sinestezija

[Takeshi]

bilo bi super da sinestezija moze da se vezba. (pdf fitnes)

pa da ne uspem, kao sto nisam sa lucidnim snovima.

 

 

Pa fitness i zdravlje, valjda.

 

BTW gde to u seriji pominju sinesteziju, nešto se ne sećam?

 

morao sam i ja da potrazim:

HBO's New Hit Series "True Detective" Features Synesthete

[kgmr]

beti da spremi skripta da nam sve objasni, a ja obecavam da cu se raspitati kod kolege koji se bavi nekim od fenomena koje smo ovde pominjali, pa cu da prepricam :)

[morgana]

@vini, takesi

 

nije ni cudo sto ste zaboravili to, kad je picolato rastu dodao debeo sloj mirisanja psihosfere i proizvoljno odabranih 120 strana iz DSM-V

 

 

nego, nazad na sadasnju temu, havefunu, jesi nasao neku primjenicu sinestezije u zivotu? da li ti, npr, neki posao cini laksim ili u bilo kom smislu nestandardnim u odnosu na njegov tipican proces?

 

uvijek mi je taj fenomen sinestezije bio interesantan

Edited April 21, 2014 by morgana

[betty]

ha, secam se jednog predavanja gde je predavacica odmerila amfiteatar, rekla: koliko nas ima ovde? mislim da ima dovoljno, bice jedan sigurno: neka digne ruku onaj kome ima smisla pitanje 'what is the color of your letter A?' 

 

na to jedna osoba iz publike kaze: pa kud bas A, ono je crno... 

 

ne znam ja mnogo o sinesteziji, nisam citala nista strucno. ali znam da je popularna tema medju neuronaucnicima! ako budemo imali srece, saznacemo za zivota odakle potice :) znam i da se prica o neke dve vrste sinestezije, i da mi se iz povrsnog pracenja cinilo da je jedna od njih prava stvar kao ovo have_fun-ovo*, a druga nekakvo asocijativno vezivanje koje moze da se desi tokom zivota ali je naucno mnogo manje zanimljivo. recimo, primeceno je da kod ljudi koji vide boju kad cuju slovo, ima previse poklapanja u bojama. onda je neko otkrio da fisher price set slova za ucenje pisanja ima bas te boje koje ljudi vide - dakle cista asocijacija iz detinjstva. kod nekih. 

 

jedna od teorija koju sam cula pre nego sto sam bila u neuro vodama, jeste da dolazi do ukrstanja puteva nekih neurona, pa tako nesto sto npr. ide od kortijevog organa u uvetu dospe do vizuelnog korteksa umesto do auditornog, i onda izaziva vizuelne senzacije. to mi zvuci moguce pod nekim uslovima, ali nije dovoljan mehanizam da objasni sta se dogadja sa kompleksnijim pojmovima kao sto su dani u nedelji. 

 

 

*napisala sam hepijevo 

Edited April 21, 2014 by betty

[Have_Fun]

 

 

nego, nazad na sadasnju temu, havefunu, jesi nasao neku primjenicu sinestezije u zivotu? da li ti, npr, neki posao cini laksim ili u bilo kom smislu nestandardnim u odnosu na njegov tipican proces?

pa.. iskreno.. ne

 

mislim da to nema nikakve veze s` tim sto npr pamtim vizuelno.. kada spremam ispit ili nesto i padne mi neko pitanje, tacno znam gde se nalazi odgovor, kako izgleda ta stranica, skoro i u kojem je redu.. ali ne bih rekao da to ima bilo kakve veze sa ovim, vec da sam kao i mnogi naucio da pamtim vizuelno

 

cini mi se da imam dobar pojam o vremenu, ali opet.. ni to ne bih bas povezao sa sinestezijom

 

mozda sve to ima nekih malih veza, ali ne mogu reci da je to to

 

jedino gde sam koristio to je u crtanju, ali to zapravo i nije neka korist u zivotu :)

 

npr, ljudi koji vide boje u slovima i brojevima, mogu da zapamte neke cifre, ili neka imena lakse.. jer se vezu za ono sto vide i onda "aha, ovo je bilo ljubicanstveno-zuckasto sa dozom plave, dakle 76543" ili tako neke stvari

[Ravanelli]

kakvi ste drogoši na ovom forumu, znao sam!

