The Language of Color

Ancestral state reconstructions on consensus tree. Haynie HJ, Bowern C (2016) Phylogenetic approach to the evolution of color term systems. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 113(48):13666-13671. link

Biology, meet philology: First application of phylogenetic evolutionary framework to color naming

Dec 2016, phys.org

I have been an art teacher for ten years, and always took notice of what happened to the box of colored pencils in my classroom. In September, it had all the colors, and as the year went on, a distinct pattern would emerge. The red pencils were always the first to go, and by the end of the year, the only things left were brown, orange, yellow. It always made me wonder if we each had our own subjective color preferences, or if we were hardwired for some over others.

So, I’m very excited to read this article on color evolution. This has been a recurring topic on Network Address, the companion blog to Limbic Signal. This work in particular looks at the way that color-names enter or drop-out of a language. In the image above, we see that everyone has names for the black and white, and red comes next. After that, green and yellow vie to be in our mouths. The authors explain that there tends to be names first for things that are maximally distinct. Hence black and white first. Why does red come next? There’s plenty of reasons, some simple, some confusing, but we know that in just about every culture, every situation, red comes next – or first, depending on whether you consider black and white as colors.

I will take a contradictory stance to something one of the study authors states. Prof. Claire Bowern says, “humans aren't very good at smelling (compared to hearing or seeing), so it's not surprising that we don't have a lot of smell-based vocabulary.”

Actually, that's not the reason. Instead, we don't have names for smells because the language-parts and the smell-parts of our brains are so separate, and because of reasons that took me an entire book to enumerate. (See Hidden Scents.)

Later on, however, she drops a shiny gem while making a point about the lifelike behaviors of the language of color:

"It's uncontroversial that language changes; it's also uncontroversial that languages aren't organisms. The point is that from Darwin on, language and biology have had a long history of cross-pollination and co-inspiration."

This is one of the most beautiful discoveries I came across in working on Hidden Scents, which is that the very concept of evolution, of natural selection, developed by Darwin, was based on the taxonomy of languages across the world. Language may not be alive, but our cultures are, and for some of us, we can say that by extension the products of those cultures are also alive. Regardless, it is hard to deny the influence that such potentially ‘inorganic entities’ have on our concepts of all things organic. In other words, we assigned what we now know as the process of biological evolution to language before we understood it regarding living organisms.

I’m just going to requote this whole section from my other blog, it’s good stuff so why not:

Darwin:

“It may be worthwhile to illustrate this view of classification, by taking the case of languages. If we possessed a perfect pedigree of mankind, a genealogical arrangement of the races of man would afford the best classification of the various languages now spoken throughout the world... The various degrees of difference in the languages from the same stock, would have to be expressed by groups subordinate to groups; but the proper or even only possible arrangement would still be genealogical…”

Darwin, C. R. 1859. On the origin of species by means of natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London: John Murray. [1st edition]

[page] 422 CLASSIFICATION. CHAP. XIII. [link] via Steven Pinker - The Genius of Charles Darwin: The Uncut Interviews. BBC, 2008

POST SCRIPT

Cultural Evolution of Basic Color Terms

Network Address, 2012

Seeing Red

Network Address, 2013

Color-Brained

Network Address, 2014

Natural Intelligence X Artificial Intelligence
Network Address, 2012

Identifying the Smell-Language Interface

Olfactory Artist Peter De Cupere

Re: Research investigating the physiological basis for odor naming via event-related potentials (ERPs) and fMRI.

The scientists fed subjects cues, either visual or olfactory, followed by words either matching or not matching the cue. A picture of a rose followed by the word “Rose”, the scent of a rose followed by the word “Rose”, or maybe the word “Lemon” instead. What parts of the brain light up when they recognize the match or the mismatch?

The results show that the “cue-modality”, whether it was visual or olfactory, affected different areas of the brain. Performance in recognizing either a match or a mismatch was slower when presented with an olfactory cue versus a visual cue. It was also discovered that the same areas responsible for recognition of an olfactory cue-word match lit up before the word appeared, suggesting less ‘flexibility’ in semantic identification of odors.

Furthermore, when the word is presented for match validation, the cue is reactivated, or re- experienced. But for olfaction, the entire olfactory perception system is not activated, only the parts which had initially coded the sensation semantically. This echoes the assertion that smells cannot be “imagined” in the same way as visual stimuli.

