#auditory tactile synaesthesia

[sounds-to-touch]

Sometimes I don't think about my audio tactile synaesthesia at all, for huge swathes of time.

But then I think about why it's so easy for me to identify specific voices in songs i like, and the closest word that comes to mind is texture.

I really do sort vocal sounds primarily by tactile means. When I'm certain I've identified a specific voice artist I'm thinking not about how it sounds, but about how that sound feels, physically, in my body.

[sounds-to-touch]

This song on repeat is a direct line to a silly-dance party for one if I'm home alone.

Ashbury Heights - Spectres From the Black Moss

[exagides]

okay i need to sleep soon but on the topic on the dash and senses and all that. Synaesthesia is wild am I right

[scarefox]

this one sound literally gives me shivers

Two Feet - Quick Musical Doodles & Sex

[orwellsunderpants]

trying to find instrumental music to work to can be ... interesting when you have auditory-tactile synaesthesia. like, i like this tune but can i also put up with the sensation that someone is tapping the base of my skull from the inside while i work

[augmentedpolls]

More information about the types here ^^^

[cdd-system-terms]

Hay we have synaesthesia and the flag that I’ve mostly been seeing was made by Endo, would you be willing to remake the flag for us?

Bonus points if you can make sub terms For the types of synaesthesia. Like Chromesthesia or Auditory–tactile synesthesia.

Posted!

[thethingything]

I still keep getting caught off-guard by the better sound quality in our new headphones making our auditory-tactile synaesthesia more noticeable. it's weird but fun

[goodgriefnd]

Physically Embodying Neurodivergence: Autism, ADHD & Auditory-Tactile Synaesthesia

an autoethnography of sensory subjectivities

I was recently at the It Takes All Kinds of Minds (ITAKOM) conference, and this is one of the posters I displayed!

[Image ID: a poster on the sensory aspects of autism, ADHD, and auditory-tactile synesthesia. Full transcript under the cut]

From top to bottom, starting with the title, it reads:

Physically Embodying Neurodivergence: Autism, ADHD & Auditory-Tactile Synaesthesia - an autoethnography of sensory subjectivities

CONTEXT

Ally is a neurodivergent PhD student in Clinical Psychology researching autism and grief. She writes here about the everyday sensory overwhelm she feels: the tactile nature of her synaesthesia, the acute sensory sensitivity of her autism, the unfilterability of everything around her from her ADHD, that odd bodily awareness of her hypermobile joints. The poster follows her experience of one class on a good day: a day when she manages, a day when she copes. The class follows four writing prompts and Ally documents her experiences of not being able to leave the moment to follow the prompts: all the sights and sounds which hold her in place. Ultimately, the aim of this poster is to give an insight to a lived experience of sensory processing differences.

WRITE ABOUT A MOMENT… The lecturer set a timer and she sat utterly and completely bemused at the front of a classroom with the fan buzzing, projecting colour and sound above her, needles of visible light instructing her to, “write about an experience [she] had today” … well, this is it. The fan growing louder and louder, creeping like soft watery ice down her arms; the flickering up and down and up and down of fingers hammering away at keys writing worlds of their own, every letter a hurricane beating away at her eardrums. She feels so lost there, sat between squeaky chairs, hitting her ears and travelling down her spine, the sounds seem afire and aglow in the room. The border between her senses knows no impermeability. She is lost there, in the room where the air feels as alive as it is meant to, yet she does not… how? how can she follow instructions in this chaotic calmness of everyday overwhelm? The alarm from the timer finally goes off and it slaps across the back of her neck.

WRITE ABOUT WHAT YOU LEFT OUT… She could have written about anything and everything that happened and didn’t happen that day. She could have written about how she didn’t fall asleep last night , the glorious and godly sunrise across the kitchen table which stopped time for just that moment, how she forgot to eat breakfast again: muesli and blueberries would have been a good start to the day, the sunrise and cereal to her writing… but, no, she writes about now, all the everyday overwhelm of her senses, of sounds and smells and people, decentred into their own worlds, she is caught like a moon in their gravity and motion. She could have written about any other moment, about popping joints and pain which greet her body as though she were a poorly made watch, or about the delightful shape and feel of the sound of piano scales she plays religiously as though they were hymns. She could have written about any other moment, but the wiring in her brain stops her dead, stuck in the moment she writes about. The alarm hits her again, she can’t escape.

