Okay okay okay!  This is really really cool.  Jette (from Germany!  So the “J” sounds like the English “Y”…neat huh?) sent me all this great info about synesthesia because she did her thesis on it.  So she’s like our resident expert on synesthesia.  Whoohoo!

I watched something about synesthesia a while ago, on…I dunno…probably the Discovery Channel, or TLC, or one of those sciencey channels.  Anyway, I remember being blown away by it because it revealed to me how self-centered my worldview is.  I see, I hear, I taste, I touch, I smell.  I experience each of these senses more or less separately, with the possible exception of taste and smell, which I find often go together, but I think that’s a common experience given how physically connected our nose and mouth are.  But I’m not one of those people who can, as Jette says, see music, or smell words, or feel smells.  Or taste colors, or touch sounds, or really any combination of the senses.  It never occurred to me that there are people out there who DO experience the world this way…who have an intermingling of the senses.  This phenonemon is called synesthesia.

Synesthesia literally translated means “together sensation” or “joined perception.”  Most synesthetes experience two senses simultaneously when they perceive a single thing.  There are synesthetes who experience 3 or more senses at the same time, but this type of synesthesia is much rarer.  Anyway, the most common form of synesthesia is colored letters and numbers.  For example, someone might always see the letter “A” as red, or the number 7 as blue.  So a lot of synesthetes have colored alphabets.  For example, the black letters I see on the left might look like the colored letters on the right to a synesthete.  Isn’t that neat?

While doing her research, Jette also discovered that many synesthetes aren’t aware of their gifts.  Since they’ve always experienced the world in their own unique way, it never occurs to them that other people experience the world differently, just as I never thought that people sensed things differently from the way I do.  Since synesthesia is a relatively unknown phenomenon, there’s a campaign going on to open up awareness.  One, so that it’s easier for synesthetes to realize that they’re synesthetes, and two, so that synesthetes aren’t viewed as being kinda kooky.   Here’s a link from Jette.  And here are some others:  Mixed Signals and Synesthesia.

And check this out… in the U.S., three times as many women as men have synesthesia, but for some unknown reason, that difference jumps to eight times as many in the U.K.  Weird huh?  I don’t know the biological reason for the difference between men and women, but it makes sense to me since female brains tend to have more neural connections between the left and right halves of the brain.  Isn’t that fascinating?

Famous synesthetes include the painter Wassily (Vasily) Kandinsky, the poet Charles Baudelaire, the composer Franz Liszt, and the physicist Richard Feynman.  Some say that synesthesia played a large role in the creativity of people like these.

(One of my favorite Kandinsky paintings, Painting No. 200, aka Panel for Edwin R. Campbell No. 1)

And it also makes you wonder, doesn’t it?  Where certain phrases or ways of describing things come from?  Like “soft music” or “loud shirt” or “bitter cold.”  Or even phrases like “green with envy”…who actually turns green with envy?

This post is getting a bit long, so I’ll just leave you with something Jette said in her email:  “I believe it is so important to talk about themes like [synesthesia]. There is no objective experiencing of the world and why shouldn’t the world be a little more colourful for some people?”

All thanks to Jette, for shaking up the senses and mixing things up a little.