I didn’t get round to posting anything yesterday because I was busy. In the morning, I went looking for an outfit for the Halloween disco, and got thoroughly soaked! In the end, I didn’t find anything which would fit me, and returned home empty handed. I decided to wear the fairy costume again – I’ve worn it before, but it’s still cute!

Anyway, driving about in Defiant gave me time to think. The ideas of Barthes concerning photographic punctum – the idea that one can be ‘pricked’ by a photo – are very reminiscent of synesthesia. Ramachandran and others have described how some images stand out. To my mind, there has to be a relationship between punctum and synesthesia.

I therefore rolled to the library. The link was obvious to me – so obvious others had made it. So I asked the librarian for academic literature on the subject, but to my great surprise there wasn’t any. This took me aback and I decided to take the librarian through my reasoning, to see if she agreed. She said she too could see a clear link – I wasn’t being stupid then.

After that I spent a merry afternoon going through camera Lucida and two or three papers over a cuppa tea in the wes, looking for correlations. Although I didn’t get too far – friends came to chat etc – I am now certain there’s a link. They might not be exactly the same phenomenon, but they must be closely related.

Thus, through Barthes, we can combine film studies and neuroscience to form a new field: filmic neuroaesthetics. This may even link with my ideas on filmic language, as I think filmic grammar may have a synaesthetic basis!

What great fun. Almost as fun as fairy costumes.