[mustang]

misofoniju ne bih stavljala u sinesteziju. to su osetljivost na odredjene zvuke koje Moj zivot cine da pizdim a ponekad i stvarno pustim suzu od besa. 

gledavsi dok o gvantamo zatvorenicima kako ih muce, ja bih na zvuk prva capnula...sva ona mucenja ostala bih izdrzala ali zvuk nikako. 

ljudi ne shvataju koliko je opterecenje kada cujes frekvencije koje ti udaraju u mali mozak i ne mozes da ih ignorises....kap iz cesme, suskanje kese, zvakanje hrane, sirene, bas iz picke materine sto udara...

zato imam white noise zvuk uvek pri ruci jer ne utralise te smrt zvukove i smiri me za sekudnu.

 

a mirisi....ovaj sto mi je triger za detalje i sto  ga evociram vezan za ljude i dogadjaje je okej. 

 

dok pojacano culo mirisa koje stvarno imam nema veze sa sintezijom. logicno mi je da to ima veze sa pojacanim sluhom...

 

mogu da 'osetim' dodire, da se ugrejem, ohladim ...ali to vise pripisujem jakoj autosugestiji. i to svi mi posedujemo i mislim da moze da se vezba. 

 

ne nosim sat jer stane a i cini me anksioznom jer kao da mi odbrojava nesto i u trci sam...ne drzim telefon u ruci jer se baterija brzo istrosi....ne mogu sada svega da se setim ali otprilike naucila sam sta da izbegavam i da zivim sa tim...osim sa zvukom ...to mi i dalje ne polazi od ruke. 

 

 

 

i menije prosto neverovatno da i drugim ljudima dani u nedelji, na primer, nisu u boji! 

 

 

evo nekih stvari koje sam provalila i nemaju veze sa sinestezijom

 

 

cetvrtak je najbolji dan za slanje bilo kakve birokratske papirologije 

utorak dobar za sastanke

 

ako se natrontas ili spavas u toploj sobi imaces kosmare (dobro za inspiraciju) 

 

kad te ljudi lazu obicno te gledaju u oci

[ordi]

umene su samo godišnja doba u boji dok dani jok, premda se nisam služila prećeranom logikom da bi' ih ofarbala; proleće mi žuto, leto zeleno, jesen plava, a zima siva.

meseci u godini su mi obavezno poređani u krug gde januar kreće od mesta gde je i dvojka na satu, recimo; jun, jul i avgust su mi podešeni na 9, 10 i 11 h... ne znam jesam li baš normalna

[Amelija]

mozda malo sramota

 

 

što sramota, zašto sramota?

 

kod mene meseci u godini i brojevi do 100 po dekadama imaju svoje boje

 

i to bez ikakve veze sa npr toplotom ili sličnim, npr jul mi je svetložut a septembar jako žut tj vuče na narandžasto, oktobar mi je cigla-boje (to je možda kao i logično zbog lišća), april je jarko-zelen (isto logično) ali je avgust tamno zelen

itd

 

 

btw nisam ni znala da ta pojava ima ime dok, čini mi se, isto nekada davno neko to nije rekao na forumu

Edited April 22, 2014 by Hjortron

[Have_Fun]

@ orderka, najs :)

meni nisu bas tako u krug, vec sam nekako ja u centru a oni su rasporedjeni oko mene, ali ne idu bas iza

@Hjorton

pisao sam vec.. zato sto nije bas bilo najbolje prihvatano od strane drustva.. vec sam u nizim razredima imao problema sto mi je jedna grana po jednom od roditelja druge veroispovesti pa su roditelji nekima govorili da ne bi trebalo da se druze sa mnom

jbm li ga, valjda su mislili da cu jednog dana doci opasan dinamitom.. sta znam


enivej, septembar nam je mozda tu negde, ostali meseci su ti pogresni :p

npr.

april - plav (nekako "cisto" plava) i levo od mene cini mi se malo dalji nego mart
jul - je crven (mozda ta cigla crvena) i za nijansu desno i nekako je povezan sa subotom pa mi se valjda zato cini da ide ispred juna koji je povezan sa nedeljom
oktobar - je slican utorku, ali dosta tamniji i prljaviji rekao bih

ovo je najblize sto mogu da probam da opisem boje

[Pixie]

Odlomak na temu sinestezije iz knjige Musicophilia Olivera Sacksa. 

