Editor's Weekly Ramblings 6

Friday 11th April 2003

Synesthesia - It's a Colourful World!

Synesthesia is where stimulation of one sense causes a perception in another. In Greek its literal translation is "syn"=together and "aisthesis"=perception. It is a condition that has been known about for over three hundred years, but has only been more rigorously pursued scientifically in the last twenty or so years as interest in the specific mechanisms of the brain has grown. Prior to that it had a brief flowering of interest in the late 19th and early twentieth century in relation to its connection with the arts, and the sense that it was somehow linked to perceiving the reality of the world more fully.

Synesthesia (the alternative spelling is Synaesthesia) occurs as the ability to taste shapes, smell sounds, see music and any other number of combinations of the five senses of touch, smell, vision, taste and hearing. The most common form is generally reckoned to be coloured hearing where particular sounds will evoke the experience of colours. It was this form that was most commonly emphasised in early work on the condition, with different composers who experienced Synesthesia trying to communicate the sensations through their work. Alexander Scriabin (1872-1915), the Russian Composer, for example produced his symphony, Prometheus, The Poem of Fire in 1910 to include a mute keyboard which was setup to control coloured light that would illuminate the auditorium in different colours and shapes throughout the performance.

This particular attempt at communicating what's going on in your head actually initially failed, because of technical problems, and rather sadly Scriabin never got to see the first successful performance which came a few weeks prior to his death in 1915 (although of course he would have seen it differently anyway, because this was just a representation of his own colourful reality). However, he was not alone. Available figures on exactly how many people experience synesthesia vary wildly both according to the type, and which 'authorities' you read. With one quoting; from 1 in 500 for coloured letters or musical pitches and 1 in 3000 for coloured musical sounds or coloured taste sensations, and 1 in 15,000 for tasting what you touch; and other combinations such as smelling flavours not yet being seen. Whilst other commentators putting the overall figure as closer to one in 25,000; presumably to incorporate the rarer varieties of synesthesia into the overall statistics. We do know that it often runs in families (both the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov and his mother for example had it), that there are many more women then men (between 3:1 and 8:1 in different studies in the US and UK respectively), and that they will tend to be left-handed.