SYNESTHESIA

Chromasthesia and beyond

Mary Gilreath

COMM 141

Lee

April 23, 2001

Synesthesia is a unique and intriguing capability in which a person experiences cross-sensory phenomena. The term comes from Greek, where syn = together and aesthesis = perception. The experience is involuntary and usually its onset is during childhood. The stimulation of one of the senses causes perceptions in another sense, sometimes multiple senses. There are a few shared physical traits among synesthetics, but each one’s actual synesthesia and experience is rarely exactly the same as another’s.

Richard Cytowic, a researcher from whose book The Man Who Tasted Shapes one can learn much about the clinical aspects of synesthesia, outlines five different requirements for synesthesia:

1. “ Synesthesia is involuntary but elicited. It is a passive experience that happens to someone. It is unsupressable, but elicited by a stimulus that is usually identified without difficulty. It cannot be conjured up or dismissed at will, although circumstances of attention and distraction may make the experience seem more or less vivid.

2. Synesthesia is projected. It is perceived externally in peri-personal space, the limb-axis space immediately surrounding the body, never at a distance as in the spatial teloreception of vision or audition.

3. Synesthetic perceptions are durable and generic, never pictorial or elaborated. "Durable" means that the cross-sensory associations do not change over time. This has been shown many times by test-retest sessions given decades apart without warning. "Generic" means that while you or I might imagine a pastoral landscape while listening to Beethoven, what synesthetes experience is unelaborated: they see blobs, lines, spirals, and lattice shapes; feel smooth or rough textures; taste agreeable or disagreeable tastes such as salty, sweet, or metallic.

4. Synesthesia is memorable. At first, we are impressed by synesthetes' excellent figurative memory and taken with their anecdotes of how the "extra bits" help them to remember telephone numbers, appointments, and the like.

5. Synesthesia is emotional. The experience is accompanied by a sense of certitude (the "this is it" feeling) and a conviction that what synesthetes perceive is real and valid. This accompaniment brings to mind that transitory change in self-awareness that is known as ecstasy. Ecstasy is any passion by which the thoughts are absorbed and in which the mind is for a time lost.” (1)

To summarize, synesthesia is characterized by projected involuntary events caused by external stimuli on one or more of the senses, which are abstract or generic memorable feelings that are very real and present to the synesthete. Many synesthetes remember the exact moment at which they realized they were different, be it interacting with schoolmates or trying to describe something to their family.

Cytowic found that a large proportion of synesthetes are left-handed and female. There is also a genetic or familial connection, wherein synesthesia is passed through the parents to one or more offspring. He also noticed that memory skills in synesthetes are superior, often at the expense of mathematical ability. He says, “Synesthesia is "abnormal" only in being statistically rare. It is, in fact, a normal brain process that is prematurely displayed to consciousness in a minority of individuals.” (1) So, it is thought to be a phenomenon that we all have the basic capability for, but our brain suppresses it. Non-synesthetes’ brain processes do not cross wires, so to speak, between senses at a level where they can notice it. Synesthetes simply are able to see essentially what goes on in the subconscious levels of the mind that normal people are unaware of. Their experiences are not hallucinations, and can even be replicated many years later to the exact detail. One such example is an anecdote of Cytowic’s:

“…perhaps the strangest synesthesia is "audiomotor," in which an adolescent positioned his body in different postures according to the sounds of different words. Both English and nonsense sounds had certain physical movements, the boy claimed, which he could demonstrate by striking various poses. By way of convincing himself of this sound-to-movement association, the physician who described it planned to re-test the boy later on without warning. When the doctor read the same word list aloud ten years later, the boy assumed, without hesitation, the identical postures of a decade earlier.

Mnemonics play a large part in the synesthetes’ cast of players. Many synesthetes report exceptional memory skills that are tied to their experiences. Some state that they must first recall the synesthetic experience before they can recall the information they need. Richard Cytowic relates in his book one such tale:

That an experience rather than a thought is primary is illustrated by my subject JM, a Swiss polyglot in whom the spelling determines the perceived color of letters, words, and speech in any language. "You know how they have that electric band with the news in Times Square?" she asks. "That's how it is in my head. The color flows through me, and then I think of the thing. Somebody says to me, 'Wie ist Ihr Hund?' First I have the color, and then I think of my dog." (1)

A very common form of synesthesia is the combination whereby letters have certain assigned colors and words have certain shapes or physical characteristics beyond the mere formation of letters. Each synesthete’s alphabet is different, varying from letter to letter. Sean Day (2) has done a study wherein he compiled data from 43 synesthetes on the colors of their letters, and he compiled a database of the responses. He found that most letters had a definite trend regarding their color, but others were more spread out across the board. In his research, he found that not all synesthetes’ letters are colored. Some may have only the vowels colored, and some may have only half of all 26 letters registering a color.

There are definite trends regarding the vowels. Here is what the most common colors are for them:

A E I O (white) U (several colors, all of them dark)

He noticed that O is predominantly white, and I is either white or black. I wonder if it is the shape of O, a circle, that makes synesthetes regard it as white. Do cultural associations come into play? Is O white because there is some logical connection between a circle as a symbol of eternity translated into a wedding ring that is given to a bride who is wearing white? Is there some other reason why it is white? Is I black or white because I is the way people refer to their own selves? Since “black and white” is a euphemism for “clear-cut certainty”, is I black and white because “I” is necessarily a known fact, being that I is the person themselves?