 

Spoiler

The Key of Clear Green: Synesthesia and Music

 

For centuries, humans have searched for a relationship between music and color. Newton thought that the spectrum had seven discrete colors, corresponding in some unknown but simple way to the seven notes of the diatonic scale. “Color organs” and similar instruments, in which each note would be accompanied by a specific color, go back to the early eighteenth century. And there are no less than eighteen densely packed columns on “Colour and Music” in The Oxford Companion to Music. For most of us, the association of color and music is at the level of metaphor. “Like” and “as if” are the hallmarks of such metaphors. But for some people one sensory experience may instantly and automatically provoke another. For a true synesthete, there is no “as if”—simply an instant conjoining of sensations. This may involve any of the senses—for example, one person may perceive individual letters or days of the week as having their own particular colors; another may feel that every color has its own peculiar smell, or every musical interval its own taste.

 

One of the first systematic accounts of synesthesia (as this was dubbed in the 1890s) was provided by Francis Galton in his classic 1883 Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development—an eccentric and wide-ranging book which included his discovery of the individuality of fingerprints, his use of composite photography, and, most notoriously, his thoughts on eugenics. Galton’s studies of “mental imagery” started with an inquiry into people’s abilities to visualize scenes, faces, and so on in vivid, veridical detail, and then proceeded to their imagery of numbers. Some of Galton’s subjects, to his astonishment, said they invariably “saw” particular numerals—whether they were actually looking at them or even imagining them—in a particular color, always the same color. Though Galton at first thought of this as no more than an “association,” he soon became convinced that it was a physiological phenomenon, a specific and innate faculty of mind with some kinship to mental imagery but more fixed, more stereotyped and automatic in nature, and, in contrast to other forms of mental imagery, virtually impossible to influence by consciousness or will.

 

Until recently, I had rarely had occasion, as a neurologist, to see anyone with synesthesia—for synesthesia is not something that brings patients to neurologists. Some estimate the incidence of synesthesia to be about one in two thousand, but it may be considerably more common, since most people who have it do not consider it to be a “condition.” They have always been this way, and they assume, until they learn to the contrary, that what they experience is perfectly normal and usual, that everyone experiences fusions of different senses as they do. Thus I have recently discovered, simply by asking, that several patients whom I have been seeing for other conditions, sometimes for years, are in fact synesthetes as well. They had simply never thought to mention it, and I had never asked.

 

For many years, the only patient I knew to be a synesthete was a painter who suddenly became totally colorblind following a head injury. He lost not only the ability to perceive or even imagine color, but also the automatic seeing of color with music which he had had all his life. Though this was, in a sense, the least of his losses, it was nevertheless a significant one, for music had always been “enriched,” as he put it, by the colors that accompanied it.

 

This persuaded me that synesthesia was a physiological phenomenon, dependent on the integrity of certain areas of the cortex and the connections between them—in his case, between specific areas in the visual cortex needed to construct the perception or imagery of color. The destruction of these areas in this man had left him unable to experience any color, including “colored” music.

 

Of all the different forms of synesthesia, musical synesthesia—especially color effects experienced while listening to or thinking of music—is one of the most common, and perhaps the most dramatic. We do not know if it is more common in musicians or musical people, but musicians are, of course, more likely to be aware of it, and many of the people who have recently described their musical synesthesias to me have been musicians.

 

THE EMINENT contemporary composer Michael Torke has been deeply influenced by experiences with colored music. Torke showed striking musical gifts at an early age, and when he was five he was given a piano, and a piano teacher. “I was already a composer at five,” he says—his teacher would divide pieces into sections, and Michael would rearrange the sections in different orders as he played.