WRITE ABOUT THE POWER WHICH (RE)SHAPES THIS MOMENT… She could be anywhere, but she is here. She fought so tirelessly for this quiet moment filled with so much sound and chaos. She remembers reading of how 4 out of 5 of her kind won’t finish an undergraduate degree, and that is only the small handful that make it there. And (t)here she is, doing a PhD no less, her undergraduate degree only took an extra year, the battle wasn’t as hard as it is for others like her, those who also cannot leave their own moments and minds. And, between psych wards and suicidality, she was somehow a lucky one. She is lucky to be here. And she loves it. Even though she will crash into nothingness tonight, burnt out from a most mundane sensory onslaught. She will still feel the echoes of tapping keys and the flash from the smoke detector crawling across her skin for hours after, as she lays under weighted blankets which make her feel a little lighter for every minute she let’s herself heal. The alarm smacks her neck and vibrates down her spine once more.

WHO IS THIS “I” THAT IS WRITING THIS… She goes back in, trying to decentre her mind out of the moment, to even attempt to answer what “I” she is that is writing, that promiscuous pronoun which is never quite a product of one’s self, rather all the other selves which surround her: that patchworked legacy of all the other “I”s she has ever known, caught up in their gravity and motion, somehow more and somehow less than every interaction she has ever had which (re)constitutes her being in this moment which leaves her skin buzzing across fragile joints and a proud heart. She is reminded of that Neil deGrasse Tyson lecture, Onward to the Edge, that when we look beyond the Hubble Deep Field, reaching beyond the horizon of the observable universe, reaching for answers we can’t quite grasp yet, that in these times we ought to simply be content with the questions themselves… who is this “I” that is writing this, the “I” that she is? What a fantastic question, and she has no idea how to answer it! She has written beyond the final alarm now.

[sparklywaistcoat]

trying to find instrumental music to work to can be ... interesting when you have auditory-tactile synaesthesia. like, i like this tune but can i also put up with the sensation that someone is tapping the base of my skull from the inside while i work

[compneuropapers]

Interesting Papers for Week 37, 2022

State-dependent representations of mixtures by the olfactory bulb. Adefuin, A. M., Lindeman, S., Reinert, J. K., & Fukunaga, I. (2022). eLife, 11, e76882.

Evidence of the role of the cerebellum in cognitive theory of mind using voxel-based lesion mapping. Beuriat, P.-A., Cohen-Zimerman, S., Smith, G. N. L., Krueger, F., Gordon, B., & Grafman, J. (2022). Scientific Reports, 12, 4999.

Interplay of tactile and motor information in constructing spatial self-perception. Cataldo, A., Dupin, L., Dempsey-Jones, H., Gomi, H., & Haggard, P. (2022). Current Biology, 32(6), 1301-1309.e3.

Loss of audiovisual facilitation with age occurs for vergence eye movements but not for saccades. Chavant, M., & Kapoula, Z. (2022). Scientific Reports, 12, 4453.

Meaning and reference from a probabilistic point of view. Feldman, J., & Choi, L.-S. (2022). Cognition, 223, 105058.

Neuronal codes for arithmetic rule processing in the human brain. Kutter, E. F., Boström, J., Elger, C. E., Nieder, A., & Mormann, F. (2022). Current Biology, 32(6), 1275-1284.e4.

From hallucinations to synaesthesia: A circular inference account of unimodal and multimodal erroneous percepts in clinical and drug-induced psychosis. Leptourgos, P., Bouttier, V., Denève, S., & Jardri, R. (2022). Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 135, 104593.

