“Synesthesia” by Richard E. Cytowic, MD, MFA: “Synesthetes have a different texture of reality than the rest of us.”

[I was motivated to skim this nonfiction book, because the protagonist of Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist had had unlabeled synesthesia.]

“As a toddler, the novelist Vladimir Nabokov complained to his mother that the colors of his wooden alphabet blocks were ‘all wrong.’ She understood what he meant because she was a synesthete herself, as would be the novelist’s offspring, Dmitri, who wrote about his family in Wednesday Is Indigo Blue" (1, p. 34).

“Sensing days of the week as colored is the most frequent manifestation of synesthesia, followed by seeing letters, numerals, and punctuation marks as colored even though they are printed in black. We call these written elements of language graphemes. For some individuals, graphemes also have gender and personality…This is how synesthesia is: modalities that most of us think aren’t supposed to go together, like gender and numerals, end up coupled thanks to increased connections between different brain areas” (1).

“Synesthesia is a hereditary condition in which a triggering stimulus evokes the automatic, involuntary, affect-laden, and conscious perception of a sensory or conceptual property that differs from that of the trigger…It appears at an early age. Children born with the neurological trait are surprised to discover that not everyone experiences the world the way they do…Roughly 4% of people combine two or more modalities…about 1% experiencing it all the time” (1).

“It helps to think of congenital synesthesia as a trait, like having perfect pitch. There is nothing wrong, and nothing in need of medical treatment. In fact, the extra perceptual hooks give nearly all synesthetic individuals a superior memory” (1).

“What synesthesia shows is that not everyone sees the world as you do” (1).

Comment

In interviews of novelists and poets, it would be interesting to ask if they are synesthetes, and if so, how it contributes to their writing.

1. Richard E. Cytowic, M.D., M.F.A. Synesthesia [nonfiction]. Cambridge Massachusetts, The MIT Press, 2018.