John Carlos BaezFeb 22

THE BOUBA/KIKI EFFECT

Which of these shapes looks like the sound "bouba", and which looks like the sound "kiki"?

People of all cultures agree on this, and now it's been found that baby chicks do too:

https://phys.org/news/2026-02-bouba-kiki-effect-baby-chicks.html

It may seem weird that sounds should robustly match with shapes, but I think it follows from physics - and living as we do in the physical world, it pays for us to make these associations.

For more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

Thanks to Alex at https://mathstodon.xyz/@WizardOfDocs@wandering.shop/116115329367345332 for pointing out the news about baby chicks!

Show threadma𝕏poolFeb 22

@johncarlosbaez

There are other similar phenomena:

Vowel pitch: High pitch/small size low pitch/large size. (large objects vibrate with lower frequency)

Taste: Roundness equals sweet or creamy; angularity equals sour, bitter, or salty.

Grapheme-color synesthesia

There may be deep neurological reasons for conceptual metaphors, and these are just the lowest level. There are cultural mappings or individual level mappings developed later in life, such as spatial metaphors where the future is in front and the past is behind, argument is a war, time is a landscape, resentment is bitter, functors are metaphors.

Show threadJohn Carlos Baez
@maxpool - nice! There's probably a useful "coarse theory of reality" lurking in all these observations.
Feb 22 at 10:52pmWeb
Show threadma𝕏poolFeb 22
@johncarlosbaez You are probably already familiar with applied category theorist Joseph A. Goguen, UCSD? He wrote "What is a concept?" (2005) https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~goguen/pps/iccs05.pdf where he sketched a way to bring together cognitive, social, pragmatic and mathematical view of concepts and integrate them in same system.