Dr. Richard Cytowic
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Dr. Richard Cytowic is one of the leading researchers of synesthesia, a condition in which two normally separated sensations - such as sight and sound, or touch and taste - occur at the same time. As a result, a synesthetic person might experience the taste of a dish on her fingertips, or be convinced that the letter X is a vibrant turquoise. Mind Matters editor Jonah Lehrer chats with Cytowic about his new book, Wednesday is Indigo Blue, which he co-wrote with David Eagleman.
LEHRER: What first got you interested in synesthesia?
CYTOWIC: It was an accident. I like etymology and so knew the word, whereas my colleagues back in 1979 had never heard of synesthesia. In fact, they refused to believe it could be real, and warned that looking into such “weird” and “New Age” nonsense would ruin my career. Their denial was the typical reaction of orthodoxy to something it can’t explain.
It is said that chance favors the prepared mind, so I guess I was ready when a dinner host apologized that there weren’t “enough points on the chicken.” For Michael Watson, who I later wrote about as “The Man Who Tasted Shapes,” flavor was more than a mouthful. Taste was also a touch sensation felt on his face and in his hands. “With an intense flavor,” he explained, “a feeling sweeps down my arm and I feel weight, shape, texture, and temperature as if I’m actually grasping something.”
Fortunately, I could use university resources to quietly study Michael in depth and write papers. What interested me most was pondering an experience that “wasn’t supposed to be.”
LEHRER: How has our scientific understanding of synesthesia changed in recent years?
CYTOWIC: It has to do with possibilities of how the senses couple in the brain. My first idea that the emotional brain served as the link gave way, based on observations in neonatal synesthesia, to the possibility of faulty pruning. That is, the gene in synesthesia might fail to prune the extra synapses that are normally made in great excess in all newborns. We thought their persistence might plausibly explain why some people are synesthetes.
Today, we know that far from being rare, synesthesia is common––one in 23 individuals has some kind of synesthesia, and one in 90 has colored letters and numerals. That being so, in Wednesday is Indigo Blue David Eagleman and I favor a genetically–determined imbalance between excitation and inhibition. We’ve learned that the normal brain is already highly cross–wired. We think synesthesia occurs due to increased activity in existing wiring rather than the result of extra wiring.
LEHRER: What can synesthetes teach us about the nature of human perception?
CYTOWIC: Far from being a mere curiosity, synesthesia is a consciously elevated form of the perception that everyone already has. Minds that function differently are not so strange after all, and everyone can learn from them.
Synesthesia has opened up a window onto a broad expanse of the brain and perception. Younger researchers are now active in 15 countries. Because the trait runs strongly in families, it is easy to collect DNA from a large number of synesthetic relatives. This means that synesthesia may be the very first perceptual condition for which science can map its gene. This inherited quirk is teaching us that cross–talk among the senses is the rule rather than the exception––we are all inward synesthetes who are outwardly unaware of sensory couplings happening all the time.
For example, sight, sound, and movement normally map to one another so closely that even bad ventriloquists convince us that whatever moves is doing the talking. Likewise, cinema convinces us that dialogue comes from the actors’ mouths rather than the surrounding speakers. Dance is another example of cross–sensory mapping in which body rhythms imitate sound rhythms kinetically and visually. We so take these similarities for granted that we never question them the way we might doubt colored hearing.
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14 Comments
Add CommentIn a way, we're all synesthetes, as we get goosebumps upon hearing a particularly good piece of music, although no one touched us and the room hasn't gotten suddenly colder. That's a physical response to an auditory stimulus.
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The effects of synethesia apparently were experienced and recorded in their writings by such creative 19th century romantics as Coleridge, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and others, as referenced in Alethea Hayter's book on the subject, 'Opium and the Romantic Imagination'. A musical score experienced as relief sculpture? Apparently this is possible. Hoffman described clarinet notes as having 'a particular color and scent', and in the case of the poet Francis Thomson, the phenomenon need not have been related to the use of such stimulants, but could have arisen naturally and spontaneously, as Richard Cytowic describes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHaving been a synesthete for all of my life it is very difficult to imagine how dull it would be without it. Of course as a child, I had to learn not to talk about how I perceived the world. Being a girl made it worse. Sight, sound, colors, taste, feel, hearing all come together in (mostly) wonderful combinations. Added to this, I "hear" others feelings as well. This was very difficult to deal with when I was young, but over the years I have learned how to dim the din, but it is very tiring when in crowds. It has been lovely to find out that I am not weird or crazy now that synesthesia is recognized and studied. Neither my children nor my grandchildren seem to have synesthesia; although I do wonder about my youngest granddaughter.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisGremmie.. I'm not a synesthete, how great that must be! :) But I do share your 'hearing' of others' feelings. It can be overwhelming emotionally.... it's very intense for me. I grew up not understanding that not everyone could tell what everyone else was thinking/feeling all the time. I'm in my mid 40s and still haven't completely harnessed it but I keep trying.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIs this related to the manner in which stmulii from more than one sense aids establishment of memory: e.g. the much stronger memory formed by writing a new word as opposed to just seeing it or hearing it?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRichard Feynman also reportedly experienced this, and was not shy about it. On the contrary, he was rather fond of his "weirdness", and I suspect it serves people well to make connections among unexpected phenomena. That is often how discoveries are made, memories retained, and I suspect it makes for funnier sense of humor. Is there any connection between synesthesia and left-handedness?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDidn't the merry pranksters demonstrate that anyone can have the doors of perception cleared chemically and thereby induce this and other related sensory experiences?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRe Ambertooth's comment: add J.K. Huysmans (_A Rebours_ [Eng. trans. _Against the Grain_]) to that list, I think maybe without opium).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRe Gremmie's comment: as a very clearly "borderline" synaesthete (see my fiction in _The Evergreen Review_, in 1962, '65, '68) clearly inherited, I think, from both sides of my biological family, which included poets, one very early (1930s through 1960s) multi-media figure, and cross-disciplinary people also .... I strongly support and encourage (from my own experience) investigation of your suggestion that synaesthesia might be linked to the kind of "beyond-empathic" experience of the inner functioning of others you mention.