An action potential initiation mechanism in distal axons for the control of dopamine release. Liu, C., Cai, X., Ritzau-Jost, A., Kramer, P. F., Li, Y., Khaliq, Z. M., … Kaeser, P. S. (2022). Science, 375(6587), 1378–1385.

Larger visual changes compress time: The inverted effect of asemantic visual features on interval time perception. Malpica, S., Masia, B., Herman, L., Wetzstein, G., Eagleman, D. M., Gutierrez, D., … Sun, Q. (2022). PLOS ONE, 17(3), e0265591.

The role of color in the perception of three-dimensional shape. Marlow, P. J., Gegenfurtner, K. R., & Anderson, B. L. (2022). Current Biology, 32(6), 1387-1394.e3.

Dissociating the Neural Correlates of Subjective Visibility from Those of Decision Confidence. Mazor, M., Dijkstra, N., & Fleming, S. M. (2022). Journal of Neuroscience, 42(12), 2562–2569.

The Relationship Between Tactile Intensity Perception and Afferent Spike Count is Moderated by a Function of Frequency. Ng, K. K. W., Tee, X., Vickery, R. M., & Birznieks, I. (2022). IEEE Transactions on Haptics, 15(1), 14–19.

Intrinsic mechanical sensitivity of mammalian auditory neurons as a contributor to sound-driven neural activity. Perez-Flores, M. C., Verschooten, E., Lee, J. H., Kim, H. J., Joris, P. X., & Yamoah, E. N. (2022). eLife, 11, e74948.

A nasal visual field advantage in interocular competition. Sahakian, A., Paffen, C. L. E., Van der Stigchel, S., & Gayet, S. (2022). Scientific Reports, 12, 4616.

Developmental differences in memory reactivation relate to encoding and inference in the human brain. Schlichting, M. L., Guarino, K. F., Roome, H. E., & Preston, A. R. (2022). Nature Human Behaviour, 6(3), 415–428.

Visual consciousness dynamics in adults with and without autism. Skerswetat, J., Bex, P. J., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2022). Scientific Reports, 12, 4376.

Associative learning drives longitudinally graded presynaptic plasticity of neurotransmitter release along axonal compartments. Stahl, A., Noyes, N. C., Boto, T., Botero, V., Broyles, C. N., Jing, M., … Tomchik, S. M. (2022). eLife, 11, e76712.

Telencephalic outputs from the medial entorhinal cortex are copied directly to the hippocampus. Tsoi, S. Y., Öncül, M., Svahn, E., Robertson, M., Bogdanowicz, Z., McClure, C., & Sürmeli, G. (2022). eLife, 11, e73162.

Medial prefrontal cortex and anteromedial thalamus interaction regulates goal-directed behavior and dopaminergic neuron activity. Yang, C., Hu, Y., Talishinsky, A. D., Potter, C. T., Calva, C. B., Ramsey, L. A., … Ikemoto, S. (2022). Nature Communications, 13, 1386.

An STDP-based encoding method for associative and composite data. Yoon, H.-G., & Kim, P. (2022). Scientific Reports, 12, 4666.

[coffee-mage-sans-caffeine]

#2 for glacier? I'm curious what inspired this idea, it's such a unique take on geralt!

#2 prompt is "What scene did you first put down?" which is a really fascinating question to me, because it actually has three answers. There's the first scene I put down at all, which I ultimately scrapped. There's the first scene that actually made it into the draft. There's the first scene I noticed I was writing Glacier. It's all intertwined into the idea of inspiration, so it's a bit of a story. Let me explain behind this handy readmore so I don't clog the feeds.

In the first few days of October 2020, I was engaged in conversation about witcher neurology. I was in nursing school and we were learning about brain stuff of some kind and I was all up my own ass about the ideas of 'what happens when you stuff this much goddamned sensory input into a relatively normal human brain.' There was a lot of me going 'but our brains aren't set up to receive this much information and process it, so their brains have to be mutated!' I'm an autistic adult with sensory integration dysfunctions, auditory processing disorder and mild (mostly tactile) synaesthesia, so I went 'my mutated brain is a great model.' And so on October 3rd, 2020, I put down the very first scene (ultimately scrapped) of Glacier in a document on my Scrivener entitled "Tactile Witcher." Here's the opening of the first scene in that document.

