The synaesthetic sphere of the embodied mind: the case study of the color hearing of a musicians

The problem of pre-reflexive foundations of consciousness and mind has always been crucial for phenomenology. This problem has acquired a new perspective in the contemporary studies of the embodied mind. Bodily preconditions of consciousness are comprehended in neurosciences, psychiatry, psychoanalysis, analytic philosophy, pragmatism and post-phenomenology. Perception, spatial-corporeal orientation, body memory, day-to-day actions, psychological contact of a human with his own body, sense-gaining by means of gestures are considered as access points to the embodied mind. The author aims to study the perceptual level of the embodied mind by associating psychological data with phenomenological problems. Phenomena of an intermodal transposition, also referred to as syn-aesthesia, are in he focus of attention. The author hypothesizes that synaesthetic reactions not only have cognitive consequences but also are a pre-reflexive form of the embodied mind. She confirms her view with by analyzing the results of experimental studies of grapheme-color synaesthesia and color hearing of professional musicians. M. Dixon's experiments of grapheme-color synaesthesia show that ambiguous graphemes are perceived in different colors depending on whether test subjects see a number or a letter. Consequently, a synaesthetic reaction is not a result of perception of shapes or lines, it is caused by the meaning of graphemes in the context. It is also significant that most musicians with color hearing sense the keynotes of tonality in color, not the pitch level. It is not a certain chord, for synaesthetic musicians see the color of the keynotes during the musical composition, even if the keynote chord does not sound now or there are modulations in other tonalities. They rather hear the common center of harmonic gravitation in color. Notably, synaesthetic musicians lose these color sensations when they hear atonal music. In doing so, they hear enharmonic sounds and chords which have the same pitch levels but different notations in different colors. These important moments of grapheme-color synaesthesia and color hearing indicate the presence of a bodily-cognitive level of consciousness on which perception and meaning attribution are indistinguishable. Here occur the processes that can be defined as simultaneous processes of perception, thinking and meaning attribution. Namely, here we have the opportunity to observe a work of the embodied mind.

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