Let's not forget that smell originally functioned as an automatic system with no intervention of cortical processing. Activate - inhibit, that is the way of chemo-sensation. The buck does not cognize the scent of the doe, it reacts. Most of our models or analogies for thinking are visually based. The interface between olfaction and language is akin to the inner mental space in its entirety. The Olfactory-Language Interface, on the other hand, is more like a short cut through this mental space. There is no time for deliberation against the simulated perception, such a thing was impossible or unknown to our organic ancestors.

The chemically-sensitive organism (a redundancy in itself), whether plant or animal, is tied to its environment. The separation between the body and the environment is ultimately what we call this mind space, and it is the thing that makes us human.

(olfactory literature double whammy)

excerpt from The Foul and the Fragrant: Odor and the French Social Imagination, Alain Corbin, 1988; quoted in Sandalwood and Carrion: Smell in Indian Religion and Culture, James McHugh, 2012:

A few simple stereotypes demonstrate the paradoxical nature of the sense of smell. Olfaction as the sense of lust, desire, and impulsiveness is associated with sensuality. Smelling and sniffing are associated with animal behavior. If olfaction were his most important sense, man's linguistic incapacity to describe olfactory sensations would turn him into a creature tied to his environment. Because they are ephemeral, olfactory sensations can never provide a persistent stimulus of thought. Thus the development of the sense of smell seems to be inversely related to the development of intelligence.

Sound Symbolism and Universal Language

In this context, we have no choice but to summon Kiki and Bouba, two letters of an alien alphabet that although no person has ever heard it, they still known which is which, because one feels sharp and the other round, and that is called synaesthesia.

A nose by any other name would sound the same, study finds

Sep 2016, phys.org

“A study that shatters a cornerstone concept in linguistics […] two-thirds of the world's languages shows that humans tend to use the same sounds for common objects and ideas, no matter what language they're speaking […]the research demonstrates a robust statistical relationship between certain basic concepts—from body parts to familial relationships and aspects of the natural world—and the sounds humans around the world use to describe them […] For example, in most languages, the word for "nose" is likely to include the sounds "neh" or the "oo" sound, as in "ooze." The word for "tongue" is likely to have "l" (as in "langue" in French).”

Morten H. Christiansen, professor of psychology and director of Cornell's Cognitive Neuroscience Lab: “There does seem to be something about the human condition that leads to these patterns. We don't know what it is, but we know it's there.”

Use It Or Lose It

Losing your sense of smell and how to get it back

Frito Feet – a smell sorely missed by acquired-anosmic dog lovers. source

I had the opportunity to interview a young woman who temporarily lost her ability to smell. For anyone interested, I’ll give a brief rundown of events.

Before anything else, however, I must make a distinction. Not being able to smell is called Anosmia. But there is Congenital Anosmia for people born without it, and Acquired Anosmia for people who lose it after they already know what it is to smell. Acquired Anosmia usually happens as a result of physical trauma, like a blow to the head, or a sinus infection. But, one can also lose their sense due to prolonged disuse. In this case of the young woman I interviewed, it was disuse that led to her loss.

Ok, so let’s say one day you realize you have a spontaneous cerebral spinal fluid leak. Chances are you’re in for a rough time. The headache that never ends is from your brain tissue drying out and slowly dying. Daily, relentless, suicidal pain. The sinus problems are from your brain juices spilling out of your skull and into the pockets behind your face. You’ll probably get a spinal tap blood patch to refill your losses, and in the meantime (this can take months to refill) you get hallucinations. Auditory, like K-pop; visual like phantoms and UFO’s; maybe even olfactory. The thing about migraines-and-smells is that all smells turn into bad smells. All sensory stimuli sucks, but smell will trigger that deep, involuntary limbic system response – too much to ask for the migraine-suffering mind.

Back to the spontaneous cerebral spinal fluid leak. Now that your brain fluid has pillowed and deformed your sinus cavities, you should finish up your suite of procedures with some sinus reconstruction. Ahhh, looks great in there. Wait a month for the river of blood to dry up in your nose, get the scabs vacuum-sucked, and you’ll be good as new.

