Synaesthesia

Syn_es_the_sia -noun a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is applied to another modality, as when the hearing of a certain sound induces the visualisation of a certain colour.

Synaesthesia, a mixing or combination of the senses, is a relatively familiar concept in the arts. Several well-known artists, writers and musicians have described this condition, Vladimir Nabakov, Alexander Scriabin and most famously Wassily Kandinsky. Although this phenomenon has been written about since 1890, until the recent developments in neuroimaging it remained an interesting yet ultimately dead-ended scientific anomaly. It explained something of the artists’ inspirations, but served little purpose in understanding larger themes in creativity and the workings of the mind. The dependence on personal experience discounted from serious scientific research. This has radically changed over the past twenty years and at this point in time research into synaesthesia is at the forefront off neuroscientific research. It is widely thought that this condition could in fact tell us much about creativity and the formations of language , and in the context of painting I believe it still holds valuable insights into the workings of abstraction.

So what exactly is this condition? The most commonly reported experience of synaesthesia is seeing colours (in the ‘minds eye’) in response to letters, numbers and days of the week (called Grapheme Colour Synaesthesia). There are also frequent reports of colour experience in reaction to sound. Smell and taste are uncommon but do occur, and an area of particular interest is emotionally mediated synaesthesia, where colour is seen in response to stimuli with an emotional connotation. I will discuss this further on. We do not know exactly how many people experience synaethesia, it is normally something people have experienced since early childhood and is therefore so normal to them they may not realize their experience differs from anyone else’s/ The number could be 1/1000 to 1/200, but it is agreed that it is three times more common in women and 8 times more unlikely in artists, writers and musicians. It is also a trait, which is commonly passed down through generations, but never from father to son which suggests it is an X chromosome linked trait. Other defining traits of the condition include;

1. The experience is uni- directional, sounds may stimulate colours but it does not follow that the same occurs the other way round. 2. Relationships between stimuli and experience are durable, the red of a letter A 9for example) will be the same red when the person is 5 years old and 65, it does not change over time. 3. Relationships are arbitrary in the sense that they convey no cultural or social attachment. The letter A may be green for one person and pink for another, and are reported as such in a ‘matter of fact’ way. 4. Reactions are not voluntary or controllable by the subject.

The development of brain scanning techniques during the 1980’s has allowed scientists to monitor areas of the brain while experiencing synaesthesic activity. In the 1990’s Richard Cytowic pioneered a new wave of research in America which was then paralleled by researchers in the UK. Brain imaging, which shows us the activity of the brain under certain stimulations, has shown that whilst experiencing synaesthesic perception, subjects show activity in other brain areas closely linked to the stimulated area. It is suggested that executive areas of the brain, primarily the frontal lobes, manifest a high degree of sensory integration. The area which controls the letters/ numbers is next to that which processes colour which suggests the experience is due to some ‘overspill’, A popular theory is that of CMT,) cross modal transfer) which proposes that synesthetes have an abnormally large amount of neural links between normally differentiated sensory modules. New research, that expands on CMT, is now indicating that synaesthesia is common to us all on the most basic level. That it is something we are all born with.

‘The Neonatal Synaesthesia hypothesis builds on the CMT evidence, but suggests that in early infancy, probably up to about 4 months of age, all human babies experience sensory input in a non differentiated way. Sounds trigger auditory, visual and tactile experiences all at once. Following this early initial phase of normal synaesthesia, the different sensory modalities become increasingly modular. Adult synaesthesia, has been suggested to be as a result of the breakdown in the process of modularisation, such that during infancy the modularisation process was not completed. This of course implies that if not now, then at some point in the past, we have all experienced synesthesic perception.’

In February 2006 the journal ‘Cortex’, (devoted to the study of neurology and cognitive function) published an issue covering the current findings of research into synaesthesia. In the introductory article, ‘Synaesthesia: An Overview of Contemporary Findings and Controversies’, Jamie Ward and Jason B. Mattingly state;

‘How different visual attributes such as form and colour are integrated in perception is an issue of interest to many cognitive neuroscientists (triesmann 1999); synaesthesia may represent an instance of colour binding in the absence of external colour information (Robertson 2003). A related reason why many are interested in synaesthesia is that it may shed light on the neural and cognitive substrates of perceptual awareness. By definition synaesthesia is the elicitation of perceptual experiences in the absence of normal sensory stimulation.’

This leads us back to the experience of altered consciousness discussed in previous chapters, and provides the bridge between different sensory experiences which combine with the altered state.

