Synesthesia

History of Synethesia

July 11,2006

History of Synesthesia

Synesthesia has been known to medicine for almost three hundred years. After interest peaked between 1860 and 1930, it was forgotten, because psychology and neurology were premature sciences. Psychological theory was full with associations, and concepts of nervous tissue were insignificant. Subjective experience, such as synesthesia, was believed not a proper subject for scientific study.(pg3)

Synesthesia's history is interesting but also important if we are to understand its neurological basis, because the word was used to describe diverse phenomena in different eras. Central to the initial approach in 1980 was a sharp separation of synesthesia as a sensual perception as distinct from a mental object like cross-modal associations in non-synesthetes, metaphoric language, or even artistic aspirations to sensory fusion. By contrast, the perceptual phenomenon is unheard-of in literary and linguistic circles, where the term "synesthesia" is understood to mean rhetorical tropes (figures of speech) or sound symbolism. Whether such a division remains warranted is considered.(pg10)

Synesthesia attracted attention in art, music, literature, linguistics, natural philosophy, and theosophy. Most accounts emphasized colored hearing, the most common form of synesthesia.

This imbalance in the types of synesthesia is fascinating. The five senses can have ten possible synesthetic pairings. Synesthetic relationships are usually unidirectional, however, meaning that for a particular synesthete sight may induce touch, but touch does not induce

Visual perceptions. This one-way street, therefore, increases the permutations to twenty (or thirty if you include the perception of movement as a sixth element), yet some senses, like sight and sound, are involved much more often than others. To people with gifted colored hearing, for example, speech and music are not only heard but also a visual melange of colored shapes, movement, and scintillation. (Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard)

It is rare for smell and taste to be either the trigger or the synesthetic response. There are findings in which sight evokes smell, in which taste and smell evoked widespread experience, I have found none in which smell itself is the trigger.

The strangest synesthesia is "audio motor," in which an experiment was done and an adolescent positioned his body in different postures according to the sounds of different words. Both English and nonsense sounds had certain physical movements, the boy claimed, which he could demonstrate by striking various poses. By way of convincing himself of this sound-to-movement association, the physician who described it planned to re-test the boy later on without warning. When the doctor read the same word list aloud ten years later, the boy assumed, without hesitation, the identical postures of a decade earlier.(pg 20)

By mid-nineteenth century synesthesia had intrigued an art movement that sought sensory fusion, and a union of the senses appeared more and more frequently. Multimodal concerts of music and light, sometimes including odor, were popular and often featured color organs, keyboards that controlled colored lights as well as musical notes. It is imperative to understand that such deliberate contrivances are qualitatively different from the involuntary experiences that I am calling synesthesia in this review.

The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915) specifically sought to express his own synesthesia in his 1910 symphony Prometheus, the Poem of Fire, for orchestra, piano, organ, and choir. It also included a mute keyboard, a clavier a Lumieres, which controlled the play of colored light in the form of beams, clouds, and other shapes, flooding the concert hall and culminating in a white light so strong as to be "painful to the eyes."

Vasilly Kandinsky (1866-1944) had perhaps the deepest sympathy for sensory fusion, both synesthetic and as an artistic idea. He explored harmonious relationship between sound and color and used musical terms to describe his paintings, calling them "compositions" and "improvisations." His own 1912 opera, Der Gelbe Klang ("The Yellow Sound"), specified a compound mixture of color, light, dance, and sound typical of the Gesamtkunstwerk.(Pg 27)

Kandinsky yearned to push aside analytic explanations and move himself and his audience closer to the quality of direct experience that synesthesia typifies. There is an important clue in his famous dictum, "stop thinking!" that relates to one of synesthesia's implications in reversing the roles of reason and emotion. Kandinsky grasped that creativity is an experience, not an abstract idea, and that a mind that incessantly analyzes what is there impedes that experience.

(Kandinsky's 1910 adjuration was, "lend your ears to music, open your eyes to painting, and . . . stop thinking! Just ask yourself whether the work has enabled you to 'walk about' into a hitherto unknown world. If the answer is yes, what more do you want?")

People were intrigued with the notion that synesthesia seemed to have a direct link to the unconscious. With time, however, attention turned to "objective" behavior that could be quantified or measured by machines. Humans became "subjects," the individual was abandoned, and the mind temporarily became a black box.

Mechanistic explanations have been plentiful throughout synesthesia's history. The notion of crossed wires turns up repeatedly. As early as 1704, Sir Isaac Newton struggled to devise mathematical formulae to equate the vibration of sound waves to a corresponding wavelength of light. The nineteenth century saw an alchemical zeal in the search for universal correspondences and a presumed algorithm for translating one sense into another. This mechanistic approach was consistent with the then-common view of a clockwork universe based on Newton's uniform laws of motion. (pg 219)

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Although medicine has known about synesthesia for three centuries, it keeps forgetting that it knows. After decades of neglect, a revival of inquiry is under way. As in earlier times, today's interest is multidisciplinary. Neuroscience is particularly curious this time - or at least it should be - because of what synesthesia might tell us about consciousness, the nature of reality, and the relationship between reason and emotion.

The words synethesia, meaning "joined