What do They Taste Like to You

Some people who are talented with math often have interesting sensory blends. That is to say, a few people always see numbers or letters as appearing a certain color, etc. Taste is also mixed. Numbers do seem to taste different. It's not always easy to describe. For example, irrational numbers often taste gritty. Other numbers taste smoother. Prime numbers may taste spicy. See:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaesthesia

Any personal experiences on this subject?

surprisingly enough, I have had experiences with this. To me even numbers give me a sort of sweet taste in my mouth, where as odd sort of give me the opposite, like a soury sort of taste.

Interesting.

weird...

a fascinating man who experiences synesthesia is Daniel Tammet: www.optimnem.co.uk

 Yup, I've read countless articles about him. He's the big one living today.

I just met a synesthete a few days ago who said that when she was a girl and heard of Tammet, she thought he he made much ado about nothing, seeing as she thought it was a quite normal feat. I was amused to entertain the notion of someone with that ability thinking that it is a common ability.

For a period when I was a teenager I felt the small integers were associated with particular colours, but this association vanished with time.  Later I recognised that this had been some form of synaesthesia. My theory was that it was the result of a very active area of the brain expanding its influence and colliding with the edge of a quite separate area. At the time it seemed a not unpleasant thing, but in hindsight it seems of no benefit.

"but in hindsight it seems of no benefit."-Perhaps you did not use it much? Most people I have heard of say it's very useful

I recall it seemed meaningful in some sense, as in non-arbitrary, but since it is merely associating two unconnected things in an arbitrary way, I don't see there can be any real usefulness.

Memorizing digits of pi would be easier...

And I'm sure being able to give each number a personality would help when trying to write a novel and you need to think of who would be a good complementary character.

Of course, I also memorised a fair chunk of pi as a teenager, (without using any colour mnemonics!). Amusingly, I got my data from a Robert Heinlein novel, as I was sure he would have used the correct values. If someone tried that now and used Kate Bush's song called "Pi" instead they would get it wrong.

"I'm sure being able to give each number a personality"-This is always interesting, and is a type of synaesthesia if I am not mistaken.

I'm curious as to how a synesthetic, (curious term, I know, but no offense intended to anyone), would experience infinity??? Maybe a dual experience, the symbol as one and the concept as another...?

As a mathematician, I am comfortable with many different types of infinity as well-defined mathematical concepts, but my pictures of them are rather primitive, corresponding to sensible diagrams to illustrate them.

For example, with the infinity of integers, I picture a line of boxes heading into the distance in both directions, with perspective indicating the increasing size, and the assumption that the line does not end in either direction (perspective means that that there is a point in the view in either direction which corresponds to infinity, where the parallel sides of the boxes appear to meet). I recall having the same mental image for time, when it is broken up into units such as days. (I better make sure the past direction ends somewhere around 13 billion years, the future one is a bit hazy at the end )

For the cardinality of the continuum, I have no picture beyond that of a continuous line, which is not really adequate. (Kind of difficult to picture it, but an infinite dimensional cube of side 2 would have the right number of infinite dimensional cubes of size 1, but to claim I could picture this would be exaggerating!)

Ordinals are pretty tough to picture, involving an awful lot of "and so on"s or "etc." To see what I mean, the mathematically brave could take a look at the wikipedia article which has a nice image for omega squared (a very small infinite ordinal), where the shrinking "arrow heads" are each rather like my diagram for the natural numbers above (see copy of wikipedia image below). omega squared is essentially an infinite number of copies of the natural numbers in a row (where "infinite" is the same type of infinity as the natural numbers, i.e. the smallest one)

Very big infinite ordinals are much harder (or impossible) to picture, and the same is true of infinite cardinals.

But then mathematics is largely about manipulating the symbols that represent things, and these symbols for types of infinity obey simple finite rules, so are no more difficult that 2+2=4.

When I experience infinity intuitively, I picture it as an abyss, which is typically accompanied with strong shocks that I feel in my spine from my peripheral nervous system, which gets extremely excited. It feels like coming out of a very cold shower, only instead of discomfort, it feels extremely pleasurable, feeling somwhat cold, with a hot "afterglow". I have such "aesthetic experiences" with certain types of music, as well.

Most interesting. What is your experience of, and do you have any comments on these? (I wonder if M.C. Escher expereinced synethesia?)

I would hesitate to call myself a real synaesthete, but I would never deny that I have interesting feeling experiences. The top picture appears rather normal to me-it is as if I was looking outside of the windows with the man bent backwards on it, as if he was lying on his back (although it is not so apparent in the picture that he is bent). I must be very high up from my perspective, because the street and boats below are small. But there is nothing out of the ordinary in the first picture as far as I can see, except the white spot in the middle makes me feel uncomfortable.

The second picture, however, is far more interesting to me, although it gives me a hopeless and mildly unpleasant feeling. I also feel like I am looking up and feel like I am being sucked up by an elevator when I look at the empty spaces with the statues on the "bottom" in succession. So it gives me the interesting feeling of going forward and/or being sucked upwards almost at the same time.

You may be interested to know that much of M.C. Escher's work was based on his understanding and exploration of math. The top picture is a representation that was created by drawing a grid to scale on paper, and then rotating the grid so that the perseptive is drawn in a spiral around the picture, with the perspectives shrinking and expanding accordingly. There is no way to resolve the dual perspectives of the man being both inside the building and outside. Kind of a visual mobius strip. What he wanted people to consider is that the vague sphere at the center is a singularity. The writing in that center is his signature.

I don't know much about the second image, except that I considered it to be similar in concept to Elroch's ever receding blocks. I am sure that the characters depicted are symbolic of something, but I haven't read anything about it.

"I don't do drugs. My dreams are frightening enough." - M.C. Escher

Unfortunately I do not know much about Escher, but he sounds very interesting. I had guessed that the circle could be a singularity, but the position of the man stumps me, in that case. "I don't do drugs. My dreams are frightening enough." - M.C. Escher-sounds like a nice quote!