Synaesthesia

If you were going to have a superpower what would it be? Would it be invisibility? Or the ability to read other’s thoughts? Or would you want to be able to experience several senses simultaneously? For example, to know what the colour blue could sound like? Or what music would look like? Or what sound or colour is evoked by the taste of certain foods? Well, the last is not actually a superpower but something around 4% of the population experience. It is a neurological condition called ‘synaesthesia’. Synaesthesia is derived from the Greek, meaning to ‘perceive together’, and means that the brains of people who have this condition process sensory stimulation in a way that allows them to experience several senses at the one time.

Synaesthesia is best described as a union of the senses. What happens is that one sensory experience consistently and involuntarily prompts another.  There are believed to be up to 70 different forms including the ability to see sounds (both music and words), hear time, and taste shapes.  However, the most common types involve experiences with sensory triggered colour – including day-colour, alphabet-colour, numeral-colour and music-colour.  When synaesthetes have these experiences, they are highly memorable and often connected with an altered emotional state.

As synaesthesia does not interfere with daily functioning, it is not considered a medical or psychological condition but rather an unusual variant of sensory experiencing. Most theories for how it occurs relate to neurological development and/or functioning, however the neurological basis of synaesthesia is still not determined.  Many scientists believe that it results from a form of ‘cross-talk’ between regions of the brain that have specialized functions but usually don’t communicate with each other. Whereas other scientists suggest that it is caused by disinhibited feedback along normally existing neural pathways. The ability for non-synaesthetes to experience synaesthesia after head injury, during sensory deprivation, or under the influence of psychedelic substances strengthens the second hypothesis.

Adding weight to some kind of genetic mechanism for a predisposition to synaesthesia is the increased prevalence among first-degree relatives of synaesthetes, the higher incidence in females (up to eight times more common than in males), and the higher probability of being left-handed than the general population.

Irrespective of the sensory type of synaesthesia, two main forms are recognized. The first is known as ‘projective synaesthesia’ in which people see actual colours, forms or shapes when stimulated. For example, a person with this form may hear a clarinet and see a green circle in space. In the second form ‘associative synaesthesia’, people feel a very strong and involuntary connection between a stimulus and the sense it triggers – so that the sound of a clarinet might ‘feel green’.

The earliest recorded case of synaesthesia dates back to the late 17^th century when the Oxford University philosopher John Locke reported on a blind man who described the sound of a trumpet as the colour scarlet. This is not dissimilar to the experience I had of working with an adolescent girl with albinism who was a synaesthete. She was legally blind, but her synaesthesia meant that both linguistic and musical sounds had very clear chromatic associations which gave her a very rich visual world. For her, numbers, letters, and days of the week had their own colours and things that she didn’t like always invoked the sensation of ‘apple juice’.

Not surprisingly, many people with synaesthesia have used their abilities creatively. The most notable seem to be musicians. The influence of synaesthetic ideas in western music dates back to around 1740 when the French mathematician and Jesuit monk, Louis Bertrand Castel, built the first instrument to perform colour-music – the clavecin oculaire (ocular harpsichord). This musical instrument had sixty small coloured glass panes, each with a curtain that opened when a key was struck. A later, improved model from 1754, allowed light to shine through a piece of stained glass when a key was pressed. For Castel, colour-music was akin to the ‘lost language of paradise where all men spoke alike and even the deaf could enjoy music’. The ocular harpsichord’s fame hastened the development of visual music and was a stimulus to the use of synaesthetic imagery in literature according to physics historian Maarten Franssen.

Classical musicians said to have synaesthesia include Franz List, Jean Sibelius, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Scriabin, Olivier Messiaen and György Ligeti. Liszt (1811-1886) was known to use synaesthesia in his orchestral compositions, saying to his musicians: “Gentlemen, a little bluer if you please! This tone type requires it!” or “That is a deep violet, please, depend on it. Not so rose!”. Sibelius (1865-1957) said that if he heard a violin playing a certain piece of music, he would see a corresponding colour such as the colour of the sky at sunset in summer. For Sibelius the colour would be unique and specific and only triggered by a particular sound. He wrote that “music is for me like a beautiful mosaic which God has put together”.  Scriabin (1872-1915) composed ‘coloured music’ that was deliberately contrived and based on the circle of fifths. Lastly, Messiaen (1908-1992) invented a new method of composition known as ‘modes of limited transposition’ specifically to render his bi-directional sound-colour synaesthesia. More recent musicians with synaesthesia are Duke Ellington, Itzhak Perlman, Billy Joel, Tori Amos and Pharrell Williams.

The writer, Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), was a self-described synaesthete who equated the number five with the colour red from a young age. His wife, Vera, also experienced synaesthesia and associated colours with particular letters. Curiously, their son, Dimitri, who shared the condition, associated letters with colours that were in some cases, blends of his parent’s hues. His father described this as ‘if genes were painting in aquarelle’. Nabokov wrote explicitly about synaesthesia in several of his novels (‘Bend Sinister’, ‘The Defense’, ‘The Gift’, ‘The Real Life of Sebastian Knight’ and, ‘Invitation to a Beheading’) endowing his protagonists with the trait.

In Nabokov’s novel ‘The Gift’, the main character, Fyodor, is a gifted young poet and synaesthete. Fyodor’s experience of language is compared with that of Arthur Rimbaud – the 19^th century French poet – who, while not a synaesthete, wrote a poem ‘Les Voyelles’ about the perception of coloured vowel sounds. Rimbaud’s poem reads:

Many other writers have main characters who experience synaesthesia. These include Charles Baudelaire, William Faulkner, E.M. Forster, Frank Herbert, Dean Koontz and Mary Shelley – although not all the depictions of synaesthesia are accurate.

