21–30 of 98 posts
Well, no shit - that's why we refer to onomatopoeia, a word which probably has far wider currency than others of similar provenance like poiesis.
I'll add a conjecture that similar disparities exist in vowels, with e and i being considered slender while a, o, and u are considered broad.
This is how I remember numbers, spelling, and names sometimes. A sequence of numbers has a nice plot / wave to it. I can't say my mapping from these categories to shapes generalizes for anyone else and it hasn't made me particularly good at memory competitions. It's just how it works. Also, memorizing a couple of credit card's information has saved me so much time -- highly recommended.
This is intriguing, can you describe in more detail how you map a series of numbers to a shape/sound? like is 1234 a slope / ?
I don't have this, though I do have a consistent "visualization" of numbers under one hundred (and, yes, months, and days of months, and weeks) since very young. Probably helps a bit to memorize some stuff, though I can't compare with the same me deprived of this view. I'm not great at remembering birthdays but not terrible either.
People with such visualizations don't even always realize not all people see them the same way, or at all for that matter.
I've wondered if languages which "score" well in leveraging this sort of mapping just make it easier to juggle complex subjects by using more "efficient" parts of our mental stack that position conversation to go deeper on any point of interest just because it's less energy intensive or something along those lines. Something akin to a mental locality of concepts if you will. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_e…
Ramachandran and Hubbard suggest that the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because it suggests that the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary. Well, no shit - that's why we refer to onomatopoeia, a word which probably has far wider currency than others of similar provenance like poiesis. I'll add a conjecture that similar disparities exist in vowels, with e and i being conside…
It is fascinating how many science grants we could save on if we just asked HN commenters to describe the world. To think that we might have reached such knowledge about human beings by just asking HN to tell us about the world.
Eat your heart out, Karl Popper. It appears that Keats wins the day.
I don't get it? What's the significance of this? I thought the left one is bam/pow and the right one is a blob?
The interesting part is that everyone gives the same answer, regardless of culture and language.
I don't get it? What's the significance of this? I thought the left one is bam/pow and the right one is a blob?
> 95% to 98% selected the curvy shape as "bouba" and the jagged one as "kiki", suggesting that the human brain somehow attaches abstract meanings to the shapes and sounds in a consistent way
So apart from visually impaired (from birth) people, we may have a pattern in mapping shapes to phonemes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I just watched this video a few hours ago because youtube randomly recommended it to me. I wonder if it's just the Baader–Meinhof effect or if the post was caused by the same youtube algorithm.
i would use the term frequency illusion, as baader-meinhof refers to a specific instance of someone who coined the term, and are members of a former west german left extremist terrorist group which actually killed people. pretty weird that it continues to be in use, it'd be as if we discovered this effect today and called it the taliban effect or the stalin gulag effect.
There's a Tom Scott video about this with some further academic references: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TDIAObsqcs Bouba/kiki is most likely a specific instance of the more general notion of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_symbolism . Another well-known cross-linguistic association is the one between front vowels and small objects on one hand, and back vowels and large objects on the other.
I just watched this video a few hours ago because youtube randomly recommended it to me. I wonder if it's just the Baader–Meinhof effect or if the post was caused by the same youtube algorithm.
Bouba/Kiki are onomatopoeia for the sounds objects of those shapes are liable to make if you drop them or otherwise physically interact with them. Bouba is probably soft/flexible and Kiki is probably hard/rigid.
There is no inherent association with shape and substance. Leaves/flowers can be pointy like the kiki shape and fall softly and limply, whereas rocks are ubiquitous, round, and solid.