intellectica 2011/1, n° 55

Synesthesia and Intermodality

Synesthesias, Synesthetic Imagination, and Metaphor in the Context of Individual Cognitive Development and Societal Collective Consciousness

Abstract : The continuum of synesthesias is considered in the context of evolution, childhood development, adult creativity, and related states of imaginative absorption, as well as the anthropology and sociology of "collective consciousness". In Part I synesthesias are considered as part of the mid-childhood development of metacognition, based on a Vygotskian model of the internalization of an earlier animism and physiognomic perception, and as the precursor for an adult capacity for imaginative absorption central to creativity, metaphor, and the synesthetically based "higher states of consciousness" in spontaneous mystical experience, meditation, and psychedelic states. Supporting research is presented on childhood precocities of a fundamental synesthetic imagination that expands the current neuroscience of classical synesthetes into a broader, more spontaneous, and open-ended continuum of introspective cross modal processes that constitute the human self referential consciousness of "felt meaning". In Part II Levi-Strauss' analysis of the cross modal and synesthetic lattices underlying the mythologies of native peoples and their traditional animation thereby of surrounding nature as a self reflective metaphoric mirror, is illustrated by its partial survival and simplification in the Chinese I-Ching. Jung's psychological analysis of the I-Ching, as a device for metaphorically based creative insight and as a prototype for the felt "synchronicities" underlying paranormal experience, is further extended into a model for a synesthetically and metaphorically based "collective consciousness". This metaphorically rooted and coordinated social field is explicit in mythologically centered, shamanic peoples but rendered largely unconscious in modern societies that fail to further educate and train the first spontaneous synesthetic imaginings of mid-childhood.

Key words : cross-modal, physiognomic, metacognition, imaginative absorption, mythological thinking, Levi-Strauss, numinous experience, synchronicity, Vygotsky.