Multisensory perception as the biosocial basis for the transmission, preservation, and reproduction of culture

The research establishes the role multisensory perception plays in the production and preservation of culture. It covers the interconnection between biological and social factors in cultural behavioural patterns. Multisensory experience is studied as a biosociocultural unity, using its “extreme” case, synesthesia, as an example. The following approaches to understanding synesthesia are employed: a way of cognition and a determinant of interactions with the sociocultural environment; a basis for community formation and a source of cultural and social practices; a special form of knowledge; a research object. Synesthesia, interpreted as a unique form of biosociality and part of multisensory culture, becomes the basis to expand the theoretical framework and identify, besides social relay, that of a biosocial nature. The methodology includes analysis, synthesis, induction, deduction, classification, generalisation, and elements of the semiotic method. The conceptual framework includes the principles of the new interdisciplinary field of sensory studies, as well as M. A. Rozov's social relay theory. Synesthesia and multisensory perception as such are shown to display, besides genetic mechanisms, signs of “social inheritance”, i.e., social relay. However, applying this theory to them imposes certain limitations. Their patterns can be spread as cumatoids via multisensory perception-related ideas, associations and norms that overlap with the general cultural field. Said perception is, simultaneously, a framework for experiencing culture as a “process”, its symbolic element, and a special form of preserving cultural and historical heritage. The results expand “sensory studies” by redefining the interdisciplinary notion system and forming a biosocial concept of cultural space interactions regarding its multisensory design. The latter aids in developing new models to explain and analyse the emergence and functioning of sensory- and multisensory-conditioned behavioural patterns, norms, and associations, such as colour-related norms, both in a general context and in specific instances.