Gunnar_Zarncke comments on Discovering Your Secretly Secret Sensory Experiences - Less Wrong

21 Post author: seez 18 March 2014 10:12AM

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Comment author: ChristianKl 18 March 2014 01:40:32PM 11 points [-]

The huge problem is that we lack vocabulary to talk about unique qualia. Our words come from talking to other people and if nobody around us has the same qualia as we are, nobody gave us a word.

At the moment I'm learning to distinguish colors better via an Anki deck. I use the CSS color name definition. Seeing the difference between navy and midnightblue is still hard for me but I'm confident that I can learn it with practice. Some day I will hopefully even be able to tell apart snow from floralwhite.

I like the particular deck and if someone wants to train their color perception I'm happy to share it. It's build in a way that you get progressively more difficult decisions and provides years of fun at 5 new cards per day.

I would also like to create a deck to train sound perception. Does anyone know of a good tool that can automatically produce sound files with a specific pitch for pitch training? At best a tool that can be used via the command line.

Comment author: Gunnar_Zarncke 18 March 2014 05:30:56PM 4 points [-]

Regarding color you might want to have a look at the as usual funny and detailed XKCD color survey: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/

Comment author: adam_strandberg 19 March 2014 10:46:32PM 2 points [-]

Even better than that is this series of blog posts, which talks about color identification across languages, the way that color-space is in a sense "optimally" divided by basic color words, and how children develop a sense for naming colors:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-i/ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/06/the-crayola-fication-of-the-world-how-we-gave-colors-names-and-it-messed-with-our-brains-part-ii/