Blurring the Senses
This week, Rebecca Rideal focuses on the medical history of synaesthesia...
Unless you experience it, in popular imagination synaesthesia still seems to be a condition wrapped in mystery and scepticism and difficult to understand. When synaesthetic traits make it into literature or onscreen (such as BBC’s 2018 adaptation of Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White), they are often presented as borderline supernatural. But what is synaesthesia? And how far back can we trace its history?
Background
The condition is defined by the overlapping or merging of the human senses; a trigger through one sense (touch, sound, sight, taste, smell) invokes an involuntary reaction in a different sense. Those who have it speak of seeing letters in colour, of experiencing a physical feeling when they see another person touched or of seeing sounds as colours and shapes.
The below picture was created by Tomasz Sitkowski, who was born in 1949 and diagnosed with Down Syndrome and synaesthesia. As a child he spent a lot of time in music venues where he absorbed the sounds as colour. His artistic work, which started when he was 14, repeatedly reflected this. This image, created in 1976, was produced while he listened to his tape player.
I also have this same form of synaesthesia, which researchers call Chromesthesia. So how to explain it? I guess, in a nutshell, my mind’s eye (and some people see things with their actual vision) involuntarily erupts into colour and shape whenever there is an unexpected, distinctive or unusual sound. This could be during a piece of music, suddenly hearing a lorry beep its horn, or even hearing the crash of something falling off a shelf. For me, it is particularly powerful when the sound is unexpected. The colour and shapes I see vary from sound to sound — a loud motorbike driving by, for example, could be a fuzzy yellow line against a black backdrop; a beeping horn could be a red explosion, like a firework; and a light switch going off could be a diagonal white stripe. Classical music tends to produce the most interesting shapes and colours, although not always.
History
The idea of the human body having senses (or “wits”) can be traced back all the way to ancient times — Aristotle actually believed there to be four senses (taste being a form of touch) — and the perception of these senses has by no means remained static. Dr Emma Wells, for example, has shown that during medieval times the senses were recognised as being intertwined and reciprocal. Indeed, she argues that the construction of religious spaces was designed to trigger multiple senses at the same time. “Church architects and patrons” she writes, “aware of this combined effect, chose to create spaces filled with colours, lights, sounds, smells, and tactile surfaces, wherein very rich sensory experiences could occur”.
Historical evidence for the blurring of these senses in a way that we might class as medical synaesthesia is hard to pin down, not least because we do not always have the context. A scrap of information could just as much indicate a clever metaphor, coincidence or even limited language as it could genuine synaesthesia. Examples include attempts by Pythagoras in the 6th century to assign colours to musical notes; of John Locke describing how a blind man perceived the colour scarlet to be like the sound of a trumpet; the way the musician Johann Leonhard Hoffmann (1740–1814) created musical scores using colour; and even how the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein describes: “A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses.”
Work into the history of synaesthesia is still very fresh so there may very well be earlier archival descriptions of synaesthesia waiting to be discovered. Currently, researchers have pointed to the earliest convincing documented case of synaesthesia being found within an account of albinism by German scientist George Sachs (1812). Although synaesthesia was not the focus of his work, Sachs described experiencing letters, days of the week and numbers in colour. For example [Taken from the following research paper]:
“In the alphabet, A and E are vermilion, A however is more cinnabar, E is more inclined to rose; I is white; O orange; U black; Ue (ü) gray; C pale-ash-colored; D yellow; F dark gray; H is bluish ash-colored; K nearly dark green (uncertain); M and N white, S dark-blue; W brown.”
His study heralded a flurry of nineteenth century research into the topic. As awareness of the condition spread (granted, just among scientific circles), more and more cases were reported, and a variety of theories posited — one scientist argued that it could be the case that the ‘abnormality’ was in opposition to colour blindness. In the late nineteenth century, the term ‘synaesthesia’ was coined to explain the phenomenon and the study of it was taken up by a rogue’s gallery of Victorian and early-twentieth century scientists, including eugenicist Francis Galton. After that, serious scientific interest in the topic waned until the 1980s.
After a long while in the shadows, synaesthesia was brought back into mainstream science in by researchers such as neurologist Richard Cytowic and psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen. A confluence of brain imaging technology and softening attitudes towards subjective data has enabled scientific researchers to unravel the intricacies of the condition. Their research has already hinted at synesthetes having physical neurological differences, but not always in the places you would expect (Cytowic argues that synesthetes display increased neurological activity rather than a different wiring of the brain). There is also evidence to suggest that humans are much more fluid with senses during early years, that innate synaesthesia runs in families, that drugs such as LSD can engender synesthetic experiences and that some people develop and then cease to have the condition when brain cists or tumours advance and are then removed. Crucially, research has indicated that between 1% and 4% of adults have synaesthesia and that it is a condition that has likely been around for most of human history.
I truly believe many synesthetes do not realise there is anything different about the way they experience the world (I didn’t realise my senses were unusual until I was in my twenties). This is why, I believe, its important to raise awareness. Not just to put labels on our differing senses of reality. Not even to find more historical examples (which would be great, so please do put any you know in the comments). But to remind ourselves that we are all just a bundle of deeply individual, but interconnected perceptions, reactions and feelings - and we always have been.