Bright Colors Falsely Seen – Synaesthesia & the Search for Transcendental Knowledge: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge - Hardcover

Dann, Kevin T

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9780300066197: Bright Colors Falsely Seen – Synaesthesia & the Search for Transcendental Knowledge: Synaesthesia and the Search for Transcendental Knowledge

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0300066198 ISBN 13: 9780300066197

Publisher: Yale University Press, 1998

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Review:

"Dann's extraordinarily well written history of synaesthesia in modern thought has almost equal relevance for cognitive psychology, aesthetics, and studies of religious mysticism. An important work in intellectual and cultural history."-Harry T. Hunt, author of On the Nature of Consciousness and The Multiplicity of Dreams

Synopsis:

In a conversation with his physician, a 19th-century resident of Paris who lived near the railroad described sensations of colour generated by the sounds of trains passing in the night. This patient - a synaesthete - experienced "colour hearing" for letters, words and most sounds. Synaesthesia, a phemomenon now known to science for over a century, is a rare form of perception in which one sense may respond to stimuli received by other senses. This book provides an historical treatment of synaesthesia and a closely related mode of perception called eideticism. Kevin Dann discusses divergent views of synaesthesia and eideticism over the last 100 years and explores the controversies over the significance of these unusual modes of perception. Celebrated at the turn of the century as a uniquely creative form of consciousness, synaesthesia became embroiled in a debate between Romantics who championed it as a desirable harbinger of a new, more spiritual age, and positivists who denounced it as primitive and irrational.

The author debunks Romantic notions of the transcendental nature of synaesthesia and shows that although novelist Vladimir Nabokov was a true synaesthete and eidetic, other individuals the Romantics considered synaesthetes were not. Drawing on studies of autism and hallucinogenic drugs, Dann offers perspectives on synaesthesia and eideticism and how they relate to the evolution of human consciousness.

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