Scientific evidence confirms that Ikea furniture has no personality – a previously undescribed form of synaesthesia?

Some, possibly all, of my offspring, spanning most of the genders, report experiences that are consistent with synaesthesia, which suggests to me that my own synesthesia could be the result of a double-helping of synaesthesia genetics (homozygosity). Just the other day one of ours (female adolescent) unexpectedly explained that most of the large objects in our kitchen/living room, in which we all spend a lot of time, have genders and personalities, as is well-known in the ordinal-linguistic personification synaesthesia (personified numbers and letters) which we share, along with grapheme-colour synaesthesia. She told me that this goes back to her early childhood and has perhaps faded in time, but still operates.

Like my own OLP for numbers and letters, her Furniture Personification Synaesthesia is dominated by males. Maybe this could be related to the fact that we are both “tomboys”, with the usual orientations but personalities that reflect characteristics that are associated with maleness in our culture. Maybe it is simply a reflection of the dominance of males in society or the predominance of males as major fictional characters. Maybe it is the solidity of furniture objects that makes then seem (mostly) male. I only hope this doesn’t develop into that unfortunate mental phenomenon in which people (mostly women) “fall in love” with large buildings and structures, which they generally personify as male. That wouldn’t be fun. I don’t want a traffic bridge as a son-in-law.

Here’s the details of this type of personification syn that I’ve never before heard of:

TV = male

Refrigerator = female

Piano = male, nice (of course, what kind of piano is NOT nice?)

Oven = male, nice, cheeky

Airconditioner = male (everyone’s best mate on a hot summer’s day)

Brown drawers = male, cheeky

Rocking chair = male, nice

Rangehood = male

Ikea shelf = neither

Speakers = male

Merry Christmas readers, and please be kind to your loved ones, be they human, animal or otherwise.

More pareidolia viewing the world of plants and fungi

http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/mushroom-species-looks-humans

Some music clips featuring personified objects

Reflections by Django Django

How could anyone listen to these vocals and not see colours? Sounds like the Dandys, don’t you think?

 

Fish Heads by Barnes and Barnes

This was one of the clips shown on Rage when Noel Fielding was the host. I didn’t get much sleep that night. We can always rely of Fielding for a good dose of psychedelic nonsense. Don’t be afraid of the fish at the seafood counter, little girl. They aren’t alive.

That’s odd. Both musical groups have names that are the same thing repeated twice. I guess there’s a lot of repetition in psychedelia.

This clip has got to have something to do with personification synaesthesia

Dan Deacon – Feel The Lightning.

http://youtu.be/kK-1axSGkXc

Finding confirmation of my beliefs and ideas, as you do

A closely related family member of mine recently scored a perfect mark on an adult literacy test geared to normal adults (which was true to form) , and another closely related family member in mid-childhood recently explained that they perceive motor vehicles as having faces and they categorize cars, utes and 4WDs into genders, square old 4WDs being male. I can see how that makes sense, but all the same I’ve never been that much of a car personifier. Ever since I was a child I’ve personified numbers and alphabet letters in great detail, along with perceiving them as essentially associated with very specific colours, and the shapes and motions of cars often make me think of hunting animals in some deeply instinctive way, but unlike my young relative and the many Australians who decorate their own motor vehicles with oversized curly eyelashes or giant imitation testes, I don’t see motor vehicles as male or female.

On the surface most people seem pretty-much normal and average, but if you make the most superficial investigation by testing or speaking with people about their thoughts and perceptions, you might find that there is an interesting and sometimes significant range of differences in the way our minds work. Grapheme-colour synaesthesia, personifying synaesthesia and elite and precocious levels of ability in reading, spelling and general literacy are just some of the interesting things that run in my family and are also experienced by me, and I am also a super-recognizer. A super-recognizer is a person who has an elite level of ability in recognizing faces or face memory, and typically can achieve perfect or near-perfect scores on tests of face memory. I believe that this co-occurrence of synaesthesia and elite abilities in face memory and literacy are no coincidence. I believe all of these things are based on hyper-connectivity or hyper-development in the rear parts of the brain including the fusiform gyrus, and also in the right hemisphere of the brain. I believe the genetic basis of this development might be linked to genes that code for particular variations in the functioning of the immune system, possibly involving the complement chemicals, microglia and synaptic pruning. I’m fascinated by the possibility that research work that has been done in the last decade linking immunology and neuropsychology can inform us about the origins of synaesthesia and also specific gifts and deficits in memory and cognition, and maybe also inform us about some types of dementia. In 2012 at this blog I explicitly identified research on the immune system, complement, microglia and synaptic pruning done by Dr Beth Stevens as a possible explanation for the origins of developmental synaesthesia, an idea that was so good that some synaesthesia researchers made it the basis of a speculative paper that was published in a peer-reviewed journal last year (they forgot to acknowledge me as the first to publish this idea). Work done on MHC1 (part of the immune system) and the brain by Carla Shatz is another area of scientific research that I find tremendously exciting, and I believe that the general area of research on the relationships between brain structure and the immune system is of such originality and importance that it should attract one or more Nobel Prizes.

