapping senses (in rare cases, all five senses are blended together), though everyone seems to agree that it’s more common among women and left-handed persons than the rest of the population. Synesthesia is always referred to neutrally as a “condition”—neither a “defect” nor a “gift”—because even though it’s abnormal in the sense of being rare, no one can seem to work out whether it’s advantageous or disadvantageous from an evolutionary point of view. It’s simply a trait, like having blond hair or being able to curl one’s tongue, that some people have and others don’t. There are cases in which synesthesia acts as a memory aid, and it is also associated with higher-than-normal levels of creativity. On the other hand, there are a few cases where the blending of senses is so pronounced that almost any stimulus produces a disturbing state of sensory overload.

Synesthesia is an inherited trait, although researchers have not identified the responsible gene (or genes) or the exact parameters that determine how it is transmitted. In any case, people with synesthesia experience the sensations involuntarily and consistently. There have been some reported cases in which children with synesthesia lose the multisensory associations as they grow older, but for the most part, a given stimulus always produces the same secondary response in a given person—if the number 5 is red, it will always be red; if the word “groovy” tastes like mint, it will be just as minty 10 years from now. That said, though, there is little consistency from one synesthete to the next in what sensations are triggered by what stimuli. No one has yet determined exactly how the specific associations form.

It’s Not Easy Hearing Green

Although synesthesia has been known and documented in medical literature since 1880, it was largely ignored as a field of serious inquiry until late in the 20th century. Many people believed that those who reported synesthesia were “just imagining things,” which is a strange accusation considering that all sensory perception is, by definition, in one’s head. But if someone reported that the letter R felt cold, it was easy to conclude that the person was just speaking metaphorically, or remembering a childhood association of some kind—not really experiencing the sensation of cold. Recently, though, researchers have used several clever techniques to prove conclusively that the secondary sensations are actually experienced in the brain, not simply memories or a poetic way of speaking.

In one experiment, for example, scientists filled a page with nearly identical monochrome 2s and 5s, asking subjects to tell them what pattern was formed by the 2s. Nonsynesthetes had great difficulty in picking out any pattern, because they had to look at each individual character. But for synesthetes who perceived 2s and 5s in different colors, the pattern (say, a triangle) formed by the 2s immediately jumped out.

Light Me Up

Having learned that synesthesia is a genuine sensory experience, researchers concocted more elaborate tests to determine what may be going on in the brain when such experiences occur. One such technique is a Functional MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) test, in which subjects are placed in a machine that can display a dynamic, real-time, 3D representation of blood flow in the brain. The parts of the brain that are activated in response to specific stimuli “light up” in distinctive colors. So in the case of someone who hears colors, showing the subject a color will cause the parts of the brain that handle auditory information to be activated, just as they would be if the person had actually heard the sound.

When discussing what happens in the brain in synesthesia, it’s common to talk about “crossed wires,” and of course the phenomenon does suggest communication between parts of the brain that do not normally interact. But the image of crossed wires is probably misleading; strictly speaking, synesthesia does not appear to require a different or more elaborate set of neural connections than in a normal brain. Instead, the prevailing belief is that existing connections are simply used in a new way, or that chemicals that ordinarily inhibit this type of cross-communication are not released. This notion is supported by the fact that phenomena similar to synesthesia sometimes occur in otherwise normal people who suffer seizures, have brain injuries, or use certain kinds of drugs. But apart from physical or chemical trauma to the brain, there is no evidence that synesthesia is a trait that can be learned or acquired deliberately.

A recurring theme among people with synesthesia is that they have learned by experience not to share their unusual sensations; painful tales of childhood ridicule are common. This is a great pity, because one person’s scary mutation is another person’s super power. With any luck, the combination of more generous cultural attitudes and really expensive scientific equipment will open all new doors for understanding and appreciating the unusual abilities of synesthetes.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on August 27, 2003, and again in a slightly revised form on July 8, 2004.

Image credit: User:Mysid [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

We’ve covered Oysters Rockefeller previously here on Interesting Thing of the Day—it’s a baked oyster dish with a secret recipe—often imitated but never precisely replicated. If you want the original version, I’m afraid you’ll have to visit Antoine’s in New Orleans—the same restaurant that declared January 10 to be National Oysters Rockefeller Day starting in 2017. Today, however, if you are inclined to make Oysters Rockefeller yourself, or buy them at another restaurant, I hereby authorize you to use any recipe that tastes good. (Offer expires at midnight, sorry.)

Image credit: Larry Hoffman [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Flickr

The complex story of a simple language

During college I spent a summer in Indonesia, and naturally I picked up a bit of the language. When I say “the language,” I’m referring to Indonesian or, as it is known in Indonesian, Bahasa Indonesia (“language of Indonesia”). This statement is not as obvious as it may sound; Indonesia is home to hundreds of languages, and of these, Indonesian is not spoken as a first language by the majority of the population. But it is the lingua franca, so it’s useful for citizens and travelers alike. I found Indonesian to be straightforward and easy to learn, free of most of the irregularities and annoyances of the Romance languages.

What I understood at the time was that Indonesian is, for the most part, the same language as Malay (Bahasa Melayu), the national language of neighboring Malaysia. I assumed that there were some differences, but that the main one was simply the name. I had no idea at that time of how either version of the language came into existence. It turns out that there’s a bit of a modern myth about the language’s origin—but the truth is even more interesting.

Artificial Intelligence

While doing some research on an unrelated topic, I stumbled upon a webpage claiming that Indonesian was an artificial language. I’d never heard that before and it piqued my interest, so I dug further. A few minutes of web searches turned up quotes such as the following (identities omitted to protect the guilty):

Bahasa Indonesia is an artificial language made official in 1928. By artificial I mean it was designed by academics rather than evolving naturally as most common languages have.

