I was lying in bed this morning and it struck me that you can only judge the positiveness or negativeness of certain sensory modalities by how they affect a different sensory modality.

Now, I imagine many of you are saying, “Yes, Wil, that is a wise and sage truth.” But some of you may be saying, “What the fuck are you talking about?” so I will try to explain.

Let’s consider vision. We can imagine some positive images and some negative images. A positive image might be a fuzzy kitten or our favorite meal being presented to us by a naked, attractive movie star. A negative image might be medical diagnosis paper that says “Cancer!!” or a horrible automobile accident.

But what makes them positive or negative? There’s nothing in the image that does this; it’s all how they make you feel. Positive images give us a warm, good feeling of calm and happiness while negative images may cause our heart to race, our gut to tighten, etc. In essence, we need our felt feelings, particularly in our internal body, to “know” whether this image is positive or negative.

(I believe that one test for psychopathy is showing people disturbing images and tracking their skin conductivity (which changes with stress.) Psychopaths can look at horrible imagery and not be disturbed.)

Let’s consider hearing. A positive sound might be a happy dog barking, or someone saying, “You just won the lottery.” A negative sound might be your girlfriend announcing she is leaving you because you are sexually inadequate, or your boss announcing your termination.

But, again, how do we know these things are good or bad? Because we feel sensations upon presentation of the stimulus. There’s nothing inherent in the stimulus.

We can say the same for smell, taste, even our vestibular (balance) sensation. It’s how they make us feel that denotes their character. Presumably if you simply had no feeling, you would have a hard time judging the sensations.

Of course, vision can be annoying on its own – bright lights are an example. So can sound when it gets too loud. But that has nothing to do with the object or objects being represented by the sight or sound. If you find yourself looking at an incredibly bright image of a chair, it’s not annoying because you don’t like chairs but because you don’t like incredible brightness. An overwhelmingly loud recording of a kitten mewing is just as annoying as an overwhelmingly loud recording of grating machinery.

You can think of the process by which we observe the world using our senses in this way.

1) Incoming sensory stream hits sense organ (light hits eyes, sound hits ears, etc.).
2) Our brain objectifies what it observes in this sensory stream (we recognize we are looking at a bear or hearing a pretty song).
3) Brain sets off a process by which we feel positivity or negativity about the object(s) we are observing (bear evokes fear, pretty song evokes joy).

You may be familiar with synesthesia, the cross-wiring of certain sensory modalities. People who experience synesthesia (a minority of the human population) “hear” colors, or “taste” sounds, among other abilities.

For years I read about synesthesia and thought it was weird but unrelated to me. But at some point, I read about a certain type of synesthesia and realized that I had synesthesia as a child (and to some degree still do.) In the book “Incognito”, author David Eagleman describes my brand of synesthesia as “letters and numerals experienced as having gender and personalities.”

When I was a kid, numbers and letters had easily defined genders. I’ll list some numbers here paired with my sense of their gender.

1: Male
2: Female
3: Male
4: Female
5: Female
6: Female
7: Male
8: Male
9: Male
10: Male
11: Male
12: Female
13: Male
14: Female
15: Female
16: Female
17: Male
18: Male
19: Male

From there, a number’s gender was determined by the first numeral. So 26 was female because the first character, 2, was female. Same for 2,459.

But there was more to it than that. There were familial and social relationships between the numbers. 1 and 2 were married and their children were (I believe) 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9. 4 was kind of a best friend to 5. 7, 8 and 9 were the older brothers of the family; they sort of bossed around their younger siblings. 10 was married to 12 and 11 was 10’s good friend.

I’m not absolutely certain about these statements but that’s my sense of my younger self’s interpretation of things.

Letters also had gender. I’ll run through the first part of the alphabet.

A: Female
B: Female
C: Male
D: Male
E: Male
F: Male
G: Male
H: Male
I: Male
J: Male
K: Female

There were also relationships at play here. A and B were good friends. A was kind of bossy, like a mom. C and D were pals. J and K were married.

It strikes me that all this makes an interesting point about gender. There’s a bit of debate these days about how fixed the binary properties of gender are—are we either essentially male or female, or do we exist on some sort of gender gradient? The fact that I saw these characters as having defined gender implies that a strong notion of gender was “built into” my brain, e.g. innate.

Except that I do recall that various numerals and letters had different balances of masculinity and femininity. T, for example was a very masculine letter (perhaps because it sort of looks like a broad shouldered man?) C was more of a passive man. Most of my female letters were “mom types”; they weren’t real sexpots. (My mind did not have the notion of MILFs at that point.) Interestingly, Q was a letter I have a hard time recalling the gender of.

Anyway, that was my take on it as a kid, and I still maintain a sense of it. I just think about a character and “know” its gender.