4. Synaesthesia

The stimulation in one modality that triggers sensations in another is called synaesthesia. For example, a synaesthete may consistently experience a specific colour when hearing a particular tone or looking at a certain numeral. Mild forms of synaesthesia permeate consciousness, as revealed by the sounds Kiki and Bouba, which invoke an association with shape. Similarly, a painting by Kandinsky has been found to trigger activity in portions of the brain that are associated with hearing. Synaesthesia might also play a role in other forms of self-expression. Dance could even be regarded as a form of synaesthesia, in this case sensory-to-motor, where the rhythm of movements synaesthetically mimics the auditory rhythm. Even the design skills of a surfer-shaper could be regarded as building a synaesthetic link between surfing manoeuvres and the shape of the surfboard.

Such motor-to-sensory synaesthesia would probably be underpinned by mirror-neurons, so-named because they fire in response to movements that share a common trajectory, whether performed by you or someone else. Mirror neurons are believed to be implicated in learning to speak. They facilitate the transfer of skills, e.g. from parent to child, by coding movements in terms of their purpose. As a result, the mind learns how to deal with objects through their use, which is fundamentally different to their spatial presence, since the use of an object extends the self beyond its physical limits.

To design a surfboard as an extension of the self, the surfer-shaper has to decipher manoeuvres in terms of the spatial and temporal paradigms. The axes of penetration and release represent the set of alternatives from which manoeuvres are composed, just as the letters of an alphabet are combined to form words. The similarity between the movements of surfing and the movements of speech is evident in passages that employ onomatopoeia, where the sound of a word, or group of words, seems to characterise its denotation. For example:

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance,
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense.
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows,
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar,
When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.

Alexander Pope (1711)

This passage demonstrates the perceptual overlapping of sound, movement and meaning, which is analogous to the perceptual overlapping required to design a surfboard:

The set of speech sounds is analogous to the set of curves present in a surfboard. The sense of movement induced by the speech sounds is analogous to manoeuvring the surfboard.
The meaning of the poem is analogous to the order of execution, since this displays the surfer’s understanding of the wave, which is analogous to our understanding of context.

In each case, the (temporal) sequence connects the components that are (spatially) separated from alternatives. The interplay between spatial and temporal relations invokes memories to inform present experience. In language, the sound of an utterance feeds forward to produce a sequence of words, which feed back to invoke meaning. In surfing, the shape of the surfboard feeds forward to produce a sequence of directional changes, which feed back to invoke manoeuvres. Just as the components of language are assembled to generate speech sounds in the vocal tract, the components of surfboard design are assembled to generate manoeuvres on the wave.

Previous : Next

Surfism : Emergence : Articulation : Synaesthesia : Semiosis :
Spatial perception : Dimensions : Evolution : Conclusion