Hmmm, Jayde, according to one studdy I looked at when I was researching the subject, one in ten people are synaesthesic to some extent, ---- and taste synaesthesia is certainly possible.
As I said above, I'd agree with you to some extent, ---- though at the same time I wouldn't want to go too far down the "it's all a social bias" route, though i certainly think there is a lot of that sort of thing as I said. I'm also reminded of one snide comment of my mum's which she told me about. At a recent course for her work, there was a really long lecture on the necessity of non-verbal communication, eye contact, facial expression etc. Like me, though my mum has a certain amount of site, she can't get much of that sort of thing at all. When it came to question time, she stood up and inicently asked why, if this non-verbal, face to face communication was so dam important, organizations like the samaritans and child line could be so successful over the phone. there was apparently quite a lot of stunned silence, ---- rofl!
I also fully agree with you on multi-sense perception being a very good thing, in fact it's something all of my very close friends who are fully endowed in the eyeball department do very well, ---- I've been known to spend afternoons sitting around with one friend just playing around with his mixer and a mike for the hell of it, in fact one advantage of being a person with abnormally low levels of eyeballs I think, is that I get to appreciate a lot of things in a multi-sensary way (though this is also a characteristic of synaesthetes).
One interesting conversation I had with the chap about second life research involved the developement of uis that took advantage of multiple senses. in fact, i know at the moment there is a plastic in developement which can contract when an electric current passes through it, and cease contracting when not electrified. Not only would this mean incredibly cheap, and very detailed braille displays, but also the potential for fully tactile displays which changed according to preset programs commands. imagine for example, a game with a fully intigrated tactile map, or the ability to read large amounts of screen layout information like a braille page of text.
there's some intteresting experimental work being done on haptic technology and intefaces at the moment, and I could see an information revolution doing a lot to change social atitudes.
Btw Jayde, both from your use of air vibration perception and echoes, and what you said in the chess thread, it sounds like you have bloody good space perception and mental mapping skills. I actually have a physiological disability in this area caused at birth, ---- in fact I find understanding spaces and distances a dam difficult affair (one reason why i'm terrible at grid based games like solitare, and probably what makes me such an awful lone wolf player).
I often walk into things which I've either seen, or felt the first time symply because my spacial judgement is so awful, and if I go upstairs, I can never work out which way I'm facing relative to where I was downstairs. all my mobility involves remembering strings of land marks, --- some visual, some tactile, some auditory and some scent, --- for example, walk until i reach the tactile paving, cross road and turn left until i get to the coffee shop etc), , but if you asked me actually where I've gone in relation from A to B I genuinely couldn't tell you.
I've read several intreaguing articals which suggest that our five sense model is actually very limited. Other senses could include pain, bodily awareness, feelings of temperature (which is obviously different from tactile sensation), and of course space and time. then of course there are things like awareness of others feelings, ambience etc which raise their own set of issues.
Just an interesting idea I thought. As you can tell, this is a topic I've worked on (and One I'm stil working on), and one I'm really interested in.
Cw, please explain what you mean by different colour on different websites meaning different things. If you mean text highlighting or writing links in another colour, ---- your screen reader can tell you that information already, if you mean background/forground colour, --- again your screen reader can tell you (though your quite okay brousing without it). If you mean immages, ---- then it's not really a question of colour, just one of information, and the webmaster's badness in not providing that information with text lables or alt tags.
With our dreaming and singing, Ceaseless and sorrowless we! The glory about us clinging Of the glorious futures we see,
Our souls with high music ringing; O men! It must ever be
That we dwell in our dreaming and singing, A little apart from ye. (Arthur O'Shaughnessy 1873.)