scholarly journals Colors in Silence – The Journey of a Synesthete in Understanding the Senses

2020 ◽  
pp. 54-60
Author(s):  
Rachel Chen Siew Yoong

This paper will explore how a synesthete, RC, perceives colors, shapes, and textures in silence. RC has sound-to-color synesthesia, where at least one color is associated with each pitch on the Western music scale. Listening to silence strips all sound down to the bare minimum in terms of color or texture. As discovered through weekly meditation in a “Deep Listening” class, RC places a pitch to everything at least audible when plunged into silence, trying hard to capture the colors of every available sound. The silence also forces a more pronounced tactile sense that RC tries to grasp together with the colors. Every experience with the sound however, is present but muddled, and difficult to understand. Silence becomes an uncomfortable world of uncertainty and it becomes vital to grasp the visual and tactile nuances that are a part of it. This paper reflects RC’s progression through silence towards an understanding of her senses. What is silence? And how does the synesthete grapple with it?

2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kerry Martin Skora

AbstractThis article introduces a “hermeneutics of touch” in order to uncover the place of tactile experience in the work of Abhinavagupta, the Kashmiri Hindu Tantric sage (c. 975-1025 C.E.). I focus on his understanding of the liberation of touch, especially as articulated in his Trankāloka (TĀ), his encyclopedic synthesis of Trika Śiva discourse and ritual. Inspired by the scholarship of the new emerging fields of anthropology of the senses as well as religion and the senses, I purposely break with the primary emphasis on vision and cognition seen in Abhinavagupta Studies, to reconsider the significance of the tactile sense.


2012 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Murat Akser

Film theory has lost itself in the woods among debates of the mind and the senses. Ther are those who are interested in a more tactile sense of the real in film studies. This issue of CINEJ focuses on the documentary truth and how it aims to present us a real and a better world.


1956 ◽  
Vol 1 (6) ◽  
pp. 177-177
Author(s):  
LEO M. HURVICH
Keyword(s):  

1986 ◽  
Vol 31 (10) ◽  
pp. 820-820
Author(s):  
No authorship indicated
Keyword(s):  

1893 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Gray M'Kendrick ◽  
William Snodgrass
Keyword(s):  

2020 ◽  
pp. 316-328
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Susca

Contemporary communicative platforms welcome and accelerate a socio-anthropological mutation in which public opinion (Habermas, 1995) based on rational individuals and alphabetic culture gives way to a public emotion whose emotion, empathy and sociality are the bases, where it is no longer the reason that directs the senses but the senses that begin to think. The public spheres that are elaborated in this way can only be disjunctive (Appadurai, 2001), since they are motivated by the desire to transgress the identity, political and social boundaries where they have been elevated and restricted. The more the daily life, in its local intension and its global extension, rests on itself and frees itself from projections or infatuations towards transcendent and distant orders, the more the modern territory is shaken by the forces that cross it and pierce it. non-stop. The widespread disobedience characterizing a significant part of the cultural events that take place in cyberspace - dark web, web porn, copyright infringement, trolls, even irreverent ... - reveals the anomic nature of the societal subjectivity that emerges from the point of intersection between technology and naked life. Behind each of these offenses is the affirmation of the obsolescence of the principles on which much of the modern nation-states and their rights have been based. Each situation in which a tribe, cloud, group or network blends in a state of ecstasy or communion around shared communications, symbols and imaginations, all that surrounds it, in material, social or ideological terms, fades away. in the air, being isolated by the power of a bubble that in itself generates culture, rooting, identification: transpolitic to inhabit


Author(s):  
Heather Tilley ◽  
Jan Eric Olsén

Changing ideas on the nature of and relationship between the senses in nineteenth-century Europe constructed blindness as a disability in often complex ways. The loss or absence of sight was disabling in this period, given vision’s celebrated status, and visually impaired people faced particular social and educational challenges as well as cultural stereotyping as poor, pitiable and intellectually impaired. However, the experience of blind people also came to challenge received ideas that the visual was the privileged mode of accessing information about the world, and contributed to an increasingly complex understanding of the tactile sense. In this chapter, we consider how changing theories of the senses helped shape competing narratives of identity for visually impaired people in the nineteenth century, opening up new possibilities for the embodied experience of blind people by impressing their sensory ability, rather than lack thereof. We focus on a theme that held particular social and cultural interest in nineteenth-century accounts of blindness: travel and geography.


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