What color is Tuesday? Exploring synesthesia - Richard E. Cytowic

Key Takeaways

[Music] Imagine a world in which you see numbers and letters as colored even though they're printed in black. In which music or voices trigger a swirl of moving colored shapes. In which words and names fill your mouth with unusual flavors. Jail tastes like cold hard bacon while Derek tastes like ear wax. Welcome to synthesia. The neurological phenomenon that couples two or more senses in 4% of the population. A sintheite might not only hear my voice but also see it, taste it or feel it as a physical touch. Sharing the same route with anesthesia meaning no sensation. Sinesthesia means joint sensation. Having one type, such as colored hearing, gives you a 50% chance of having a second, third, or fourth type. One in 90 among us experience graphimmes, the written elements of language like letters, numerals, and punctuation marks as saturated with color. Some even have gender or personality. For Gail, three is athletic and sporty. Nine is a vain elitist girl. By contrast, the sound units of language or phone names trigger syninesesthetic tastes. For James, college tastes like sausage, as does message in similar words with the ending. Synesthesia is a trait like having blue eyes rather than a disorder because there's nothing wrong. In fact, all the extra hooks endow sinthets with superior memories. For example, a girl runs into someone she met long ago. Let's see. She had a green name. Dieser Green. Deborah, Darby, Darthy, Denise. Yes, her name is Denise. Once established in childhood, pairings remain fixed for life. Sinthesed inherit a biological propensity for hyperconnecting brain neurons, but then must be exposed to cultural artifacts such as calendars, food names, and alphabets. The amazing thing is that a single nucleotide change in the sequence of one's DNA alters perception. In this way, synesthesia provides a path to understanding subjective differences. How two people can see the same thing differently. Take Shawn, who prefers blue tasting foods such as milk, oranges, and spinach. The gene heightens normally occurring connections between the taste area in his frontal lobe and the color area further back. But suppose in someone else that the gene acted in non-sensory areas, you'd then have the ability to link seemingly unrelated things, which is the definition of metaphor, seeing the similar in the dissimilar. Not surprisingly, sesthesia is more common in artists who excel at making metaphors like novelist Vladimir Nabokov, painter David Hawkchney, and composers Billy Joel and Lady Gaga. But why do the rest of us nonsense understand metaphors like sharp cheese or sweet person? It so happens that sight, sound, and movement already map to one another so closely that even bad ventriloquist convince us that the dummy is talking. Movies like convince us that the sound is coming from the actor's mouths rather than surrounding speakers. So inwardly we're all sinthets outwardly unaware of the perceptual couplings happening all the time. Cross talk in the brain is the rule, not the exception. And that sounds like a sweet deal to me.