 

One day he remarked to his teacher, “I love that blue piece.”

His teacher was not sure she had heard correctly: “Blue?”

“Yes,” said Michael, “the piece in D major . . . D major is blue.”

“Not for me,” the teacher replied. She was puzzled, and Michael, too, for he assumed that everyone saw colors associated with musical keys. When he began to realize that not everyone shared this synesthesia, he had difficulty imagining what that would be like. He thought it would amount to “a sort of blindness.”

 

Michael has had this kind of key synesthesia—seeing fixed colors associated with the playing of music, scales, arpeggios, anything with a key signature—as far back as he can remember. He has always had absolute pitch, too, as far as he knows. This in itself makes musical keys absolutely distinctive for him: G-sharp minor, for example, has a different “flavor” from G minor, he says, in the same way that major and minor keys have different qualities for the rest of us. Indeed, he says, he cannot imagine having key synesthesia without having absolute pitch. Each key, each mode, for him, looks as distinctive (and as “characteristic”) as it sounds.

 

The colors have been constant and fixed since his earliest years, and they appear spontaneously. No effort of will or imagination can change them. They seem completely natural to him, and preordained. The colors are highly specific. G minor, for example, is not just “yellow,” but “ochre” or “gamboge.” D minor is “like flint, graphite”; F minor is “earthy, ashy.” He struggles to find the right word, as he would struggle to find the right paint or crayon.

 

The colors of major and minor keys are always related (for instance, G minor is a subdued yellow ochre, G major bright yellow), but otherwise he is hard put to find any system or rule by which the colors of particular keys might be predicted. At one time, he wondered whether the colors had been suggested by actual associations when he was very young—a toy piano, perhaps, with each key a different color—but he has no clear memories of any such thing. He feels, in any case, that there are far too many color associations (twenty-four for the major and minor keys, another half dozen for the modes, as a start) to make such an explanation likely. Moreover, some keys seem to have strange hues which he can hardly describe, and which he has almost never seen in the world about him.

 

When I asked Michael in what sense he “saw” his colors, he spoke of their luminosity. The colors had a sort of transparent, luminous brilliance, he said, “like a screen” before him, but they in no way occluded or altered his normal vision. What would happen, I asked, if he saw a D-major “blue” while looking at a yellow wall—would he see green? No, he replied; his synesthetic colors were wholly inward and never confused with external colors. Yet subjectively, they were very intense and “real.”

 

The colors he sees with musical keys have been absolutely fixed and consistent for forty years or more, and he wonders whether they were present at birth, or determined when he was a newborn. Others have tested the accuracy and consistency of his color-key associations over time, and they have not changed.

 

He sees no colors associated with isolated notes or different pitches. Nor will he see color if, say, a fifth is played—for a fifth, as such, is ambiguous, not associated with a particular key. There needs to be a major or minor triad or a succession of notes sufficient to indicate the basic key signature. “Everything goes back to the tonic,” he says. Context, however, is also important; thus Brahms’s Second Symphony is in D major (blue), but one movement is in G minor (ochre). This movement will still be blue if played in the context of the whole symphony, but it may be ochre if he reads, plays, or imagines it separately.

 

He particularly liked Mozart and Vivaldi as a boy, above all for their use of keys, which, he says, was “pure, narrow . . . they used a simpler palette.” Later, in adolescence, he became enamored of Chopin, Schumann, the Romantic composers—though, with their convoluted modulations, they made special demands on his synesthesia.

 

Michael does not have any color associations with musical pattern or texture, rhythm, instruments, composers, mood, or emotion—only with key. He does, however, have other sorts of nonmusical synesthesia. For him, letters, numbers, and days of the week all have their own particular colors, and a peculiar topography or landscape as well.

