Synesthesia

C-sharp is bluechicken tastes pointy

J is greenno J is red

Mondays are

squareDecember is yellow

h is a drab shoelace

Syn esthesia

together perception

blending of 2 or more senses

many types of synesthesia:

• discussed by Francis Galton, a psychologist and cousin of Chalres Darwin: published paper in Nature

• known previously

• 1880-1920: main interest in synesthesia, especially colour-hearing “audition colorée”

• studied extensively in last 10 years, with fMRI studies of brain function

Real or Memory?

PopOutTest

• synesthetes pick out shapes 90% of time

• induced colours are genuinely sensory• not just “making things up”

• magnetic imaging of syneshete’s brains while viewing black letters on a white background shows highly active colour processing area

• not seen in people with “normal” perception

→ a real phenomenon

Area 17

TPO junction(temporal, parietal, occipital lobes)

V4 (colour processing area)number

processing area

• region of the visual pathway involved in recognizing letters and numbers (graphemes) is indicated in green• region involved in color processing (hV4) is indicated in red• adjacent regions: increased probability of connections leading to cross-activation between the grapheme area and hV4

how does it happen?

Properties of Synesthesia

• Synesthesia is involuntary and automatic

• Synesthetic perceptions are spatially extended, meaning they often have a sense of "location." For example, synesthetes speak of "looking at" or "going to" a particular place to attend to the experience.

• Synesthetic percepts are consistent and generic (i.e., simple rather than pictorial).

• Synesthesia is highly memorable

Grapheme → color synesthesia

example of Grapheme →colour

Sound → color synesthesia

example: Norman McLaren (Canadian filmmaker)

Number form synesthesia

A number form is a mental map of numbers, which automatically and involuntarily appears whenever someone who experiences number-forms thinks of numbers.

ST experiences the months of the year as an oval surrounding her midriff

-- Artists representation (Smithsonian Magazine, 2001)

Personification

Ordinal-linguistic personification (OLP, or personification for short) is a form of synesthesia in which ordered sequences, such as ordinal numbers, days, months and letters are associated with personalities

Lexical → gustatory synesthesia

Individual words and the phonemes of spoken language evoke taste sensations in the mouth.

chicken tastes pointy(gustatory→lexical)

Vladimir Nabokovwriter

Famous Synesthetes

"fine case of colored hearing. Perhaps 'hearing' is not quite accurate, since the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline. The long a of the English alphabet (and it is this alphabet I have in mind farther on unless otherwise stated) has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g (vulcanized rubber) and r (a sooty rag bag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l, and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites. I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass. Passing on to the blue group, there is steely x, thundercloud z, and huckleberry k. Since a subtle interaction exists between sound and shape, I see q as browner than k, while s is not the light blue of c, but a curious mixture of azure and mother-of-pearl. Adjacent tints do not merge, and diphthongs do not have special colors of their own, unless represented by a single character in some other language (thus the fluffy-gray, three-stemmed Russian letter that stands for sh [Ш], a letter as old as the rushes of the Nile, influences its English representation)."" ... In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The yellows comprise various e's and i's, creamy d, bright-golden y, and u, whose alphabetical value I can express only by 'brassy with an olive sheen.' In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h. Finally, among the reds, b has the tone called burnt sienna by painters, m is a fold of pink flannel, and today I have at last perfectly matched v with 'Rose Quartz' in Maerz and Paul's Dictionary of Color. The word for rainbow, a primary, but decidedly muddy, rainbow, is in my private language the hardly pronounceable: kzspygv“

– From Vladimir Nabokov, “Speak, Memory” (autobiography)

Wassily Kandinskypainter

Composition VII (Kandinsky 1913)

“The sun melts all of Moscow down to a single spot that, like a mad tuba, starts all of the heart and all of the soul vibrating. But no, this uniformity of red is not the most beautiful hour. It is only the final chord of a symphony that takes every colour to the zenith of life that, like the fortissimo of a great orchestra, is both compelled and allowed by Moscow to ring out.”

Alexander Scriabincomposer(probably not true synesthete)

Scriabin's keyboard (Colours described by Scriabin.)

His colour system, unlike most synesthetic experience, lines up with the circle if fifths : it was a thought-out system based on Sir Isaac Newton’s Optiks.

Olivier Messiaencomposer

Messiaen wrote descriptions of the colours he experienced when he heard certain chords, ranging from the simple ("gold and brown") to the highly detailed ("blue-violet rocks, speckled with little grey cubes, cobalt blue, deep Prussian blue, highlighted by a bit of violet-purple, gold, red, ruby, and stars of mauve, black and white. Blue-violet is dominant")

"Monday is yellow; Tuesday is quite a deep red; Wednesday is sort of a grass green; Thursday is a much darker green but still quite bright; Friday has always confused me, it’s either a very dark purple, blue or grey; Saturday is white; and Sunday is sort of a light peach colour. For anyone who doesn’t understand what’s happening here, I have a neurological condition called synesthesia which means that I ‘see’ words in colours.”

Stephanie CarswellAustralian actress and soprano (born 1985). Lexeme → color.

"When I see equations, I see the letters in colors – I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde's book, with light-tan j's, slightly violet-bluish n's, and dark brown x's flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students."

Richard FeynmanPhysicist (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988). Winner of the 1965 Nobel Prize in Physics. Feynman had colored letters and numbers (graphemes → color).

Which is a booba?Which is a kiki?