Precis

Synaesthesia, the joined sensation, is a unique way of perceiving the world. The term refers to a phenomenon in which an individual experiences a sense other than the one being stimulated.

I am interested in the investigation of synaesthesia as social phenomenal. The ability to understand what others are thinking lies at the heart of social interaction. We constantly convey meanings to others, and draw conclusions about their beliefs and intentions. Since we each have access to exactly one consciousness; our own, we can learn the contents of another person’s mind only by communication with them and relating their descriptions with our own experiences. Yet this communication relies on the assumption that we all perceive the world in a similar way.
Synaesthesia, on the other hand, is an experience of enhanced perception of the world. Synaesthetes are not missing anything, they got something extra. This, too, is part of the richer palette of human perception. By learning how others perceive the world, we gain an appreciation for human diversity and improve our ability to understand and relate to the people around us.

This phenomenology is what our modern culture lacks. As Cytowic, the neurologist who rediscovered synaesthesia, argues, “this phenomenon is a conscious peek at a neural process that happens in each of us all the time. Multi–sensory awareness has been lost from the consciousness of a majority of people”[1]. A walk in New York, for example, reveals how the eye sees differences to which it reacts with indifference. Our modern culture suffers from a divide between inside and outside. This reaction of disengagement when immersed in difference is the result of the forces that have created a disjunction between subjective experience and worldly experience.

The study of synaesthesia can be thought as an investigation into celebration of diversity, differences and difficulty. However, it seems we have trouble understanding the experience of these concepts as a positive human value. In city such as New York, modern structures do not suggest the complexity of how people might live. The structures wall off the differences between people, assuming that these differences are more likely to be mutually threatening than mutually stimulating. What we make in the urban realm are therefore bland, neutralizing spaces, which remove the threat of social contact; street walls faced in sheets of plate glass, or highway that cuts off poor neighbourhood from the rest of the city.

How can one invent a form which celebrates diversity and differences, and remove the forces which have annihilated the value of complexity even in a city whose differences are an overwhelming sociological fact. What could make social diversity as abundant and instructive as was neutral diversity?

The city is subject to constant change. What I am looking for is a way of making and acting that can lead to a different mechanism which is less fixed, less static. A built form that is made such a way they can permit multiple interpretations. A form that can evoke different images in different people and in different situations, and thus take on different meanings, and it is the phenomenon of this experience that is the key to an altered awareness of form. One must be able to conceive to oneself in terms of his/her own experience. In other words, one must elicit associations so that he/she can compare them mentally with propositions of which he/she was already conscious or which can be raised from his/her subconscious experience. The more associations that are evoked the more individuals will be able to respond to them. Consequently, the more influence they can exert into the space, the more engaged they will be of one another.So this is a plea for more enhancement of the public domain in order to stimulate interpretations, in the sense that it must be capable of taking different roles, which everyone can relate to in his or her own way. It is a plea for a form that can both absorb and evoke multiple meanings without, however, losing their identity in the process.

[1] Synaesthesia: A Union of the Senses, Richard E. Cytowic, second edition, The MIT Press 2002