 

I asked Michael what role, if any, his musical synesthesia played in his creative life, whether it took his thinking and imagination in unexpected directions. There was an explicit connection, he answered, between color and key in the first orchestral music he wrote, a series of five pieces called Color Music in which each piece explored the musical possibilities of a single key—and thus a single color. The first of these pieces was entitled “Ecstatic Orange”; the others were “Bright Blue Music,” “Green,” “Purple,” and “Ash.” But apart from these early pieces, Michael has never again made explicit use of his key synesthesia in his work—a remarkable and ever-expanding range of music which now includes operas, ballets, and symphonic pieces. He is frequently asked whether synesthesia has made much difference to his life, especially as a professional musician. He says, “For me, at least, it’s no big deal.” For him, it is normal and completely unremarkable.

 

DAVID CALDWELL, another composer, also has musical synesthesia, but of a distinctly different sort. When I mentioned Michael’s equation of yellow with G major to him, he exclaimed, “That seems wrong to me!” So too was Michael’s green for E major, and indeed most of Michael’s colors (although, David said, he could see the “logic” of some of them). Every synesthete has his own color correspondences.

 

Color-key association goes both ways for David; seeing a piece of transparent golden-yellow glass on my windowsill put him in mind of B-flat major. (“Something clear and golden about that key,” he said. Was it, he wondered, the color of brass? Trumpets, he said, are B-flat instruments, and a lot of brass music is written in this key.) He is not sure what determines his particular colors: Have they arisen from experience, by conventional association? Are they arbitrary? Have they any “meaning”?

 

While David does not have perfect pitch, he has excellent relative pitch. He remembers accurately the pitch of many songs and many instruments, and can immediately infer from this what key any piece is played in. Each key, he says, “has its own quality”—and each key also has its own individual color.

 

David feels that the color of music is central to his musical sensibility and musical thought, for it is not just keys that have distinctive colors; musical themes, patterns, ideas, and moods have colors too, as do particular instruments and parts for them. Synesthetic colors accompany every stage of his musical thinking; his groping for “the underlying structure of things” is facilitated by color, and he knows he is on course, that he is achieving his goal, when the synesthetic colors seem right. Color flavors and enriches and, above all, clarifies his musical thinking. But it is difficult to pin down or systematize his correspondences. When I asked him to make a chart of his synesthetic colors, he thought for a few days and then wrote to me:

 

The more I’ve tried to fill in the blanks on my chart, the more tenuous the connections have seemed. Michael’s connections are so fixed, and don’t seem to involve intellectual or emotional consideration. Mine, on the other hand, have a lot to do with how I feel about keys and how I use them in composing and playing music.

 

Gian Beeli, Michaela Esslen, and Lutz Jäncke, researchers in Zurich, have described a professional musician with both music-color and music-taste synesthesia: “Whenever she hears a specific musical interval, she automatically experiences a taste on her tongue that is consistently linked to that musical interval.” In a 2005 article in Nature, they detailed her associations:

 

Minor second Sour

Major second Bitter

Minor third Salty

Major third Sweet

Fourth (Mown grass)

Tritone (Disgust)

Fifth Pure water

Minor sixth Cream

Major sixth Low-fat cream

Minor seventh Bitter

Major seventh Sour

Octave No taste

 

Any auditory uncertainty as to what musical interval she is hearing is immediately compensated for by its “taste,” for her musical-synesthetic tastes are instantaneous, automatic, and always correct. I have also heard of violinists who make use of synesthesia to tune their instruments, and piano tuners who find it useful in their work.

 

CHRISTINE LEAHY, a writer, visual artist, and guitar player, has strong synesthesia for letters, numbers, and days of the week, as well as a strong, though less specific, color synesthesia for music. Her letter chromesthesia is especially strong, and if a word begins with a “red” letter, for example, its redness may spread to involve the whole word.

 

Christine does not have absolute pitch and cannot perceive any intrinsic difference between different keys. But the color concomitants of letters also apply to the letters of the musical scale, so that if she knows that a particular note is D, it will elicit a sensation of greenness as vivid as that of the letter D. This synesthesia applies also to the sound of the note. She described the following color sensations when tuning her guitar, bringing a string down from E (blue) to D (green): “Rich, saturated blue . . . blue fading out, it seems grainier . . . a textured and unsaturated green . . . a smooth, pure, rich green.”

