Dear Terry,

sorry for the late reply.

The learned synaesthesia you mentioned is called cross-modal integration 
or analogy afaik but I may be wrong at this. I had a nice chat about 
this topic with Fiona Newell of Trinity College Dublin at a symposium 
for neuroaesthetics in Karlsruhe. She told me (besides the priceless tip 
to use online surveys instead of expensive fmrts) that the synaesthesia 
is hard wired in the brain. Therealso was some critique about this hard 
wiring theory because without input you can't learn anythingand 
therefore it is a kind of learning. Maybe synaesthetes learn in another 
wayand safe their expience differently. I don't knowit.

Theonly thing I know for sure is that I'm not a projector synaesthete. I 
don't know in how far I'm an associator but I'm covinced that people (me 
too) from an creativebackground are a bit more experienced with this. I 
can't imagine creative work without the ability to translate things from 
one form of expression into another. It's also in the criticism of 
creative work where people often use the word "to". Something is "to" 
this, somethingis "to" that. It's like adjusting your mental model step 
by step.

Regarding motion in special there is something that draw my attention on 
this. My fellows at university were all very good in animation. I think 
this is quite astonishing because it's not really necessary for static 
print design(but for the perception processand the guiding through a 
layout). It's not like that rhythm and timing weren't known terms in 
graphic design (especially for typography) but there was a bit more than 
that. I assume that we use motion (without expressing it in another 
language) as a tool to describe our mental modelsabout the process of 
perceiving communication and port it overin a layout, drawing or other 
things.

For my personal experience: I drew a comic as my diploma work. I spent 
2.5 month in a darkenend room in front of a 19" crt with a wacom under 
my fingers. At day time I sketched the pages and at night time I inked 
them. In this time I slept only 2.5 - 4 hours every night (more 2.5). 
After a couple of weeks I realized that I wasn't fast enough and that I 
would not get my work done by time. I changed my drawing method and 
stopped to carve (draw/erase parts/redraw) the lines and went over to 
draw them once and right. It increased the duration to draw a single 
line but the overall process was faster. It was a kind of meditation and 
I was in need to control my breath otherwise it would have caused a loss 
of control of my hand. Well, and after a while I started to here the 
"sound" of the lines. It was like modulating a sine curve. For me a 
brush stroke has a total time, a current duration, intensity 
(width/pressure), change of the ration current/total and current state 
to state before and a thing I called the rightness of the sound. I knew 
how the lineshould look like before I drew it and a aberration from the 
model caused a wrong sound. It was very usefulto get the things right. 
Energy drinks did the rest. A while after I graduated and stopped 
drawing it vanished but I'm recognizing that it comes back when I'm 
drawing for a while. Maybe there is more. I recognized that color 
gradients have a sound too. There is change, duration, total duration, 
intensitytoo.

So, I mentioned sound, motion, color, lines.. From this I jump over to 
monotoneous sine functions, easing functions, functions here, functions 
there, FFT and so on. Not highranking science but a kind of a puzzle. 
This is why is said that everything merges at some point in the brain. 
It may be questionable whether one can describe the perception process 
without a fundamental model ofthe brain but I assume that it's not 
necessary to build a giant computer to hunt down perception and 
experience. It should be enough to find an abstract description for what 
people experience (or at least what I am experience. Would be totally 
fine for me.). Not an easy task but still in the range of the possible.

Kai


Am 21.09.2013 07:56, schrieb Terence Love:
> Dear Kai,
> Is what you are describing the weak 'everyday' form of synaesthesia many
> people have learned? Or is it something different?
> Best wishes,
> Terry
>
> <snip>
> In my experience all perception merges at some point and helps us to build
> analogies. I replied to Fiona that I find motion is very important. But I
> didn't meant it in the sense of the actual motion of an object from A to B
> in t. It's the thing that helps me to understand other things without the
> binary information. It doesn't matter if you're following the contour of a
> melody or the contour of a landscape, a sine function curve, or the shape of
> an design object, or the motion of dancers, or make your way through a
> magazine layout. The process of perception I experience is all about how
> much of a certain input type you get over a time period. You could call this
> motion. We all have a lot of concepts of motions and we use it to build up
> analogies between totally different fields (and sometimes perception modis).
> I would go so far to say that motion is the only reason why communication
> (-design) is working beyond the pure transmission of information.
>
>
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