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Bouba/Kiki Effect

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Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect

#51

Post by codezero »

jvanderbot wrote: post #47
codezero wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 / ?

Yes. In fact there's almost no "entropy" to remember in 1234 because it perfectly matches a 45 deg slope. I just have to remember it starts at ground and has length 4. A seq like 1244 has a bit more entropy with the "bump" where the 3 should be, so it's easier to see it as a slope of length 2 starting at 12, or some "busy-beaver" like sequence that starts gradual and curves rapidly up to 44. The bump at 3 seems most…

It sounds like you've got some form of synesthesia!

I can totally understand what you're saying but there's no way I could apply it to a series of numbers, maybe not even if I practiced.

Did you always have this feeling with numbers, or was it practiced at all? It feels like what you're describing is a natural visualization you've developed and it also sounds a lot more powerful than something one might practice.

Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect

#52

Post by quickthrower2 »

robbie-c wrote: post #33

As someone who has trouble remembering which way round Type 1 and Type 2 decisions are defined, I have started calling them Bouba and Kiki decisions. It doesn't help whatsoever but it does wind up my cofounder ;)

Type X where X is the number of ways through the door.

Type 1 is a one way door, no return!

Type 2 is a 2 way door.

I’d probably label type 1 a kiki (a pointy decision … beware!)

Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect

#53

Post by wyager »

silicon2401 wrote: post #12
wyager wrote: post #8

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.

99.9% of concave rocks are pointy, not smooth. Almost no rocks look like bouba.

Very few leaves look like Kiki. Most are rounded. Leaves also aren’t the kind of physical objects you would typically interact with physically as a baby learning about kinematics.

Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect

#54

Post by codezero »

nirav72 wrote: post #34
jraph wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like synesthesia. Some people see the year as ring-shaped in their head. The "visualization" is consistent during the lifetime and can help memorizing dates. 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 depri…

does it always have to be a ring? I've always imagined a year vertically/top down. Each month a slice. Also alphabet letters in color. Each letter having a distinct color.

Nope, it doesn't need to be a ring.

I was deep into synesthesia stuff when I worked at UCSD and had a friend participate in an experiment at VS Ramachandran's lab and one of the neat things is that a lot of the commonalities are culturally or temporally specific.

Many of the people with numeric synesthesia use a ring because they resemble CLOCKS! 1-12 is a common pattern and most people with synesthesia that grew up with this kind of clock have the same pattern for the first 12 numbers, but after that they tend to have their own patterns they develop.

This is true for other forms of synesthesia as well, there's not a single "way" but more a categorical set of shared characteristics, usually derived from their surroundings, as this isn't something people get taught to manage or take advantage of, but some folks naturally do. It's truly fascinating.

It sounds like you grew up with more calendars than round clocks, or an agenda/diary of some sort, or maybe it comes from something else - think about it, I'd love to know if you can place it!

It definitely sounds like you have some form of synesthesia.

Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect

#55

Post by renewiltord »

anigbrowl wrote: post #32
renewiltord wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well, no shit,... 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.

Consulting people who are intuitively skilled in some area can often be a good way to get a head start on understanding a problem. Given the seeming universality of imitation in humans, the assumption of complete arbitrariness actually seems like the bolder claim.

The strange thing is that many of these people seem to be unable to make predictions a priori, choosing to use their knowledge only for confirmation. If only humanity could harness their intellect and knowledge for search rather than confirmation.

Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect

#56

Post by kgarten »

kanbara wrote: post #20
P-ala-din wrote: post #14

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.

Why? yes they should be remembered for the atrocities they did … why change the name?

I’m always worried that if we engage in this type of cancelling we will end up with vilification and people will forget that Stalin and Hitler were also just people (and not evil looking demons).

The Taliban got a dedication on an Apollo mission and in one of the Rambo movies … now these things tend to be forgotten. It’s always better to remember and remind people about the potential of evil we (you and me) can do to other people. Leave the name, yet make sure that the article and every mention refers also to the R A F.

Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect

#58

Post by rjmorris »

haecceity wrote: post #48
alok99 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: Without being told which shape was which, > 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.

Why did I choose something else??

I'm guessing because you misunderstood the question. The question in the research was something like, "Which one of these shapes is called 'bouba' and which is called 'kiki'?" There was no option to invent your own word.

Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect

#59

Post by kazinator »

The primary author of the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar book series, Makino Seiichi, presents a related hypothesis about sound symbolism in Japanese. He identifies a pattern that "hard" sounds like K often appear with words associated with distance between the speaker and the subject, whereas sounds like N are associated with less distance.

For instance, the clause nominalizing particle KOTO expresses a more objective view compared to NO.

Piano-wo hiku-no ga taihen. (Playing the piano is difficult (for me, because of arthritis or whatever)).

Piano-wo hiku-koto ga taihen. (Playing the piano is difficult (as such, for humans)).

The Japanese onomatopoeia is full of this also. For instance something lightly rolling is korokoro, whereas gorogoro refers to heavy rolling.

Sparkling, glittering: kirakira (-suru).

Slithering, wriggling, sliding: nyoro-nyoro.

Another example of sound symbolism in the grammar: questions.

The ka particle is the most direct question marker. If, say, you're scolding a child and want to say "are you listening to me?" angrily: kiiteiru-ka?

A soft way, with a completely different nuance, would be: kiiteiru-no?

See? "ka" is a hard sound with an unvoiced consonant at the front, full of high frequency content, like an object breaking, whereas "no" is low frequency.

Re: Bouba/Kiki Effect

#60

Post by User23 »

twelvechairs wrote: post #36
gfaure wrote: post #4

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.

'Symbolism' is a terrible word to describe something like this. Symbols are convention and can change. This is the opposite - an innate cross-sensory connection that will not change.

Charles Sanders Peirce attempted to address this problem with his semiotic[1]. Sadly he never reached a conclusive result, but I find his work in this area to be extremely enlightening and also quite novel even today.

[1] https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-semiotics/

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