Update: Glenn Reynolds has synesthesia: “I see sounds as visual analogs with shape, color, and texture. Based on my own conversations, this is quite common among people who do sound engineering, and probably helpful.”
And we have a smeller and taster! Commenter Gregg the Obscure writes: “Have had synesthesia as long as I can remember – the main attribute is that some (not all) musical sounds have associated smells and, occasionally, tastes. This happens more with either pipe organ or orchestral music than with other instruments. Also, FWIW, I have very strong senses of smell and hearing, but poor eyesight…The months of the year each bring to mind different smells, though not shapes or colors.”
Later…I don’t want to create an even longer post by excerpting more comments, so please read all of them. Good stuff, esp. one by speedwell.
Much later…And J’s comment. Too cool.
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A condition in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another, as when the hearing of a sound produces the visualization of a color.
This is a long post, but please keep reading to the end. Questions, questions! If you don’t have the time or the desire, however, skip down to Letters and Numbers in Color.
I’m interested in more than just how digital tech is changing the music industry. I’m interested in music itself; that is, what the heck is this thing we call music (organized sound?) and why does it affect us the way it does? Why does it reach to the very heart of us, manipulating our emotions?
I’m listening to the audiobook of Musicophila: Tales of Music and the Brain, a book I had on my Amazon Wishlist but decided to download from the DC library instead. Generally, the book is about music’s effect on people with brain disorders. Fascinating stuff. It’s written by Dr. Oliver Sacks, a neurologist whose patients have had everything from seizures, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, amnesia, and a few uncommon ailments.
Music Love
Sacks opens with a man who was struck by lightning and almost died. Afterward, this orthopedic surgeon developed an intense interest in piano music. He’d taken lessons as a boy, but was no virtuoso. He started to play and got better. Then he began hearing music in his head and had a compulsion to write it down. He didn’t know how to do musical notation, so he taught himself. The man not only performed music but composed his own music for one-man piano concerts! Out of the blue, playing and composing music consumed him.
Musical therapy has helped improve the speech of stroke patients with limited speech or those who seemed to have lost the ability to speak. There’s something about listening to melody that helps these patients re-learn how to process language and express it.
Sacks talks about music’s effect on people with Tourette’s Syndrome, whose victims exhibit involuntary physical and/or verbal tics. Some report that their repetitive and incessant motor ticcing disappears or lessens when they channel the excess energy playing drums or the piano. Also fascinating are children with Williams Syndrome, similar to autism. They can’t add 2 and 2 but are quite sociable and very musical. And a man with a brain disorder (can’t remember if it was dementia or something else) had to sing what he was doing in order to do it. Patients with Parkinson’s, which impairs motor and speech skills, would become “unstuck” when playing music.
Other disorders affect patients’ ability to hear melody or harmony or process certain notes. Sacks covers common occurrences like “earworms,” tunes that get stuck in our heads. And on and on.
Letters and Numbers in Color
Sacks also discussed a condition called synesthesia, a neurological and involuntary phenomenon in which people “see” musical notes, numbers, letters, words, or other concepts in color. For some, these things have sounds, smells, or tastes associated with them. “Must be fairly rare,” I said to myself.
That prompted me to do a bit of research on the topic. (See sample articles below.) I discovered there were other forms of synesthesia like spatial and conceptual. People with spatial synesthesia see numbers, days of the weeks, or months of the year in precise locations in space. What’s this? I thought. I do that. I have a low level form of synesthesia.
Since I was a child, I visualized the 12 months as a sort of two- and sometimes three-dimensional shape in space. I wanted more information about this so-called calendar synesthesia and stumbled upon Mark Jaquith’s blog, who sees the 12-month calendar in a similar way! Incidentally, Mark is a code guru who did some work on my blog a couple years ago. He works for Michelle Malkin and a few other bloggers. I was fascinated to know that Mark is a “spatial synesthete,” too. Check out his three-sided shape below:
I need to create and upload an image for my mind’s calendar, because my chart is a little different. In my mind, the first five months stretch across the top like Mark’s, but the summer months, September, October, and part of November occupy the right side, and the summer months are slightly elongated. Part of November and all of December are at the bottom. Weird, eh?
(I attribute the elongated summer months to a childhood dread of summer, which seemed to last forever. I was bored two weeks into summer vacation and couldn’t wait to go back to school. And I hated the heat. In fact, I still hate summer.)
Sometimes I see the chart flat; sometimes it’s three-dimensional. I can visualize myself standing on January, for example, looking down and to the left at September. Standing on December, I’m looking up at January. Whenever I think of a calendar year, this is how I see it, and the months always occupy the same location in space. I didn’t think this was at all unusual or had a name, and it never occurred to me to ask others if they did this, too.
But I’m asking now! I hope you participate because I’m dying to know who else does this. Note: True synesthesia is involuntary. Without any prompting, synesthetes see colors of letters and numbers, hear their sounds, see numbers and days in precise locations, etc. These attributes are just there. Pseudo-synesthesia is when someone assigns these attributes.
If you or anyone you know has synesthesia, what kind is it? Do you or they see musical notes, letters, words, numbers, days of the week, months of the year, etc., in colors? Are there associated sounds or smells or tastes?
Do days of the week or months of the year occupy a precise space in your head?
Resources:
- Seeing Life in Colors: Crosswired Senses: Food, Music and Numbers Take Shape and Color
- The Mind’s Eye: Neuroscience, Synesthesia, and Art