“Oh! Geralt! Is that you?” came a voice from not too far away. There was crashing in the underbrush.

Jaskier. Geralt blinked and tried to remember why Jaskier was even there. He’d never take a human on a hunt like this even if it meant losing his entire payout and the last time he’d seen Jaskier he was fairly sure he’d left him in a brothel.

“Well, that doesn’t look great,” Jaskier said, peering down at him suddenly enough to make Geralt startle and fall from his knees to his ass. That was… not a great sign. His emotions were supposed to be blunted from artificial adrenaline.

“Where did you come from?” Geralt asked, the words sounding strangely small to his ears.

“I was coming north from a little village on the Livian border—they know how to throw a party—and I came upon Roach, so I thought I’d stay near her until you returned. Seems like a good plan on my part. You’re never going to get back to her on your own.”

“It’s the middle of the night. Why were you in these woods in the middle of the night?” Geralt was fairly sure that he’d managed to get all the words in the right order, though the way Jaskier peered at him made him try to play it back in his mind to check.

“Oh.” Jaskier said, after a few seconds of thought, his eyes darting around. “Well, there was a bit of a misunderstanding and I thought it prudent to take my leave.”

“Misunderstanding?”

“Someone misunderstood the precise nature of their marriage—how much of that blood is yours?” Jaskier was peering at Geralt’s head, which was stupid because it was Geralt’s side that was bleeding.

Geralt tried to shrug, but this turned out to be a mistake. He grunted as pain shot clean from his chest to his fingertips.

Jaskier looked him over from head to toes. “You’re going to have to drop whatever that is,” he said, indicating the creature’s head.

“Echinops.”

“I’m not touching it. It looks venomous. Put it down.”

“Won’t get paid.”

“I can’t get you up by that arm, so you’re going to have to put down the head or I can’t get you to Roach.”

“Fuck.” Geralt dropped the head, grabbed his sword and stabbed the head. “Carry it with that.”

Jaskier sighed. “I can come back for it, you know.”

“No.”

“Fine.” Jaskier took the sword from Geralt’s hand, carefully so as not to startle him. “Aren’t these things supposed to just be… overgrown plants? How did they hurt you this badly?”

“There were a pack of them—twice as many as I’ve ever seen before—and I wasn’t expecting the drowners. Should’ve expected the fucking drowners,” Geralt muttered.

Jaskier sighed and then there was warmth under Geralt’s good arm, tugging him up to his feet. That Jaskier was stronger than Geralt expected shouldn’t have been a surprise, but somehow it always was.

Now, that scene was ultimately scrapped. It wasn't flowing and I was blocked on it. I didn't know what to do and I pranced around my house trying to think how to fix it for literally weeks. I couldn't make it do what I wanted with sensory shit. I couldn't think of how to bring in the sensory overload stuff I wanted. I couldn't think how to make any of it work, so I opened a new document on my computer, entitled 'Synaesthesia' on October 17th, 2020, and tried a new approach. That approach is actually the first published chapter of Glacier, almost unchanged from the original draft. It was a good day for my writing and I was on a roll. I was too early for NaNo, but I thought I'd get this 10 000 word short about witcher sensory dysfunctions wrapped up before November 1st. (I was younger then, more innocent, had more confidence in my ability to write a short.)

The problem wasn’t really the talking. Lots of humans talked incessantly. Geralt could remember asking a lot of questions before the Trial of the Grasses. The trainers hadn’t been particularly fond of answering most of them. Geralt had heard humans talking constantly every time he’d been within a quarter mile of civilization his entire adult life. Some of them talked in their sleep, making the stream of speech almost unending.

