LEHRER:In Wednesday Is Indigo Blue, you argue that investigations of synesthesia can help us better understand the neurological basis of metaphor and even creativity. Could you explain?
CYTOWIC: Artists are at ease using metaphors, and we have known for a long time that synesthesia is more common in creative individuals. Famous synesthetes include novelist Vladimir Nabokov, whose mother and son Dmitri also had it; composers Olivier Messiaen, Amy Beech and Billy Joel; and painters David Hockney and Wasily Kandinsky. Dmitri Nabokov, incidentally, wrote a charming afterword about his father and himself for “Indigo Blue.”
There is more to creativity than a capacity for metaphor, of course. Nonetheless, begin with the assumption that the gene for synesthesia lashes together normally unconnected brain areas, thus linking seemingly unrelated qualities such as sound and color. Having one kind of synesthesia gives a person a 50 percent chance of having a second or third kind, meaning that the gene expresses itself in two or three separate areas in that person’s brain. Suppose, however, that brain hyper–connectivity occurred not selectively here and there, but diffusely. One would have a generalized talent for cross connecting apparently unrelated concepts, which is the definition of metaphor: seeing the similar in the dissimilar.
And this is the reason several of us suspect that the synesthesia gene maintains itself at such a high frequency in the population. After all, one in 23 people are walking around with a mutation for an apparently useless trait. It must be doing something of inapparent value in order for evolution to select so strongly in its favor. When the gene expresses itself in sensory parts of the brain, people are outwardly synesthetic. But what are they like when the mutation expresses itself in non–sensory brain parts such as those concerned with memory, planning, or moral reasoning? Might it contribute to increased creativity, thereby making humans smarter as a whole?
We are beginning to find out. The strongest link so far is a region on chromosome 2 that is associated with autism and epilepsy, conditions that occur together with synesthesia more often than chance predicts. The autistic savant Daniel Tammet, whose best–selling autobiography is Born on a Blue Day, has all three conditions––indicating that they might share an underlying genetic mechanism. Tammet first shot to fame in Britain when he set a record for reciting 22,514 digits of pi from memory.
LEHRER: Has there been one case of synesthesia that you've been particularly astonished by?
CYTOWIC: What is astonishing about The Man Who Tasted Shapes is how rare Michael Watson’s type of flavor–touch synesthesia turned out to be in retrospect: less than one percent. So, the odds of him having been the first case were vanishingly small.
One feature that still fascinates me is the “screen” phenomenon that some people with colored hearing have. That is, they see their sound–triggered hues, geometric shapes, and moving configurations projected a foot or so in front of their face as if on a screen. One college professor particularly likes seeing rising and falling lines. Lines that go up are the best. “My favorite music,” she says, “makes the lines go right off the top of the screen.”
In the end, the most astonishing thing I’ve experienced over and over during 30 years of study has been the trust strangers placed in me and their willingness to allow me into their private worlds. That is a brave thing to do when no one has believed you all your life. So it is impossible not to remain fascinated with synesthesia, and even more so synesthetes themselves.
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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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