 

I asked about what happened, visually, with the semitone, the E-flat, between E and D, and she said, “Nothing; it’s a blank.” None of the sharps or flats have color concomitants for her, though she perceives them and plays them without any difficulty. When she plays a diatonic scale—the scale of C major—she sees a “rainbow” of colors in spectral order, each color “dissolving” into the next. But when she plays a chromatic scale, the colors are interrupted by a series of “blanks.” She ascribes this to the fact that when she was very young, she learned the alphabet by means of colored letter magnets on the refrigerator. These were organized in groups of seven (A to G, H to N, etc.), their colors corresponding to the seven colors of the rainbow, but there was nothing, of course, corresponding to sharps or flats in these letters.

 

She regards her musical synesthesia as an enhancement or enrichment of music, even though it may have initially had a linguistic rather than a musical origin. She was aghast when I told her the story of the colorblind painter and how he had lost his musical synesthesia when he became colorblind. She would be “stricken,” she said, if she were to lose hers—it would be “like losing a sense.”

 

PATRICK EHLEN is a psychologist and songwriter who has very extensive synesthesia—not only to music but to sounds of all sorts, from musical instruments to car horns, voices, animal noises, thunder—so that the world of sound is continuously transformed into a flowing world of colors and shapes. He also has color synesthesia to letters, numbers, and days of the week. He remembers how his first-grade teacher, seeing him staring into space, asked what he was looking at. He replied that he was “counting the colors till Friday.” The whole class burst into laughter, and thereafter he kept such matters to himself.

 

It was only when he was eighteen, in a chance conversation with a fellow student, that he heard the term “synesthesia”—and realized that what he had always had, and had always taken for granted, was in fact “a condition.” His curiosity aroused, he began reading about synesthesia, and thought about writing his dissertation on the subject. He feels that his synesthesia moved him to become a psychologist, though his professional work has been in other realms—speech, discourse, linguistics—and not in synesthesia.

 

Some of his synesthetic correspondences are of mnemonic use to him (thus when someone said that 9/11 was a Monday, he could instantly and with assurance say that it was not, for Tuesday is yellow for him, and 9/11 is yellow too). But it is the musical synesthesia which plays a vital part in his sensibility and his creative life.

 

Patrick does not experience, like Michael Torke, a fixed relation between color and key (this seems to be a relatively rare form of musical synesthesia, perhaps because it demands absolute pitch, too). Synesthesia, for Patrick, is evoked by virtually every other aspect of music: its rhythm and tempo, the shapes of melodies, their modulation into different keys, the richness of harmonies, the timbre of different instruments, and, especially, the overall character and mood of what he is hearing. Listening to music for Patrick is immensely enhanced—never occluded or distracted—by the rich stream of visual sensations that accompany it.

 

But it is in composing, above all, that he values his synesthesia. Patrick has songs, fragments of songs, and ideas for songs continually running through his head, and his synesthesia is crucial for their realization, an integral part of the creative process. The very concept of music, for him, is infused with the visual. Color is not “added” to music, it is integral to it. He only wishes that others could share this totality, and he tries to suggest it, he says, as fully as he can, in his own songs.

 

SUE B., another synesthete, seems to experience musical synesthesia not so much with color as with light, shape, and position. She describes her experience this way:

 

I always see images when I hear music, but I do not associate specific colors with particular musical keys or musical intervals. I wish that I could say that a minor third is always a blue-green color, but I do not distinguish the intervals all that well. My musical skills are pretty modest. When I hear music, I see little circles or vertical bars of light getting brighter, whiter, or more silvery for higher pitches and turning a lovely, deep maroon for the lower pitches. A run up the scale will produce a succession of increasingly brighter spots or vertical bars moving upward, while a trill, like in a Mozart piano sonata, will produce a flicker. High distinct notes on a violin evoke sharp bright lines, while notes played with vibrato seem to shimmer. Several stringed instruments playing together evoke overlapping, parallel bars or, depending on the melody, spirals of light of different shades shimmering together. Sounds made by brass instruments produce a fan-like image. High notes are positioned slightly in front of my body, at head level, and toward the right, while bass notes are located deep in the center of my abdomen. A chord will envelop me.