Just one more thing – since you’ve had a nose full of blood for the last several weeks, and you haven’t smelled a damn thing in quite a while, you’ve now lost your sense of smell. It doesn’t work at all.

Again, there are all types of things that can happen to make you lose your sense of smell, it doesn’t have to be a cerebral spinal fluid leak. You could faceplant in a rock-climbing accident, like this character written by the olfactory-science-fiction author Deji Bryce Olukotun. Or you could have your GI system removed and replaced with a bunch of tubes, like this gentleman on Radiolab. He couldn’t eat through his mouth anymore, and that eventually disabled his nose. His wife caught him one night in the kitchen with his digital members stuffed into a warm cake, and by some sensory shell-game, squishing its essence through his fingers and into the aromatic centers of his brain (necessity is the mother of invention). Anytime you stop using your nose – even by way of not-eating, you can lose it.

But there’s still hope. They can jumpstart your olfactory bulb in a couple of ways. Here, have some modified estrogen.* Oh, you can’t have estrogen? Sure, sniff these nose steroids through a baby bottle. In a week or so, you smell the steroids, and the rubber nipples, especially the “rotten fish” portion of the profile. The bad smells come first, and then the rest, one at a time. And that’s if you’re lucky. Sometimes it just doesn’t work, and may never come back, in which case you should read Oliver Sacks’ Hallucinations.

*Women smell things better than men, and fertile women better than anyone.

Post Script

Fifth Sense - UK-based, volunteer-led charity supporting people with smell and taste disorders

Post Post Script

Who knew – Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's can’t smell!

Q: Is it true the early success of your product stemmed from the fact that Ben, the official ice-cream taster, has a smelling problem?

BEN: I've never had a very good sense of smell, and if you don't have that, you don't have a good sense of taste. When we began, the game was for Jerry to make a flavor I could taste with my eyes closed. To do that, he had to make ice creams that were intensely flavored. Also: because of this disability, I have an excellent sense of mouth feel.Creaminess and crunchiness are very important to people who can't taste.

JERRY: This led to our putting bigger than standard chunks of fruit and candy into our ice creams. It turned out that people really liked these highly flavored, extra-chunky ice creams. We were offering them something unique.

On Dog Paws

“Dog feet are a great place for bacteria and yeast to take up residence because there's a lot of moisture and little to no air circulation in the folds and pockets of skin between the toes and foot pads. Bacteria flock there and reproduce with exuberance.”

“All these microorganisms emit their own distinct odors (they're what give us BO), and the popcorn/corn chip smell on some dogs' feet could be due to yeast or Proteus bacteria. Both are known for their sweet, corn tortilla–like smell. Or it could be Pseudomonas bacteria, which smell a little fruitier—but pretty close to popcorn to most noses.”

-source

Froot Flavored

How Can Froot Loops Be Real If the Flavors Aren’t Real?

It’s true, Froot Loops are all the same flavor.

Back in the early days of the Internet, when people were still learning not to use made-up punctuation on message boards, there was a place where you could go to get information about all those random thoughts you have while lying in bed at night. No, it wasn’t called Google, but a predecessor of infinite internet wisdom – Straight Dope.

Although it was re-discovered in a 2014 Today I Learned thread on Reddit, the furthest back we can go is to the Straight Dope message boards of 1999. Surely, however, people have been getting into fistfights over this for many years prior.

The eye-opening part is that most cereals that come in different colors are probably the same in flavor (Ahem, Fruity Pebbles, yes).

Kellogg’s isn’t trying to be manipulative outright; they don’t even call it fruit (it’s Froot). They’re just playing a game that was started around the time of tri-color vision in primates, and one that we all take part in, and one that we actually choose to play. (If not up until now, then after knowing this, you will be forever complicit in the game. The yellow ones will still get left behind.)

Perception is multimodal, that is to say, we do not “see” or “hear” in isolation. We don’t sense anything as “raw information”; instead we perceive things, and this means that the original sensory stimulus has to be processed in its corresponding cortical areas of the brain. For Smell, the raw stimulus gets laced up into your virtual memory body, via the limbic system, before the cortical areas get a chance at it. Regardless, most sensory experience is a mixture of all the senses.

