"Perfect" Senses

Factual Questions
1

I’d written in with the following question, but found myself snubbed by one of Cecil’s staffers. I got over it and buried the trauma until reading an article recently on the first conference on synesthesia. My initial curisoity was reignited and I quote my humble question below. Please

(Blame NPR for this)

I was listening to an edition of an NPR program, ‘The Infinite Mind’. This particular episode dealt with perfect pitch. YOU know, the ability to identify notes exactly and in some cases replicate those sounds.

Well, I began wondering if the other senses have something similar and if so, what are the appropriate terms (perfect taste? perfect sight? nahhh, can’t be). I also wondered exactly how these “perfect” senses would be identified. Is the analogy in sight photographic memory or is it the ability to identify colors distinctly, even if they are so
close as to be identical to the average viewer?

How bout it?

As a follow-up, assuming that there ARE analogies, have there been any documented cases of one person possessing two or more “perfect senses”?

(And blame TIME Magazine for this …)

Also, do persons with synesthesia have a “perfect” sense in their confused sense (i.e. - if I hear a sound every time I smell a particular scent, can I perfectly i.d. that note?)

2

Just to reassure you, Machete, not getting your question answered isn’t necessarily a snub. Often, it’s just that none of us knows the answer. Well, OK, Cecil Himself knows everything, but he doesn’t have time to answer everything.

Let me just say that you’ve gotten at least one staffer wondering what the answer is, and you’ve certainly come to the right place: Very seldom is there a question to which somebody here doesn’t know the answer. Welcome!

3

hey Matchete off topic, but… your user name is one letter off from an old friend of mine’s. Is your first name Dave by chance?? living in MI??? if not, pretend I wasn’t even here.

4

SDMB generally works best when you address one question at a time vs the machine gun approach as people sometimes avoid answering a stack of “and if” questions vs one they can focus on.

Having said that welcome aboard!
Here is some synesthesia info via google

http://web.mit.edu/synesthesia/www/synesthesia.html
With respect to the “perfect senses” question this (IMO) is more of a common sense issue than anything with an absolute answer. There are people with extremely highly developed senses of taste, touch, smell, hearing and sight by way of inherent ability, training or both.

“Perfect pitch” is simply means that someone can identify and replicate a note with a defined note scale. It’s like saying someone has “perfect” sight if they have 20/10 vision or can parse out extremely fine gradations in color. It’s not “perfect” in any meaningful sense. It’s just very good. Same for the other senses. It’s all a matter of degree.

5

In order to call something “perfect,” you need an accepted standard against which to measure. Musical notes have just that, an assigned frequency that, in the case of “perfect pitch” can be accurately identified be certain individuals.

Let’s look at the other senses, shall we?

Taste
How you’d go about creating acceptable standards for the four components of taste, sweetness, sourness, saltiness and bitterness, I’ve no idea. But that is really all that would prevent you from finding “perfect taste.” Set a standard and see how accurately it can be identified with the body’s receptors.

Smell
This sense is said to be closely related to taste, but I think you’d carve out yourself a much more difficult task to set standards here. I’m not sure smell can be as easily reduced to the few simple constituents that taste is.

Touch
I suppose you could create standards of roughness, or some similar surface property. In fact, there are already standard surface quality measurements used in the machining field, as well as other fields, I’m sure. I guess you could provide a person with samples of various grades of surface toughness and ask them to identify which category they belong to. This doesn’t nearly cover the entire spectrum of the sense of touch though. What about temperature, itchiness and ticklishness (for lack of better terms) and perhaps even, bristlyness? Touch is a very complex sense and it’d be very difficult to separate the components of it like we can do with taste. Probably an even tougher task than taste.

Sight
Here’s one I think should be as doable as taste. Like sound waves, light waves are easily measurable. We just need to select a frequency and call it, say, blue. Any deviation from that would be, I guess, “not quite blue.” The same for the other colors through, probably, the secondary or tertiary. These frequencies should then be readily identifiable to persons with “perfect sight.” We also should, I think, consider brightness to be another appurtenant to the sense of sight. A standard scale of brightness shouldn’t be too hard to decide.

6

Perfect sight might include being able to remember the exact colour of an object, then go and pick the same colour from a colour chart.

  • This is quite tricky, if you want to have a go, try it with something of a distinctive colour that is small enough to put in your pocket; take a good look at it at home, put it in your pocket and go to a store that sells spray paints for cars, try to pick the closest match from memory, then see how close you really got.

I found myself doing this just by chance this week (I wanted some matching paint for my bicycle, but couldn’t takeit to the shop with me; the shade I picked was way off.

7

As far as smell, I’ve heard of perfume experts with acute senses, far beyond normal. Presumably this would extend to taste as well, since they are related… vaguely.
I read an article about a “mutant female tetrachromat” which is a genetic defect only rarely found in female carriers of colorblindness. They have 4 color receptors instead of 3. Geneticists have been predicting the existence of a female tetrachromat for years, but they have only found one recently. Tetrachromats have incredibly acute color sensibility.

8

I’ve read of two attempts to describe and encode smells so that they can be reproduced over the Web. Wired describes one:

I suspect that this foundered on the rock of “who actually wants it?”.

9

…and in that article was the company: DigiScents.

10

Perhaps perfect sight might include the ability to accurately estimate sizes just by looking?

I read an article once about a Japanese machinist who could mill and lathe objects very accurately just by sight.

As somebody pointed out, training plays a part. IIRC, there’s a chapter in “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman” where Feynman trains his sense of smell.

11

God, if I ever dump my member name, I’m gonna use Tetrachromat. Makes me feel like Angelina Jolie !!!

12

This is very anecdotish, but for what it’s worth, my art history professors often talked about a student’s “connoiseurship.” This term encompasses a lot of things, but the hallmark is being able to look at a work of art, and then look at a second work of art and almost immediately see differences and similarities. For example, seeing a painting by Rubens, and then seeing another painting and being able to identify if the second painting is by Rubens. Not so hard if the second painting is by Pollack, but it gets increasingly difficult when you start looking at stuff by students of Rubens. Anyone’s connoiseurship gets better with practice and study. But the faculty always said they could tell when students had excellent connoiseurship very early on in the program. Some people seem to have a much greater intuitive ability in this area, even without knowing anything about the artist. Some of the most senior faculty admitted they were poor natural connoiseurs, but that they made up for it with diligent study.

I still can’t figure out if this is a learned or natural ability. Maybe some people are drawn to the arts, and so at an early age train themselves to interpret that kind of visual data more skillfully? Or, are people born with a particular visual talent, and thus pursue the arts because it comes so naturally to them?