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by Sharon Begley
Wall Street Journal,
Science Journal, June, 2002
Like many artists, Carol Steen paints what she sees. But judging by the
canvases that fill her loft in Manhattan's NoHo neighborhood, her vision
is, well, unusual.
This series of canvases, she explains one afternoon, depicts the shapes
and colors that appeared to her -- usually in her mind's eye but sometimes
suspended before her -- when she underwent acupuncture treatments. In one,
a luminous blue orb weeps emerald crescents. Nearby hang paintings whose
images she saw while listening to music: flowing shapes in green, teal,
gold and violent.
Ms. Steen is a synesthete, someone whose brain is "cross-activated" so
that one sensory experience (feeling or hearing, for instance) triggers a
wholly different one (seeing). The result is "a world in multimedia," she
says. "Synesthesia is a gift."
Brain researchers couldn't agree more. Because the condition promises to
shed light on puzzles ranging from the roots of creativity to the origins
of language, says V.S. Ramachandran of the University of California, San
Diego, "synesthesia is a gold mine for neuroscience."
He estimates that as many as one person in 200 has synesthesia, which can
take as many forms as there are sensory pairings. Novelist Vladimir
Nabokov wrote that the sound of a long A in English "has for me the tint
of weathered wood, but a French A evokes polished ebony." George Gershwin
saw notes in color (ever wonder about "Rhapsody in Blue"?), as did Franz
Liszt, requesting of musicians, "Gentleman, a little bluer if you please."
For Ms. Steen, the radio creates a kaleidoscope so riveting she prefers to
turn off the music when she parks her car. In a rare form, tastes have
shapes. One synesthete says a roast chicken in citrus sauce is done to a
turn when it is "pointed."
In its most common form, synesthesia makes you always see a particular
letter or digit in a particular color. To author Patricia Lynne Duffy, P
is invariably pale yellow, R is orange, 5 is purple. "When I think of the
alphabet, it's like a sloping scale of brightly colored letters," says Ms.
Duffy, whose book "Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens" describes her world.
One medical professor tells psychologist Thomas Palmeri of Vanderbilt
University that although color letters slow down his reading, they help
his memory: He breezed through anatomy because the distinct colors of the
terms acted as mnemonics.
For decades neurologists figured people like the professor were crazy or
lying. Finally, though, brain imaging is establishing the reality of
synesthesia. In April, scientists at Goldsmiths College in London reported
on MRI scans of synesthetes who hear spoken words in color. The brain area
that processes color when you or I stare at a cerulean sky or an emerald
fairway is, in these synesthetes, also activated by the spoken word.
Synesthesia probably strikes when the brain takes E.M. Forster's maxim
"only connect" to extremes. Everyone is born with extra connections, or
synapses. Most get pruned away in childhood. In synesthetes, the extra
synapses seem to remain, producing a rich web of circuitry that connects
the cortex's color processor to the numeral area next door, or links touch
regions to vision regions. Since synesthesia runs in families, defective
pruning might reflect a genetic mutation.
While researchers have fun studying people who see Middle C, they're after
bigger game. "We hope that synesthesia can give us a window into processes
that occur in everyone's brain," says Edward Hubbard of the University of
California, San Diego.
Chief among them: creativity (which, after all, is seeing connections that
no one before you has) and metaphor (linking seemingly unrelated concepts,
as in "Juliet is the sun"). Scientists suspect that crossed wires in the
brain's angular gyrus, where information from different senses converges,
underlies synesthesia. Not coincidentally, perhaps, when this structure is
damaged, your brain can't understand metaphor.
Synesthesia may even explain one of the great mysteries of science -- how
language originated. Try this: Draw one spiky shape and one rounded,
amoeba-like one. Pretend that, in a lost language, one is a "kiki" and one
a "shoosha." Which is which?
Almost everyone says the spiky shape is the kiki. "The spikes mimic the
sharp sound of "kiki," says Dr. Ramachandran. If appearances and sounds
are really linked in a non-arbitrary way in regular folks just as they are
in synesthetes, then early humans could have used sound to represent
objects and actions in a way the guy in the next cave would understand. In
that case synesthesia, far from being a mere curiosity, offers a window
onto the most human of human traits.
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