His research also states that the letter G is green, brown, and gray. Is this because “green” starts with a G, and then the synesthete makes a connection to green things as plants that are surrounded by brown matter which is dirt? Is G gray for the same reason?

There is a high percentage of red, followed by black, for the letter R. Is this because “red” started with “r” and is the black a factor because along with white, black and red are the three colors babies first recognize and learn. Is that ingrained so deeply into our subconscious that a correlation is drawn between the two?

S is yellow. Is this because the sun, which starts with S, is yellow? These are mere speculations, but do they have merit in an English-speaking synesthete’s case? Might there be other ways to describe the difference between synesthetes’ alphabets besides societal or cultural or lingual influences?

Another notable type of synesthesia is the instances of sounds producing shapes or colors that the synesthete can see outside his/her mind. This is termed Chromasthesia. The instance of “audiomotor” cited above is related to this. Since most synesthetic experiences are uni-directional, meaning that one sense causes a manifestation of another but rarely vice-versa, instances of a sound producing visible shapes and colors is the most common form of synesthetic experience. (1)

Two of the pioneers of discovery and utilization of this phenomena were supposed synesthetes named Nikolai Kublin and Aleksander Scriabin. Kublin wanted to create anarchistic music, and he declared that “every vowel has its own special pitch… [and] assigned colors to the hard consonants.” (3) He even ascribed theosophical meanings to the colors, which today seem pretty intuitive. For example: red means sensuality, black means hate, blue means spirit, and green means transformation, as in the new growth of spring.

Scriabin did something similar, except he used musical notes instead of consonants. He wrote a symphony titled Prometheus: A Poem of Fire, which was “…written to be accompanied with a ‘light keyboard’ that projected colored images according to Scriabin’s intuitive music-color code.” (3) Scriabin also created symbology chart, using musical notes and color and their corresponding feeling or image. He was using synesthetic images to create works of art, as many synesthetes have done. Most notable among these is Wassily Kandinsky, a synesthete who turned what he saw when stimulated aurally into abstract watercolor paintings that are incidentally extremely and prohibitively expensive. He intended to create “…a ‘pure painting’ that would provide the same emotional power as a musical composition.” (4)

A clinical example of Chromasthesia is explained in A. R. Luria’s book The Mind of a Mnemonist:

“Given a tone at 50Hz and at an amplitude of 100dbls, ‘S’ saw ‘a brown strip against a dark background that had red tongue-like edges. The sense of taste is like sweet and sour borscht.’ “ (5)

His experience, like all synesthetes’ experiences, was projected outside his body. This was something he actually saw out in the world in front of him, not in his mind’s eye. It is not the same as when non-synesthetes close their eyes and imagine something, or when a certain song puts a picture in their head. For synesthetes, it is not something that they have to try to think about or something that is very detailed, like the picture of something already created. The things that synesthetes see are just as present to them as the bottle of water at my left hand is to me. In fact, “...the synesthetes’ senses are consistent with themselves - his experiences do not behave like hallucinations. And its’ causes cannot, off hand, be traced to their caffeine intake.” (5) So, it is just something that happens to some people that they have no control over.

A modern exploration of this sort is Walt Disney’s movie Fantasia. The movie has no dialogue, only a score. Part of it is animated with human characters and recognizable forms, but a whole other section of the movie is simply pictures and shapes being accompanied by the score. The sound of a tinkling piano is accompanied by twinkling stars, and other similar juxtapositions. This is an extension of Scriabin’s idea in which a musical event would have certain assignable visual characteristics.

Chromasthesia has certain implications for audio art and aural considerations in general. The question of whether you would give up your sight or your hearing would have particular repercussions for those people for whom the two senses are intertwined. How can you choose between seeing and hearing when you don’t have one without the other? Perhaps since it is a unidirectional gift, it might be easier to do without one. I feel that it would be a hard decision in any case, but even more so for people whose synesthesia has become such a large part of their life. Many synesthetes can’t imagine being any other way.

Synethesia is a very complex phenomenon, which is still not yet fully understood. There are many scientific studies about the cortices of the brain in which it is believed synesthesia is produced, but there is no way to predict how a person’s synesthesia will act. As said before, everyone’s is different and there’s no guarantee that a parent will pass it to every offspring. It is a genetic trait, and one that I think would be very interesting to have. In my proposal I said I would investigate whether or not synesthesia could be developed with concentration or practice, but apparently it can not. You either have it or you don’t. If you are gifted in this way, you are likely to be misunderstood or taken to be crazy. However, synesthesia is not a disease, it is a disorder, and that means that the only thing different about synesthetes is that they simply see and experience things others cannot.

This is an example of a colored alphabet from a synesthete named Anne. (6)

This is another example of a colored alphabet, by a man named D.C. (7) Notice the differences between them, and also how D.C. has used his artistic ability to communicate his synesthetic experiences.

Bibliography

1. http://psyche.cs.monash.edu.au/v2/psyche-2-10-cytowic.html

2. http://web.mit.edu/synesthesia/www/trends.html

3. Kahn, Douglas and Whitehead, Gregory, eds., Wireless Imagination: Sound, Radio, and Avant-Garde, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1992.

4. http://www.glyphs.com/art/kandinsky/

5. http://www.ad-i.com/viral/what/synes2.html

6. http://wabakimi.carleton.ca/~sscott2/sam/anne.jpg

7. http://wabakimi.carleton.ca/~sscott2/sam/DC.jpg