Jaskier spoke more than about half of the adult humans Geralt had ever met, but less than most of the children. In the early days of their acquaintance, it made Geralt question whether or not Jaskier was an adult at all, but there were so many evil things that preyed on children that he was certain that Jaskier’s parents would never have let him go gallivanting around the countryside if he’d been a child. He was proven wrong a couple of months after meeting Jaskier, when Jaskier proudly interrupted his own monologue to announce that his birthday was coming up and he was going to be seventeen at last. Apparently this mattered if he wanted to play in taverns in Vattweir, though why anyone would want to spend extended periods of time in Vattweir, Geralt could not possibly imagine. He tried asking, but the answer was opaque.

“You’re a juvenile, then?” he finally tried, after fifteen or twenty minutes of Jaskier proclaiming the many and varied highlights of the Vattweiran art scene.

“What?” When Geralt asked a question, it often seemed to put Jaskier off-balance. ��A juvenile? Like I’m some sort of… hawk without all its plumage in yet?”

“They always told us to stay away from humans who weren’t through their second decade yet, unless we had direct claim to them. I thought you were children until then.”

“No, of course not! I’m a graduate of Oxenfurt! Well. Mostly. I will be. Just one more semester. I’ve got to repeat geometry because that old bastard didn’t like my family name. I’ll show him. I’ve shown all the rest of them and he had no business tossing me out of his lectures. Who said we weren’t adults until we were twenty?”

“The trainers.” Roach nuzzled Geralt’s cheek and he sighed at her.

“What trainers?”

“Witcher trainers. They gave us… rules. When we left on the Path. One of them was not to touch a human not through their second decade unless it was to save their life. Humans get… protective. Of their young.”

Jaskier stared at him, head tipping to the side. “You aren’t joking when you say you don’t consider yourself a human, are you?”

I had recognised at this point that what I desperately needed to do was lean into Geralt's inhumanity with him--which didn't actually mean writing him as inhuman. It was a fine knife's edge to write. A Geralt who was extremely human, but couldn't recognise it. A Geralt who did have inhuman elements that kept him from seeing himself. A Geralt adrift in a sea of inhuman sensations, held together by the very human impulse for connection. Which is how we come to the scene where I realised I was actually writing Glacier, as it is, and accepted that it was going to be a longform fic and not a long one-shot. There are two parts in it that made me understand what kind of story I was actually writing.

“I’ve seen you with children. Witchers didn’t steal children and grind their bones to make more of yourselves. That’s a load of horseshit.” Jaskier shook his head. “You would never, so those rumours are clearly false.”

“I never did, no. The school fell before I ever had the chance. But there were others who claimed children through the law of surprise or as payment for jobs done when there was no coin. Some simply… found children lost in the woods, alone and without people, and brought them back. And we never ground their bones. No witcher ever made a witcher. That’s the realm of mages who don’t give a shit who lives and who dies.” Geralt swallowed, trying to will away the memory of the rough, shearing sound of children sobbing in a dark cellar as their hearts tried to beat through poison.

Jaskier fell silent a moment and just looked him over. Geralt didn’t like the look on his face, didn’t like the way he couldn’t tell what Jaskier was thinking. The boy was usually so open that Geralt fancied he could read the colourful waves of his emotions, feel them in his fingertips if they were close enough that he could hear his heartbeat. He was, at least, easier to read than any other human Geralt had met. While Jaskier considered Geralt, however, his face stayed still and his heart beat steady and his scent stayed unchanged.

“It doesn’t fit your story, does it?” Geralt asked, his own voice sending a bitter flavour down his throat to ache in his chest. “We can’t be heroes if we stole children and tortured them, can we?” [...] “Witchers don’t have feelings,” Geralt snapped. “You can’t harm what I lack.”

“You know, that’s the stupidest rumour ever started about witchers. However you came to be—born or created—you are intended for a purpose, would you agree?”

Geralt would and he did, with an angry nod and a soft growl.

“That purpose, I would say, can be defined as ‘to protect humanity from monsters whose physical capacities stymie the ability of humanity to fight back’.”

“Our purpose is to fight and make coin.”