Re Zoe's comment: Absolutely they did, as did Aldous Huxley and many others (including various CIA- and D.O.D.-funded researchers. But beyond the chemical opening of the doors, I (and at least one other person, the chemist Gerald Oster) did some interesting work on inducing synaesthesia without chemicals). My own work which was published only in very diluted form (in a gallery installation, _The Stone_ I did with Yoko On0 (google Fluxus or the Fluxus curator Jon Hendricks); and also, in Victorianized form, in Richard Condon's novel _The Ecstacy Game_, where it's called "The Mason Effect", and is vastly oversimplified and distorted (Dick Condon was, despite this distortion, a long-time older friend, and influence). Basically what I was doing using just sound was to go in a direction opposite to (more exactly, maybe, at right angles to, in Cartesian coordinates) both the sensory overload, and or the sensory deprivation that were being tried then. Instead of those approaches, I used micro-edited informationally-dense very short (> 5 seconds) dichotic binaural repetitions which could only be "resolved" (i.e., made sense of) of the brain over a period of c. 30 minutes. Still looking for funding (just as a matter of principle and sharing under good auspices: have all the equipment and facilities and, of course, methodology; a room (ordinary) that would simply be regarded as peer-review acceptable (i.e., no hidden mirrors and lights) and a subject and control population (say, 12 undergrad or grad students and 12 controls) would be helpful, however.
Mike Mason
(I hesitate to add a comment following another comment of my own -- see immediately above, from yesterday -- but, in the spirit of 18th-century free scientific discourse, am going to!:)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this[by the way, a correction to 5th line from bottom in my previous comment (above), which should read: " ... could only be "resolved" (i.e. made sense of) BY the brain over a period of c. 30 minutes."
By coincidence, since posting that comment yesterday, in response to an alert from a Facebook friend, I got a phone call this morning from a friend (a professional fine-arts photographer, whose work incorporates her synaesthetic responses) inviting me to meet this morning a European friend of hers who, like her, has been the subject of studies by the biomedical research synaesthetic community.
A couple of hours of conversation with this new friend led me to rethink two aspects of the too-casual comments I made yesterday regarding synaesthesia, and also affirmed the uniquenss of the sound-to-image associative synaesthesia I induced in the experiments I did with inducing synaesthesia with short (>5 seconds) exact repetitions of high-information-density dichotic binaural sounds, heard over >c. 30 minutes.
1. The medical LSD-25 experiments of the late 1950s and first half of the 1960s were _not_ very relevant to genetic synaesthesia, even though effects could seem somewhat similar, entirely different pathways and mechanisms in the brain were almost certainly involved. On the whole, LSD (and other hallucinigen-induced) synaesthetic experience should (in most cases, at least) be called "pseudo-synaesthetic," just as LSD-induced hallucinations are generally called "pseudo-hallucinations".
2. The work by Gerald Oster, whom I refer to confusingly as a "chemist" above, also should be explained. Dr. Oster (with whom I spent a couple of hours in the mid-1960s) was a professional chemical engineer working, I think, in developing new applications for plastics, including Fresnel lenses from plastic. Noticing that two such lenses on top of each other, which one lens slightly decentered, produced moire patterns and also colors in the eye, he became interested in possible therapeutic (as well as artistic) uses for these effects and other optical effects (phosphorenes; after-images). I think these effects were also entirely different (in neural pathways, and mechanisms) from true genetic synaesthesia.
The audio input work _may_ have been somewhat more relevant. I feel certain that those effects occur at quite a high cognitive/integrative level.
FRYING PAN: Personally, I don't think that one can do anything more than, as I said before, "dim the din" when one is around others. Since I don't know anyone else with this "problem" it is very difficult to go further. Be really glad that you have never come across someone who is truly EVIL, or someone who isn't there.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is interesting to hear about drugs in respect to synesthesia: i.e. to induce. I can't think of anything that would be worse than deliberately taking drugs when one is a synesthesic. Life is already so full of sensory input that to take drugs to 'see what would happen' makes me feel/hear nails being drawn down an old-fashioned blackboard! Hideous!!! Green and bright orange and black, with flashes of purple/fucia and silver: and a terrible high-pitched screaming in my ears! Yuck!
Music is a whole other thing. As are colors.
By the way: I am left-handed, but sometimes right-handed, and an artist.
I never understood that all people did not "see" a movie when reading a book or hearing a story. Or see sudden patterns that block out real sight at a sudden noise. I cannot hear when my eyes are dilated by the eye doctor. Touch puts a color shape floating in front of my eyes. Smells are always color. I cannot spell well because I have never 'seen' a word as letters. I thought all people were this way until I was 30 years old!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am a synesthete and agree completely: the thought of actually taking drugs to "see what would happen" is so painful, that it feels like a sharp glass is trying to cut me!!! My senses are almost always in high gear and the thought of a chemical pushing that even further is overwhelming!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWithout all the above noise or static or distraction,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI have to say It is fun and a great blessing to one's favorite things.
I have been told I have a synesthesia because I hear music kinesthetically. The sound coming together forming music creates perceived feeling. For instance - some music sounds thick or thin, smooth or sharp, hot or cold, loose, tight, tense, relaxed, etc. I also have a tendency to listen through layers of music. My understanding or experience listening to music is much different than other people I have spoken with. I wouldn't trade it for the world because it is how I understand the sound how I relate to it.
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