…Indonesian [is] a very simple Malay-based artificial language, designed by academics, and was the official language for a multiethnic country of over 230 million inhabitants.

…Indonesian is a constructed language made by a Dutch missionary in the 1920s on the basis of synthesizing some local languages.

…[Indonesian] was devised by a Dutch linguist, based on various Malayan and Indonesian varieties…in the 1920s.

The language in Malaysia, Bahasa Malay, is a constructed language, and was designed to be easy to learn, as the various people in Malaysia and Indonesia who were told to form rather large nations after WWII needed a common language.

…every language is artificial—it just depends how many people create it. Bahasa Indonesia is also invented but by a group.

Bahasa Indonesia is essentially a constructed language designed to fool foreigners into thinking Indonesia is a monoculture.

…the other major semi-artificial language of recent times, Bahasa Indonesia, the national language of Indonesia, is a syncretic amalgamation of existing Malay dialects that were still in current use.

Even though it is basically the Malay language, [Indonesian] has in common with Esperanto…the fact of having underwent [sic] a kind of planned restructuration to simplify grammar and reduce exceptions.

With all that evidence, I was nearly convinced, though I wasn’t entirely certain what I was convinced of. This string of claims sounded a bit like the telephone game, where a message changes just a bit with each retelling. Then a little voice in the back of my head whispered, “Primary sources, Grasshopper.” Every fact on the web appears to be equally authoritative, but just because somebody says something with conviction doesn’t mean it’s true. So I went to an actual library (two of them, in fact) and looked at ancient documents known as “books”—some more than fifty years old—to see if I could get to the bottom of this story. After all, if a Dutch linguist (or missionary) did in fact invent the language, I should be able to find that person’s name. And if a committee of academics invented it, I should be able to find some record of that momentous project.

Let me cut to the chase: as with all myths, this one has a kernel of truth to it. But the claim that Indonesian is an “artificial” or “constructed” language is simply false.

This Land Is Your Land, This Land Is Island

Indonesia is an archipelago consisting of over 18,000 islands, of which about a third are inhabited. That these islands—and their greatly varying cultures and languages—should be considered a single nation is a relatively recent (and, ethnographically speaking, artificial) notion. Nevertheless, for centuries, traders sailing from one island to another have needed to communicate with each other. Malay was the local language of Malacca, a port town near the southern tip of the Malaysian peninsula. According to legend, local fisherman in Malacca developed Malay as a synthesis of several nearby languages in the late 16th century. However, written records of Malay date back as far as the 7th century, so it is more likely that the fisherman simply integrated new words into the language. (Such borrowing happens in virtually all languages, and the newly incorporated words are known as “loan words.”) In any event, Malacca was a hot spot for traders, and by the time the Dutch colonized Indonesia (then known as the Dutch East Indies) in the 17th century, Malay had already come into widespread use as the regional trade language.

During their more than three centuries of occupation, the Dutch, unsurprisingly, attempted to enforce the use of their own language for trade. In the process, Malay—as spoken in Dutch territory—picked up a number of Dutch loan words, while the Malaysian speakers of Malay developed a somewhat different vocabulary. Meanwhile, due to the influence of Islam, which had been introduced in Indonesia as far back as the 13th century, Malay also picked up a number of Arabic loan words. Because parts of Indonesia were Hindu, Sanskrit also gave numerous words to Indonesian—including “bahasa” (“language”). And since Portugal traded in Indonesia and for many years controlled East Timor, many Portuguese words also found their way into the language. In short: without question, the Indonesian variety of Malay did indeed borrow heavily from numerous other languages, but this was a natural linguistic evolution. However, there’s still more to the story.

The Language of Change

By the 1920s, public sentiment in Indonesia was turning strongly toward gaining independence from the Netherlands. In October 1928, the Sumpah Pemuda (Pledge of the Youth) proclaimed that in Indonesia, Malay was to be called “Bahasa Indonesia” and considered the national language. However, there being no nation as yet, this was more of a rallying cry than anything else. In 1945, Indonesia declared its independence from the Netherlands and stated in its constitution that Bahasa Indonesia was its official language—though it took four years of fighting before the Dutch acknowledged Indonesia’s right to self-rule. So depending on how you look at it, Indonesian became the official language in 1928, 1945, or 1949—though at that time, only a tiny percentage of the nation’s population spoke Indonesian as a first language.

Following independence, the people of Indonesia rapidly abandoned Dutch (to the extent that they had grudgingly adopted it) and began to embrace their new official tongue. It is now the first language of more than 40 million people, and a second language for over 150 million. Although these numbers are still small given Indonesia’s total population of more than 260 million, they represent astonishingly rapid growth for the language.

In 1972, the governments of Indonesia and Malaysia collaborated on a project to reform and simplify spelling for both versions of the language; this consisted largely of eliminating Dutch spellings in favor of more phonetic Malaysian spellings. Malay and Indonesian have about an 80% overlap in vocabulary and are mutually intelligible; the variations in vocabulary, pronunciation, and usage have been compared to the difference between American English and British English. Where Indonesian retains many Dutch loan words, Malay typically replaces these with words based on English.

I like Indonesian a great deal; it has such an elegant structure that it’s tempting to believe it could only have been made artificially. But in fact it’s as natural as the next language, notwithstanding its exceptional capacity for absorbing foreign vocabulary—and contributing to linguistic mythology.

Note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Interesting Thing of the Day on September 17, 2004.

Image credit: Laura Pro [CC BY-SA 4.0], from Wikimedia Commons