Jaskier hummed. “A difference of semantics. As far as I’m aware, witchers don’t produce coin, so you can’t earn coin without protecting humans who do produce coin. So your purpose is to protect humans, when we get right down to it, is it not?”

Geralt shrugged and took a too-large bite of bread to avoid arguing as viciously as he would have liked to.

“If your purpose is to protect humans, then stripping you of emotion is immensely counterproductive. Therefore, you haven’t been stripped of emotion.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Don’t I? I’m a bard. I know what makes up a human just as you know what makes up a beast. I know which parts are valuable and which parts are just… factors that contribute to a whole. I know where the weak points are and where the strong points are. I have to. It’s the only way to capture an audience and make them see the world through my eyes.”

“Which is why you had bread in your pants when we met.”

“I was younger then and hadn’t seen as much of the world as I have now.”

“It was a year ago. You’re still a child.” Geralt scooped a bit of meat into his mouth with a slurp that he knew would make Jaskier cringe. It did.

“You’re at least seventy. To you, everyone in this room is a child, but let me finish. I understand people the way you understand the things you hunt. Let me be very clear in an area where I am certain you have been lied to repeatedly and habitually. Emotion is not weakness.”

That's the moment I knew what I was writing was something bigger, something that has a draft of 265 000 words and that is so near and dear to my heart. That, to me, is the first real scene of Glacier (you can read it, in full, as chapter three of Glacier), because it's the first one I recognised as what is now Glacier.

[guillemelgat]

What is synesthesia and do you have it ?

Hi anon, thanks for asking lol (I'm guessing this is about this post, I definitely didn't explain anything there so good catch)

Here's the Wikipedia definition, to start:

Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

Basically, what that means is that when you see, hear, smell, etc. a certain thing, it brings up another feeling/sound/sight in your head. That's a very vague definition because it's a very broad-reaching phenomenon, but here are some examples of different kinds of synesthesia:

Grapheme-color synesthesia, where when you see different written characters (letters, numbers, etc), you get the sensation of a specific color as well (usually each character has a color)

Chromesthesia, where when you hear a certain sound, you get the sensation of a color (often with people with perfect pitch, they see different keys as different colors)

Spatial sequence synesthesia, where you visualize numbers as points in space/as a map (I'd never heard of this one before so I have less of an idea of how it works)

Auditory-tactile synesthesia, where hearing a certain sound might give your skin the sensation of being touched by something

Ordinal linguistic personification, where different numbers and letters give the sensation of different personalities, similar to grapheme-color synesthesia

Mirror-touch synesthesia, where if you sees someone else be touched somewhere, you feel the same sensation in their body

Lexical-gustatory synesthesia, where different words give you the sensation of different tastes

Basically, synesthesia is just your brain making random but consistent connections between two sensations, and it's pretty much only a useful thing, not usually a problematic one. For example, I have grapheme-color synesthesia and ordinal linguistic personification, both for letters and numbers but it's much stronger for numbers. It makes it kind of fun to do things like sudoku because I can look at a box and pretty quickly figure out what number is missing if there's no green, or to remember dates and years because I have the very strong color association. The reason why I brought up the question is because I'm not sure how it transfers over to learning other alphabets, and from the one person who replied to that post it seems like the only way forward is just frustration and tears, but if anyone else has opinions lmk! Maybe over time it'll reform for a new alphabet and I can go back to reading normally.

[daemonhxckergrrl]

I basically can (synaesthesia + autism) and it doesn't cure shit

but if you can't taste gooey basslines or feel the velcro fluff of an overdriven keyboard line hoo boy you're missing out. shimmery icicle strings, the intense bite of a solo violin playing sul G, some songs are glugging warm syrup

i think my mental illness would b cured if i could eat music

[thethingything]

we got a new set of headphones and the audio quality is noticeably better than in our previous pair (which we've had since before I showed up in the system) and an unexpected side effect of this is that our auditory-tactile synaesthesia has been way more noticeable while listening to music through them