 

·   ·   ·    

 

THE HISTORY OF scientific interest in synesthesia has gone through many vicissitudes. In the early nineteenth century, when Keats and Shelley and other poets used extravagant inter-sensory images and metaphors, it seemed that synesthesia was no more than a poetic or imaginative conceit. Then came a series of careful psychological studies in the 1860s and 1870s, culminating in Galton’s Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development in 1883. These served to legitimate the phenomenon and were soon followed by the introduction of the word “synesthesia.” Towards the end of the nineteenth century, with Rimbaud and the Symbolist poets, the notion of synesthesia again seemed a poetic conceit, and it ceased to be regarded as a subject for scientific investigation.12 This changed yet again in the last third of the twentieth century, as John Harrison details in his excellent book Synaesthesia: The Strangest Thing. In the 1980s, Richard Cytowic made the first neurophysiological studies of synesthetic subjects—studies that, for all their technical limitations, seemed to show a genuine activation of different sensory areas in the brain (e.g., auditory and visual) coincident with synesthetic experiences. In 1989, he published a pioneering text, Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses, and this was followed by a popular exploration of the subject in 1993, The Man Who Tasted Shapes. Current techniques of functional brain imaging now give unequivocal evidence for the simultaneous activation or coactivation of two or more sensory areas of the cerebral cortex in synesthetes, just as Cytowic’s work had predicted.

 

While Cytowic was investigating synesthesia in the United States, Simon Baron-Cohen and John Harrison were opening up the subject in England, and in 1997 they published a review volume, Synaesthesia: Classic and Contemporary Readings.

 

Galton believed that genuine synesthesia was strongly familial, and Harrison and Baron-Cohen noted that a third of their subjects reported close relatives who also had synesthesia. Nabokov, in his autobiography, Speak, Memory, wrote of how as a child he saw all the letters of the alphabet as having distinct colors and was deeply upset when he was given a box of colored letters and found that nearly all of them were the “wrong” color. His mother, also a synesthete, agreed with him that the colors were wrong, but not on what they should be. (Nabokov’s wife, too, was a synesthete, as is their son.)

 

While synesthesia has been regarded as quite rare, affecting perhaps one person in two thousand, and to have a strong gender preference (with a female to male ratio of about six to one), a recent study by Julia Simner, Jamie Ward, and their colleagues has brought both of these suppositions into question. Using a random population of almost seventeen hundred subjects, and objective tests to separate genuine from pseudosynesthesia, they found that one person in twenty-three had some kind of synesthesia—most commonly for colored days—and that there was no significant gender difference.

 

Prior to 1999, there were no objective psychological tests for synesthesia. But in the past few years, V. S. Ramachandran and E. M. Hubbard have brought great experimental ingenuity to the testing of this. In order to distinguish true synesthesia from pseudosynesthesia, for example, they have devised tests that only a genuine synesthete can “pass.” One such test (described in their 2001 paper in the Journal of Consciousness Studies) presents the subject with a medley of rather similar-looking 2’s and 5’s, all printed in black. The ordinary person would be hard put to distinguish these at a glance, but a color-number synesthete can distinguish them easily by their different “colors.”

 

Functional brain imaging has now confirmed that there is activation of visual areas (especially color-processing areas) in synesthetes when they “see” colors in response to speech or music. There is little room for doubt, anymore, as to the physiological as well as the psychological reality of synesthesia. Synesthesia seems to go with an unusual degree of cross-activation between what, in most of us, are functionally independent areas of the sensory cortex—such cross-activation could be based on an anatomical excess of neural connections between different areas of the brain. There is some evidence that such “hyperconnectivity” is indeed present in primates and other mammals during fetal development and early infancy, but is reduced or “pruned” within a few weeks or months after birth. There have not been equivalent anatomical studies in human infants, but as Daphne Maurer of McMaster University notes, behavioral observations of infants suggest “that the newborn’s senses are not well differentiated, but are instead intermingled in a synaesthetic confusion.”

