Thursday, September 28, 2006

As per Marc and Dan's request...

I plan on researching the link between Confucius and Synaestesia. I'm familiar with some of Confucius's teachings (though not specifically from the Chung Yung) and am interested to see if there really is a correlation between those topics. From what I know, Confucius uses a lot of metaphors and poetics in his teachings. I wonder if that isn't often confused with synaestesia the same way a writer describing a character to have a dark voice may be, perhaps, incorrectly deemed a Synaesthete (?).

Taken from the online encyclopedia Wikepdia's description, "While cross-sensory metaphors are sometimes described as "synesthetic", true neurological synesthesia is involuntary and occurs in about four percent of the population (1 in 23 persons) across its range of variants (see Simner et al., in press). It runs strongly in families, possibly inherited as an X-linked dominant trait."

1 comment:

marc said...

i think you need to define synaesthesia...there is discussion as to what actually qualifies a 'synaesthete'...
how important is sex to your project?
(referring to your link)
or is it simply the 'inheritance of the trait'...maybe focusing more on (cross) cultural associations?