In looking at art, four well-known artists come to mind. The Russian artist, Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a synaesthete, painter and musician (cellist). For him colour and music were inextricably linked as he sought to evoke sound through vision. When young, he is said to have heard a ‘peculiar hissing sound’ when mixing different coloured paints in his paintbox. Kandinsky described recognising his synaesthesia while watching Wagner’s opera, Lohengrin: “I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me”. This sudden awareness caused Kandinsky to abandon his law career and study painting at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts. Later he said: “the sound of colours is so definite that it would be hard to find anyone who would express bright yellow with bass notes or dark lake with treble”.

Kandinsky explored his synaesthesia in both painting and in experimental performance-based events for the theatre. Apparently experiencing multiple sensory phenomena (colour, hearing, touch and smell) concurrently, in his abstract art, music played the instrumental role (pun intended) as he associated each musical note with an exact hue. Influenced by the Viennese atonal composer Arnold Schönberg, Kandinsky rejected figuration and recognisable objects in favour of shapes, lines and discordant colours, to create rhythmic visual experiences that evoked both emotional and spiritual responses. Not surprisingly, Kandinsky gave many of his paintings musical titles like ‘Composition’, ‘Improvisation’ or ‘Impression’. An interesting article about Kandinsky’s synaesthesia can be found in The Guardian from 2006: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/jun/24/art.art

Recently, the synaesthetes have ‘claimed’ Vincent van Gogh as one of their ‘members’. Van Gogh’s art is known for being vibrant and full of expressive movement, but perhaps he had a form of synaesthesia called chromesthesia – although ‘retrospective diagnosis’ is fraught with problems. In a letter to his brother, Theo, in 1881 he wrote: “Some time ago you rightly said that every colourist has his own characteristic scale of colours. Some artists have a nervous hand at drawing, which gives their technique something of the sound peculiar to a violin, for instance, Lemud, Daumier, Lançon — others, for example, Gavarni and Bodmer, remind one more of piano playing. Do you feel this too? Millet is perhaps a stately organ.” This style of description is very characteristic of the synaesthete. The American Association of Synesthesia also demonstrated the presence of ‘photisms’ (hallucinatory sensations of light) in van Gogh’s paintings. Van Gogh took up playing the piano in 1885 but struggled to grasp the instrument. He declared that the experience of playing was overwhelming because each note evoked a different colour.  For more on van Gogh and synaesthesia see: https://steemit.com/psychology/@joelgonz1982/vincent-van-gogh-and-the-power-of-synesthesia-in-art

The American abstract expressionist artist, Joan Mitchell (1925-1992), is also revealed to have had both synaesthesia and an eidetic memory according to Patricia Albers in her biography of the artist: ‘Joan Mitchell: Lady Painter’ published in 2011. According to Albers, Mitchell saw much of the world including letters, sounds, people and even emotions as colours. Mitchell apparently hid her condition only vaguely alluding to the colours she saw when listening to music, meeting people or experiencing emotion. However, whenever she painted, Mitchell played music – everything from classical to the blues – and the music inspired colours in her imagination that fuelled her paintings.

The artist most familiar to us is David Hockney (b. 1937) who declared his sound-colour synaesthesia many years ago. While he likes vibrant colours, he apparently tries to avoid using his synaesthetic ability in his artwork. However, he does describe its usefulness in his involvement with his stage settings for ballet and opera. According to Hockney, he listens to the music of the piece he is constructing a set for and then uses the colours he sees in his set designs. If we compare his theatre set for ‘Tristan und Isolde’ in 1987 with his recent Yosemite series from 2010, the similarity in palette is striking.

One artist who has tried to give non-synaesthetes a sense of what the condition is like, is Amsterdam-based Daniel Mullen. In an ongoing painting series titled ‘Synesthesia’, Mullen (who doesn’t have the condition himself) collaborated with an American synaesthete artist and filmmaker, Lucy Engleman. They worked together to visually demonstrate how Lucy perceives time, numbers and letters.

The artworks (paintings of acrylic on linen) appear like simple rows of coloured plexiglass seemingly arranged as three-dimensional sculptures. However, each piece of ‘plexiglass’, hand-painted and rendered in a bright hue, represents a particular number. By choosing specific dates and times, the coloured panels are arranged in the way that demonstrates how Lucy ‘sees’ time. For example, Lucy experiences ‘5’ as pink and ‘8’ as green leading to ‘They slept from 5-8’ – one of the simpler paintings. Including ‘4’ as purple, ‘6’ as orange and ‘7’ as blue means that the 1940s to 1980s is a considerably more complex work. On Daniel Mullen’s website, the complexity of some of the dates represented eg. 2037-2098AD is astounding: https://danielmullen.info/projects

Until recently, synaesthesia was recognised but largely disregarded as a phenomenon. And, as an unusual sensory variant, it has been experienced by synaesthetes as both a blessing and a curse. However, lately it is increasingly explored – largely as a result of MRI scanning – and is now much more widely discussed. Perhaps there is even something fashionable about synaesthesia. In the past few years there has been a video game, ‘Synaesthete’ (nominated for an award for Excellence in Visual Art, 2008) and the name ‘Synaesthesia’ has also been adopted by the cosmetic company ‘Lush’ as its signature multi-sensory massage treatment!

Thank you to Robyn Price who encouraged me to travel to ‘the world of synaesthesia’.