Another example of the personification of an object in advertising

To promote the message that receiving and paying bills through snail mail and paper is old-fashioned, personify a mailbox as a grumpy old man who wears a brown suit.

http://www.bpay.com.au/Personal/Receiving-bills-with-BPAY-View.aspx

Personification at the heart of imagination in stories loved by children

The Thomas the Tank Engine stories, with railway stock who have faces and voices and dialogue and relationships and dramas, and the Wizard of Oz story, with a tin-man and a living scarecrow and curmudgeonly apple trees are just two examples of classic children’s fiction which translated very successfully to popular family screen entertainment, and both are full of objects that are personified. Many synaesthetes like myself have naturally and mysteriously developed conceptions of letters of the alphabet and numbers as having personal characteristics such as genders and personalities, as well as individual and specific colours. These synaesthetic ways of thinking formed in childhood and has become embedded in the structure of the brain. It is possible that all people once experienced synaesthetic thinking as children, but synaptic pruning did away with all that fanciful nonsense for most of us. Perhaps we were all personifying synaesthetes when we were little kids, and perhaps that explains why object personification pops up so often in children’s entertainment. To complement the winter school holidays one of our TV channels is broadcasting The Wizard of Oz for the umpteenth time. I’m not sure if I’ve ever sat and viewed the whole thing and forgotten half of it, but there was some familiarity in the deep and gruff sound of the voice of one of the apple trees. Could any grown tree have a voice that is not dark and resonant? I doubt it. Irrational as it is, object personification operates according to psychological rules and relationships, and big dark brown things tend to have deep voices.

I’m sure I’m not the first to observe that popular movies are full of psychology, and the Wizard of Oz is as good an example as any. There’s the object personification in many of the characters. There’s also some interesting psychology in the way that Dorothy feels that she has known her three strange new friends for a long time, but also logically knows that can’t be true (the story is set in a dream with bizarre characters which Dorothy’s sleeping mind has created out of memories of real people in Dorothy’s real life). “Oh, you’re the best friends anybody ever had. And it’s funny, but I feel as if I’d known you all the time, but I couldn’t have, could I?” Would face processing researchers call that “implicit familiarity” or “covert recognition”? It is actually person recognition, not just face recognition, but then again, I’ve been arguing at this blog that face recognition cannot be separated from person recognition. Faces are only memorable because they are the front windows of minds. I think Dorothy’s strange and unexplained feeling of familiarity is a nice illustration of the way that person recognition is swifter and more emotional than the verbal labeling of people with personal names and place names that we are able to do once we are able to figure out where that person fits into our autobiographical memory bank. That memory bank is quite a thing to search, so it can take a while. I like the way that the Dunning-Kruger Effect or something like it is woven into the centre of the narrative of The Wizard of Oz, the tin man not understanding his own emotional dimension, the scarecrow suddenly spouting a bit of geometrical wisdom once told he does have a brain, and the lion needing to be told how brave he actually is even though he had been through so much. There’s also a message about the possibilities of human development, effort and experience changing what we are, if we care to give it a red-hot go. That could have something to do with synapses. Of course, this story has a lot to say about the psychology of quacks, con-artists, fame and inflated authority figures, but the odd thing is, despite the many decades of popularity of this book and the Hollywood movie, great hordes of educated people in America and other English-speaking countries continue to be conned and robbed by quacks, con-artists, famous people and inflated authority figures. Yes, I’m no genius for pointing out the main message of the story of The Wizard of Oz, but if it is such an obvious message, then why does it appear to be so seldom heeded?

Another funny TV show with personified objects

It’s a TV show with characters that are objects found in toilets; The Adventures Of Brush Lee And Jackie Chain. Whatever next? The personification of everyday objects is a surreal idea that keeps popping up in TV comedy shows.  http://youtu.be/xjqvzOIA0Yc  It is also thought to be a type of synaesthesia.

Advertisement featuring personification of an inanimate object

Advertisement featuring the personification of an inanimate object

When I look at this ad I can’t help thinking about the letter Y. He is such a happy and friendly personality. Here he is playing with some dogs in a park:

The letter Y frolicks with two lavender-coloured dogs at Piney Lakes playground

Facial personification of a car in a sideshow ride

Car with a face on a sideshow ride

How creepy is this? Another example of a sculpture or creative design that features personification added to the form of an everyday object. My particular interest in personification is my own theory that personification synaesthesia (as experienced by myself) or something like it gives rise to superiority in face memory (or being a super-recognizer) by naturally making the faces of unknown people more memorable and interesting. But the personification of objects is not limited to synaesthetes or people with unusual perception of faces. The personification of objects is a theme that can be found in sculpture, design, art and advertizing, and I’ve written about an photographed many examples at this blog. Not all personification in sculpture or design takes the form of a face, as in this creepy sideshow ride car. One could say that the fanciful face of this pretend car is a reference to pareidolia, which is a psychological phenomenon in which the mind interprets random or vague images or stimuli as having a pattern or significance. Some classic examples of pareidolia are seeing animals in clouds or seeing faces in rock cliffs orhearing voices in white noise. Even though the fronts of motor cars have little in common with faces (except that maybe a person looks forward through both, and a mouth and a radiator grille are intake openings), the pattern of two headlights above horizontal design features in a symetrical layout at the front of a car makes the human mind think of a face. It is thought that we are so sensitive to face-like patterns because our minds are designed to look for faces. All the same, I’d rather not have to look at one as creepy as this one.