They continue;

‘Some forms of synaesthesia (or synaesthesia like phenomena) can be elicited pharmacologically (Hartman and Hollister, 1963) from sensory deprivation arising from damage to input pathways (e.g., Jacobs et a., 1981), or even prolonged blindfolding (Merabat et al 2004). Ibid

This is discussed further by Richard Cytowic in his overview, ‘Synaesthesia: Phenomenology and Neuropsychology’ 1995, where he identifies the hippocampus as being especially important to synaesthesic experience;

‘I cannot enumerate here all the supporting reasons why I single out the hippocampus being especially- but not solely- important for synaesthesic experience. The hippocampus is also necessary for experiencing other altered states of consciousness that are qualitatively similar to synesthesia. For example, the perceptions during LSD induced synaesthesia, sensory deprivation, limbic epilepsy, release hallucinations and the experiential responses during electrical stimulation of the brain all possess a generic, elemental quality- just as they do in synaesthesia. This observation leads us to the topic of form constants, the enduring idea that elemental perceptual qualities exist.’

Cytowic has identified the ‘photisms’ described by the synaesthetes as congruent with the form constants described by Kluver;

‘Variations in colour, brightness, movement, perspective, symmetry, and replication provide finer gradation of the subjective experience. These are not just visual phenomena, but sensory form constants that are apparent in any spatially extended sense. Initially we thought theses spatial configurations reflected some anatomic structure; then we tried mapping it to some prototypical function. Now, neuroscience is not sure what their physical correlates are, but many people do suspect that form constants point to some deep, fundamental aspect of perception.’

So, research suggests that altered states of consciousness are fundamentally synaesthesic in nature and involve a merging of sensory experience known as cross modal transfer. This involves basic sense organs, most commonly sight, sound and the perception of letters and numbers, but also the key to synaesthesic and altered states is emotion. Obviously this is a difficult subject for scientific research due to its highly subjective nature, however, on defining the features of synaesthesic experience Cytowic outlines the emotional aspect as follows;

Synaesthesia is emotional. The experience is accompanied by a sense of certitude) the ‘this is it’ feeling) and a conviction that what synaesthetes perceive is real and valid. The accompaniment brings to mind the transitory change in self-awareness that is known as ecstasy. Ecstasy is any passion by which the thoughts are absorbed and in which the mind for a time is lost. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James spoke of ecstasy’s four qualities of ineffability, passivity, noesis and transience. These qualities are shared by synaesthesia.’

This ‘noetic’ quality (from Greek nous, meaning intellect or understanding), the feeling of certitude accompanying direct sensory experience, is typical of the mystical state and connects us back to reports from Persingers’ God Helmet’. Through this universal intersensory language we are beginning to see a connection between basic abstract languages inherent to our neurological make up and the realms of mystical experience.

This is led by Professor J Ramachradan, head of brain research at the University of California and Speaker for the Reith Lectures 2003. He believes that the cross association of senses may be responsible for human creativity, due to the large part metaphor plays in this. He supports this claim with research showing artists, writers and musicians are 8 times more likely to be synaesthetes. Ramachradan has also devised an experiment asking subjects to match the words ‘booba’ and ‘kiki’ with either a soft round or a triangular round shape. 99% match ‘booba’ with the round shape and ‘kiki’ with the triangular shape. Ramachradan states; This means there is a non arbitrary correspondence, a spontaneous tendency in all of us to pick the bulbous amoeboid shape as the booba, so the gentle undulation of the visual contour, similarly kiki has a sharp edge to it, sharp sound and that’s mimicking the sharp inflection of the visual contour of the kiki and this is what you need, this initial bias is what you need to get the words going.’ Hearing Colours Seeing Sounds, Nov 2002, Radio 4, Transcript www.bbc.co.uk
Kluver briefly discusses synaesthesia on Mescal and The Mechanisms of Hallucinations, he recounts mescal induced experience; ‘the hearing of rhythmically presented sounds is accompanied by the seeing of small grey circles; disagreeable tones elicit skin sensations; visually perceived movement is accompanied by skin

sensations…Here we see that an existent visual impression is only modified. In cases of synaesthesia the two sensory experiences often present themselves simultaneously.’ P49-51. In 2004, Jamie Ward published a paper, ‘Emotionally Mediated Synaesthesia’, a study reporting experience of a synaesthete experiencing colours in response to words which have an emotional connotation, more specifically males of people she knew. Ward proposes emotion- colour synaesthesia as an explanation for seeing ‘auras’. It is interesting to note this in reference to aura’s discussed by Blavatsky in ‘The Secret Doctrine’.