REFERENCES
- Cytowic, R. E. (1989). Synaesthesia: a union of the senses. New York: Springer-Verlag.
2. Gray, J.A. & S, Chopping & J, Nunn & D, Parslow & Gregory, Lloyd & Williams, Steven & M.J, Brammer & Baron-Cohen, Simon. (2002). Implications of Synaesthesia for Functionalism: Theory and Experiments. Journal of Consciousness Studies. 9. 5-31.
3. Hubbard, Edward & Ramachandran, Vilayanur. (2005). Neurocognitive Mechanisms of Synesthesia. Neuron. 48. 509-20.
4. Dixon, Mike & Smilek, Daniel. (2005). The Importance of Individual Differences in Grapheme-Color Synesthesia. Neuron. 45. 821-3.
5. Palmeri, Thomas & Blake, Randolph & Marois, Rene & Flanery, Marci & Whetsell, William. (2002). The perceptual reality of synesthetic color. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. 99. 4127-31.
6. Simner, Julia & Holenstein, Emma. (2007). Ordinal Linguistic Personification as a Variant of Synesthesia. Journal of cognitive neuroscience. 19. 694-703.
7. Feynman, R. (1988). What do you care what other people think? New York: W.W. Norton. Galton, F. (1880) Visualised Numerals . Nature21, 252–256 .
TRANSCRIPT
Once at sundown when my roommate and i were on the patio, out of the most peaceful quite he said ” I see a beach and people around a campfire, this happens everytime i listen to that part of the song”. The excitement in his voice suggested that he wasn’t talking about a memory.
The beach, the goldfish, and the blonde woman were all things he saw involuntarily when he heard certain arbitrary musical notes and he claimed they were more real than the stuff of imagination.
Years later I told another friend about this, who it turned out has a similar quirk. She saw every calculation she did in her head. If she added an 8 to a 92, she saw an 8 block crash into a bigger 92 block, creating a perfect hundred.
In the 1980s the american neurologist Richard Cytowic encountered similar accounts and rediscovered the neurological phenomenon known as synesthesia. Synesthesia a condition in which the senses become fused such that the activation of one sensory pathway – vision, hearing, smell, taste or touch causes involuntary activation of another pathway.
For some people, the synesthetic percept is ellicited by a concept, like alphabets, numbers, days of the week or months of the year. This subtype of synesthesia is referred to as ideasthesia.
About 4 percent of the general population has some kind of synesthesia.
Annie, a musician has chromesthesia, a condition where sounds are perceived as having colour. This means that she can see the music that she makes.
There are numerous types of synesthesia including ones here times of the day have tastes and orgasms have colour.
The novelist Vladamir Nobokov and the physicist Richard Feynman, both had grapheme-colour synesthesia. People with this variant of synesthesia, see each alphabet and number (collectively called graphemes) as having characteristic colours.
Ofcourse, no two synesthetes share the same grpaheme-to-colour pairing. In fact, in what is a testament to their diversity, not all synesthetes even agree on where the colour actually recide in graphemes. Most of them report being able to see graphemes like regular people. For instance, they see alphabets in the newspaper in black type but, with an additional experience of colour.
For some the graphemes produce speckles of colour in the visual field, for others, graphemes are overlayed by a veneer of colour or the colour is in their minds eye.
Although synesthetic pairings are different in different people, the pairings in an individual remains absolutely fixed.
For Micheal Watson, the title character of the book, ‘The man who tasted shapes’, the correlation between tastes and the shapes they generated were so dependably consistent that he used his synesthesia to guide his cooking.
Synesthetic percepts are not always as blobs of colour. Some people experience graphemes, days of the week or months of a year as having human-like personalities.
One of the earliest accounts of this kind of synesthesia, now referred to as Ordinal linguistic personification comes from a book by Théodore Flournoy published in 1893.
Mme. L, a synesthete that Flournoy studied, experienced numbers and days of the week as having not only personalities but sophisticated relationships among them.
Here’s how Mme. L described the personalities of numbers :
“1, 2, and 3 are children who like playing together. — 4 is a quiet woman, engrossed in material preoccupations and enjoying it. — 5 is a young man, ordinary, of common tastes and appearance, spendthrift, selfish. — 6, a 16- or 17-year-old young man, very well behaved, polite, sweet, with an agreeable appearance; all his tastes are refined. Average intelligence. Orphan. — 7, a troublemaker, although well mannered; witty, and likeable; capable of very good actions on occasion, very generous. — 8 is a dignified, proper lady. She is acquainted with 7 and has a lot of influence on him. She is married to 9. — 9, Mrs. 8’s husband, selfish, fussy, self-centered, only thinking about himself, grumpy, always reproaching his wife with something or other. Mr. 9 enjoys using drugs, and amongst other things likes trying out the medicines advertised in the papers.”
The synesthete who undoubtedly has received the most attention in psychology is Solomon Sheresevsky.
But initially, it wasn’t this newsreporter’s synesthesia, but his ability to reproduce speeches he’d heard, even once, verbatim that caught the attention of a psychologist.
And not just any psychologist, but a true giant in the field- Alexander Luria, who at the end of his 3 decade long association with solomon wrote ‘mind of the mnemonist’, a fascinating account of patient S’s life and abilities.
Luria discovered that Solomon had a vast, almost limitless memory. He could remember long strings of hundreds of words that were read to him only once, repeat them in perfect order or if you liked, in the reverse order.
Once he had committed a list of words to memory, he could recollect them after years or even decades had passed. How did he do it? Every word he heard precipitated in Solomon’s mind a synethetic form, colour and taste. He was able to retain this eidetic image, in other words, relive this multimodal experience for every word in memory.
His routine for committing words to memory involved arranging each word in order along the sides of a familiar street in his mind. To reproduce the list, all he had was imagine taking a stroll down this street at which point he could read the words off one by one.
This technique called the ‘Method of Loci’ is quite common among mnemonists but was so powerful in Solomon’s case that he left his job as a news reporter to become a professional mnemonist, travelling around the country and giving multiple public performances a day.
During these performances, the audience would give him a list of words, sometimes from languages he did not know or nonsense syllables to remember, which he would repeat to them in exact order at the end.
Solomon was among the rare few for whom synesthesia is debilitating. He couldn’t read while eating because the taste of the words interfered with the taste of the food and the food’s flavours intruded into his perception of words. He was often so lost in his subjective reality – a storm of eidetic imagery and tastes evoked by words that he was unable to follow the intended messages in conversations.
There is something about synesthetes that i’ve realised makes it hard for a non-synesthete like me to describe their inner worlds. Most of us simply lack the intuition to even imagine what it would be like to see sounds or taste words. In small but nevertheless important ways our inner worlds are different.
Forget knowing what it is like to be a bat, we may never be able to fully comprehend certain experiences of fellow human beings because of differences in how our brains are wired.
