That’s a theory. As it goes, during childhood your brain goes through a tremendous amount of neural pruning, and synaesthesia is the result of this not happening effectively, leaving “leftover” connections. There is someone trumping the theory that we are all synaesthates as children (completely unfounded)
Synaesthesia would not account for this womans ability. Phonemic/Chromatic synaesthates bi-associate visual percepts with colors, and if the synaesthetic color were identical to the real color you wouldn’t be synaesthetic. Other types, like hers supposedly (tactile/chromatic?) become increasingly rare. It is, however, entirely possible that you associate colors with aspects of touch such as texture, shape etc. (there was a pop psych book abou a man who tasted shapes). Even in a best case scenario, there would be now way for her to distinguish between two identical shape/texture etc… objects each with a different color.
(btw, synaesthesia is a real phenomenon. See Robertson (2003) for a cog/neurosci overview. link)
I never suggested that it was. I just suggest that maybe she honestly does see colours when she touches objects. The colours she sees might not be the same colours you would see.I submit this as a possibility, an alternative to the suggestion that she is deliberately cheating. I do not claim that her colour vision is actually right.
To clarify, Peter’s is an explanation for why the woman thinks she has the ability claimed in the title. She almost certainly hasn’t, a could be evidenced by dyeing identical material 10 different colours and asking her to pick out the red one a few times in a row.
That was my first thought - that I had long ago heard about a young Russian girl who had done the same thing under test conditions. I didn’t recall any “explanation”.
That would mean she could touch the fabric and see a color in her mind. That’s not the same as knowing what specific color the fabric is just by touching it.
Oh man, i’m glad it’s early in the morning…nobody had the chance to catch my blunder (which isn’t a very pretty thing around here :). I didn’t mean that they wouldn’t be synaesthetic, but that they wouldn’t know they were synaesthetic, and that wouldn’t apply for someone who did not have the properly functioning sense, e.g., vision.
But if she’s identifying the color correctly, synesthesia is not what’s happening here (unless there is some amazing string of coincidences going on as well).
When did I ever suggest that she IS identifying the colour correctly? In fact I’ve said several times that the colour she sees is not the same colour you would see.
That could be true… But it doesn’t explain anything. She could also be dyslexic or diabetic or allergic to wheat, and those would all have the same relevance to the question at hand. This woman can go on a TV show wearing a blindfold, touch a piece of cloth, and say what color it is. We’re wondering how she does this. One explanation might be that different common fabric dyes somehow feel different. Another explanation might be that she’s peeking through her blindfold. Cold-reading her audience could be yet another explanation. But synthaesia wouldn’t explain anything.
According to this article she has 1.5% vision in one eye. Do with that information what you will. Also, the picture shows that they were handing her the clothing, not having her identify what people on the show were wearing. Pretty neat trick.
I read something a few years ago that was written by a debunker (maybe Randi, but I don’t remember) who said it was really hard to completely cut off the vision of someone who knows certain tricks to see around blindfolds. He said you just about have to seal their head in a box to be sure. Knowing that, knowing that this has been a common-enough trick in the past that people have had to debunk it, and knowing that a lot of nominally blind people can still see colors (Ghanima’s link says she’s not completely blind), I don’t have much doubt that she’s just cheating.
Ok, I’m going to drop in an anecdote. Don’t hit!
I once dated a man who was born blind and had had his eyes removed at age 2.
One night I drove, (alone) from my house to his hotel.
No one else was there when I arrived. I was wearing a red dress. He ran his hand down my back and said “Red?” I asked why he thought that, and he said that red felt warmer than other colors.
Ok, he did ask, and had he been wrong, I wouldn’t remember the incident, but he wasn’t wrong. He had no way of finding out in advance.
So, Lucky guess?
No it would not. Jeez, what’s so hard to understand about this? This concept is very very simple.
Princhester claimed 2 possibilities.
She has some genuine psychic power
She is cheating.
I suggested a third possibility
She honestly ** but wrongly ** believes she sees colours when she touches objects.
Synthaesia would be an explaination for that. If she has it, then she really does see colours when she touches objects. Not the same colours you see though, as I have said several times already.
Diabetes or wheat allergy would NOT lead her to see colours when she touches objects.
Sheee, maybe I have Synthaesia cause I’m starting to see red.
As I understand it, all Peter is doping is to offer an explanation of how someone who was blind could quite innocently claim to ‘feel’ colours; it may be that this doesn’t match the phenomenon being described in the five pithy paragraphs in the linked article, but that’s not really the point; the point is that not everyone who says ‘I can feel colours’ is either mistaken, lying or magic; True, they’re not sensing anything that relates meaningfully to colour in the sighted world, but they can be ‘feeling colour’ without being deliberately dishonest, or supernaturally endowed.
Can she somehow detect colours by touch? We don’t know, and we won’t know until she has demonstrated this gift, or tried to, under controlled conditions which eliminate other possible explanations.
Can magicians and sly tricksters like myself arrange to be able to ‘see’ even while apparently securely blindfolded? Yep. We’ve been doing it for over a century at least. And we’re getting better at it all the time! Is this woman using a trick of some kind, of the type that I and other magicians would use? Unlikely, but not impossioble. Again, we must wait for a well-arranged demonstration under conditions which rule out fraud and trickery.
Have claims like this been made before? Yep. Dozens of times. Have any of them been shown to be genuine? No. Not once. Never ever. They either avoid a test conditions demonstration, or they try and fail.
Would some sort of synaethesia account for her ability as claimed? No. As others have explained through the fog of replies, this might mean that for her tactile sensations trigger perceptions akin to our normal perception of colour, but not that she would accurately identify the colours of objects as normal-sighted people see them.
Don’t read German, but as pointed out, she’s being handed clothing. The picture is small, but the two samples shown appear to have different fabric. The blindfold also looks suspicious.
It’s Randi time.
[quote=picunurse]
and he didn’t offer to show is ability with other articles you were wearing?