 

Perhaps, as Baron-Cohen and Harrison write, “we might all be colored-hearing synesthetes until we lose connections between these two areas somewhere about three months of age.” In normal development, according to this theory, a synesthetic “confusion” gives way in a few months, with cortical maturation, to a clearer distinction and segregation of the senses, and this in turn makes possible the proper cross-matching of perceptions which is needed for the full recognition of an external world and its contents—the sort of cross-matching which ensures that the look, the feel, the taste, and the crunch of a Granny Smith apple all go together. In those individuals with synesthesia, it is supposed, a genetic abnormality prevents complete deletion of this early hyperconnectivity, so that a larger or smaller remnant of this persists in adult life.

 

Synesthesia seems to be commoner in children. As early as 1883, the same year that Galton’s book was published, the eminent psychologist Stanley Hall described music-color synesthesia in 40 percent of children interviewed—a figure which may err on the high side. But a variety of more recent studies agree that synesthesia is a good deal commoner in childhood and tends to disappear at adolescence. Whether this goes with hormonal changes or cerebral reorganizations, which are both occurring at this time, or with a movement to more abstract forms of thinking is unclear.

 

While synesthesia usually appears very early in life, there are rare situations which may provoke its appearance later in life—for example, it can occur transiently during temporal lobe seizures or under the influence of hallucinogens.

 

But the only significant cause of permanent acquired synesthesia is blindness. The loss of vision, especially early in life, may lead, paradoxically, to heightened visual imagery and all sorts of intersensory connections and synesthesias. The rapidity with which synesthesia can follow blindness would scarcely allow the formation of new anatomical connections in the brain and suggests instead a release phenomenon, the removal of an inhibition normally imposed by a fully functioning visual system. In this way, synesthesia following blindness would be analogous to the visual hallucinations (Charles Bonnet syndrome) often associated with increasing visual impairment or the musical hallucinations sometimes associated with increasing deafness.

 

Within weeks of losing his sight, Jacques Lusseyran developed a synesthesia so intense as to replace the actual perception of music, thus preventing him from becoming a musician, as he had intended:

 

I had no sooner made a sound on the A string, or D or G or C, than I no longer heard it. I looked at it. Tones, chords, melodies, rhythms, each was immediately transformed into pictures, curves, lines, shapes, landscapes, and most of all colors. . . . At concerts, for me, the orchestra was like a painter. It flooded me with all the colors of the rainbow. If the violin came in by itself, I was suddenly filled with gold and fire, and with red so bright that I could not remember having seen it on any object. When it was the oboe’s turn, a clear green ran all through me, so cool that I seemed to feel the breath of night. . . . I saw music too much to be able to speak its language.

 

Similarly, V. S. Ramachandran, in A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness, described one patient who felt himself “invaded” by intrusive synesthesia after becoming blind at the age of forty. When his patient touched objects or read Braille, Ramachandran wrote, “his mind would conjure up vivid visual images, including flashes of light, pulsating hallucinations or sometimes the actual shape of the object he was touching.” These confusing sensations were “often irrelevant and always irrevocable and intrusive . . . a spurious and distracting nuisance,” and greatly interfered with every aspect of life.

 

There is a world of difference, of course, between acquiring a condition later in life and being born with it. For Lusseyran, who acquired it in mid-childhood, color-music synesthesia, though beautiful, was intrusive and prevented him from enjoying music. But for those born with color-music synesthesia, it is different.

 

There is a wide range in people’s attitudes to congenital synesthesia, the importance it may have for them, and the role it may play in their lives. This is evident even in the small sample of individuals I have described. Michael Torke, while he has a very strong and specific musical synesthesia, which at one time influenced both his musical sensibilities and his compositions, has come to think over time that “it is no big deal.” David Caldwell and Patrick Ehlen, on the other hand, feel that their synesthesia continues to be central to their musical identity and plays a most active part in their process of composing. But for all of them, synesthesia is natural, almost an extra sense—so much so that such questions as “What is it like?” or “What does it mean to you?” are as unanswerable as asking “What is it like to be alive? What is it like to be you?”

 

Sacks, Oliver. Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Picador Classic Book 72) (English Edition) (pp. 162-177). (Function). Kindle Edition.