This makes sense, because it makes things more accurate. The brain likes to check with all available information, and that means all sensory information, before verifying what something is. Vision is usually the best verifier for us, so much that it cognitively overrides other senses like smell and taste. There is a reason why almost everything we eat (in America at least) is artificially-colored. *

Sometimes cognitive override yields false results, and this is especially the case with olfaction. There are tons of studies that support this. But if you ate Froot Loops as a kid, you don’t need science, because chances are you thought the yellow was lemon, the orange orange, and so on.

The flavor of Froot Loops is indeed a mixture of the “flavors” that can be derived from various fruits, just that they’re all mixed together. And what does Kellogg’s call this omni-flavored fruit? “Froot”, of course. Froot Loops are not Fruit flavored, but Froot flavored. **

*In the UK, Froot Loops only comes in three colors (purple, orange, green) because they can’t legally use artificial coloring.

**I only repeat this because I saw it in the reddit thread: The main flavoring is bergamot, which is also the flavor in Earl Gray tea.

And one more, because I thought this was just the best comment of all: You don’t eat froot loops one at a time, so how should you even know?

On Sweetness and Flowers

finedininglovers.com

"French scientists identified a gene that's far more active in a heavily scented kind of rose than in a type with little odor. This gene, which produces an enzyme, revealed the odor-producing process."

AKA "Biosynthesis of monoterpene scent compounds in roses"

Roses have not been designed over centuries of human endeavor to smell good, but to look good. Roses may have been initially valued for their heavenly scent, but over time, they have been selected for reasons of visual beauty.

A selection from Hidden Scents:

Crossing as often as it does with the Food Industry, Fragrance is often interpreted to the mind as taste. “Sweet” is frequently used as an olfactory descriptor. However, calling caramel-smell Sweet is not a chemical consequence of the molecule, but an effect of memory. If sucrose is paired with an odor, any odor, it will eventually “smell sweet”. The potential effect on odor perception that is cued by such multi-sensory information is thought to be the minimization of “perceptual dissonance between the dominant sense (vision) and the minor sense” (Wilson & Stevenson 2006).

Smells are not just Sweet; Castoreum is Umami, and Body Odor, Sour. Yet something about the word, the taste, and the smell of “Sweet” is linked together, and can be evidenced in the fact that the word “sweet” is the most commonly used sub-category heading in the Aldrich catalog (2013), which is a chemical clearinghouse for Flavor and Fragrance scientists. The biases and idiosyncrasies inherent in the Aldrich Catalog as a universal aroma reference are immediate and comprehensive. The catalog is a flavor tool, first of all, and as a commercially-driven pursuit flavor reigns supreme over fragrance alone. The fact that “Sweet” as a sub-category has the most centrality (it falls under Balsamic, Woody, Fruity and Minty) could relate to a confluence of the pervasive availability of sweet aromas, or the sweet-tooth of a certain society, or that there really is something sensually similar about the relative phenomena. Unresolved in that matter, we can scrape-together at least that the description of a smell will tend to be communicated via other, more intentionally-simulable channels of association – anything but the olfactory-specific semantic network of experience, because of course, such a thing is so halting and reluctant in its cooperation, if at all.

In parallel to this gustatory congruency of Sweetness, it is a curious thing to consider: are Florals such an extensive part of the perfumer’s repertoire because of their associated visual aesthetic beauty? David Howes responds in telling of his work with the Papa New Guinean Kwoma people (Howes 2002:76). He presents plastic cards impregnated with scent, and painted with a corresponding color (cinnamon is brown, coconut is white, etc.). When surveyed on the most-liked odor, respondents voted Rose in the vast majority. After having hidden the red-colored Rose scent in an envelope, however, the overwhelming preference disappeared (along with Howes’ search for a universal aroma preference, à la Berlin and Kay, 1969).

Notes:

Berlin B & Kay P (1969). Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Howes D (2002). Nose-wise: Olfactory Metaphors in Mind. In: Olfaction, Taste, and Cognition, ed. C Rouby, B Schaal, D Dubois, R Gervais, & A Holley, pp. 67-81. Cambridge, U.K: Cambridge University Press.

Sigma-Aldrich (2013). Aldrich Chemistry 2012-2014: Handbook of Fine Chemicals. Sigma-Aldrich.

Wilson D A, Stevenson R J (2006). Learning to Smell: Olfactory Perception from Neurobiology to Behavior. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.