#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.

[bengesko]

Saw a post regarding Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and I was curious, because a lot of the symptom align with hemiplegic migraines, and saw the following:

Sensations such as déjà vu/ jamais vu

Amnesia of a single memory or set of memories

A sudden sense of unprovoked fear and anxiety

Nausea Auditory, visual, olfactory, gustatory, or tactile hallucinations; olfactory hallucinations often seem indescribable to patients beyond "pleasant" or "unpleasant"

Visual distortions such as macropsia and micropsia

Dissociation or derealisation

Synesthesia

Dysphoric or euphoric feelings, fear, anger, and other emotions

I have so many of these right before a hemiplegic migraine, (I don't count the synaesthesia, that's a thing I've had ALL the time since I was little, and it's an enjoyable quirk ♥) but the macropsia and dissociation/derealisation are the BIG ONES.

I often get these "spells" where everything looks WAY too big/too close, and it makes me feel momentary panic and claustrophobia- even though I'm not claustrophobic (I have an "Autistic Need" for small, closed dark spaces.)

I don't think I have TLE, but it's worth at least asking my doc about.... when/if I ever get a neurology referral to go through.....

[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

[orwellsunderpants]

I have auditory-tactile, music-spatial, and visual-tactile synaesthesia. Trying to explain how I physically sense the movement of elements in a game on my phone or how pitches in a piece of music exist in specific points in space is almost impossible. (I also usually only experience the music one if I have my eyes closed and am concentrating on the music.)

I followed you initially for the Big Dog saga recaps and I am ngl overjoyed to read your attempts to explain the way synesthesia is because I’ve doubted myself for so long. Everyone with synesthesia seems to be able to simply explain things, that for them 1 is green, or tastes of lemon. I end up babbling trying to describe the physical skin sensation that certain sounds cause. It’s … strangely affirming to see someone also loosely describe sensations or textures that don’t translate cleanly to words <3

There's something like 27 different known types of synaesthesia! Numbers having colours is the most common, which is why we tend to describe that one and then stop. But there's all kinds. Some people only have one type; some people, myself included, have multiple. Even within the world of colour synaesthesia, it can be more than just numbers (certainly is for me), more than just colours... As I say, texture is actually a bigger output for me than colour is. I'm also really good at the game of "That person's name sounds like it belongs to <insert a character type here>". My husband told me about some new comedian friends of his yesterday, and one sounded like a suave international spy of mystery whose ex husbands die under mysterious circumstances, and the other sounded like an underwhelming Cockney gangster who sells knock off brass goods like bed knobs. That was entirely just the synaesthesia talking.

Another super common one is days of the week or months of the year being positioned geographically around you - like Tuesday is above your head but Wednesday is twenty yards away at thigh height (this is one of the few I don't have.) Mirror synaesthesia, that's pretty common among synaesthetes - if you see someone else scratch their face, your own will start itching as well. Music! We're pretty sure Mozart was a musical synaesthete, there's a record that as a child he would ask his mother to play the red music on the piano (I cannot quite remember the specific output here - it might have been an emotion instead of a colour, I forget.)

Anyway yes, there's loads! And it's an absolute bugger trying to describe it all using language, I agree.

[i-love-you-very-much]

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[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

[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.