Colorful Noises and Tasty Words: A Historical Examination of the Phenomenon of Synesthesia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
For human beings, and most other animals on the planet, the perception of reality is predominantly mediated by the five senses: taste, touch, smell, hearing, and vision. Though some animals, like bats, may be deficient in one of these areas (i.e. vision), and other animals, like the platypus, may have an extra ‘sixth sense ’ (i.e. electrolocation), human beings are relatively comfortable with the idea of having five distinct senses, all of which serve to discern, detect, and inform us of different facets of reality. However, over the past 200 years, and perhaps since even earlier than that, it has come to be understood that these five senses may not necessarily be so separate after all. Synesthetes, or people who experience the phenomenon of synesthesia, have “cross-linked ” senses, such that a stimulus in one sense modality may cause a sensation in another [1]: examples include “seeing ” colors upon hearing certain sounds or music, or “feeling ” geometric shapes while tasting certain foods [2,3]. This paper will attempt to briefly recount the history of synesthesia, beginning with a short stop in ancient Greece, continuing on to the first medical account of synesthesia in 1812, examining some of the earliest comprehensive investigations of synesthesia, and
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".