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| © John Richard Stephens, 2024. |
Do you remember when you were an infant? Some people say they do. Sci-fi author Ray Bradbury was one who insisted he could remember being born.[1] There are people with photographic memory—scientists call it highly superior autobiographic memory. They have the amazing ability to recall details from throughout their lives.
Most researchers can’t remember their infancy, so they’re conducting experiments to figure out what it’s like to be a baby. One of those who study this is psychologist Alison Gopnik at the University of California, Berkeley. She says if you want to relive the experience, you should fall in love, down four double espressos, smoke four packs of Gauloises cigarettes, take LSD, and then walk through the streets of Paris, “which”, she says, “is a fantastic state to be in, but it does mean you wake up at 3 o’clock in the morning crying”.
The caffeine and nicotine will provide you with the wide-eyed, but diffuse, single-minded attention. The rush of hormones when in love and traveling to an unfamiliar place will make your brain more pliable. The LSD will give you the vivid colors that babies seem to experience and will dissolve your sense of self. Then the Paris streets will place you in an environment that bombards your senses with constant stimuli. You’ll just need to slow down your reaction time and relinquish all control, intentions, and thoughts of the future—immersing yourself in the immediate moment.
Of course, after you do all of that you may need to have someone roll you around in a stroller with a pacifier and a drool cup.[2]
Even children under the age of 12 don’t perceive the world as adults do. They don’t yet combine their different senses, or even the input from each eye, quite the same way as adults. And six-year-olds see visual elements that most adults no longer can.[3]
Many animals are born ready to take on the world. Infant deer can detect dangers and, after a few stumbles, are able to run away. As Stanford University neuroscientist David Eagleman put it, “Mother nature is taking a sort of gamble with humans, in that she drops our brains into the world half-baked and lets experience take over and shape them. Our babies have much less well-developed brains than other animals do at birth.”[4]
That development continues at least into our teens. Our brain continues to change throughout our lives, and our perceptions change along with it.
It Sounds like a Pickle
There is another way in which people can experience dramatically different perceptions—synesthesia. This is a curious phenomenon where people experience a blending of their senses. This can take a wide variety of forms. For example, someone might experience a particular musical note as looking purple, feeling spikey, and tasting like a pickle.
The most common form is when black and white text appears in the midst of a haze of color, as though seen through a filter. Usually the aura surrounds each number or letter, but occasionally each word will be mostly one color. And tests have clearly demonstrated that some people can really see auras around others.[5]
There are more than a hundred types of synesthesia.[6] Some people hear lights or shapes. Others taste sounds or smell colors. There are those who see conversations as written captions in their mind’s eye. Some can feel touch when they see others being touched or when they imagine it, and for some it’s the same with pain. For one person, all letters were either male or female. Another, Michael Watson, could feel tastes with his hands, apologized to his dinner guests that the chicken he was serving didn’t have enough points on it.[7]
When neurologist Richard Cytowic squirted Angostura bitters on Watson’s tongue, the man said, “It has the springy consistency of a mushroom, almost round, but I feel bumps and can stick my fingers into little holes in the surface. There are leafy tendril-like things coming out of the holes, about six of them.”[8]
Some experience these as vivid perceptions as part of the real world, while most see them with their mind’s eye, so, for example, one synesthete might see a black letter as being red, while another would perceive it as red in their mind’s eye. One might see sounds as colors projected on an invisible screen in front of them, while another visualizes a calendar as a flat ribbon circling their body with each month having its own color.
The associations can be very specific and detailed. Journalist Julie McDowall’s brain automatically gives a sensation or image to every name and place. She wrote, “My niece, Sophia, is pink foam shrimps and her brother Leo is thick custard. Donald is a rubber duck dipped in vinegar.”[9] This is involuntary and can persist unchanging throughout a person’s lifetime.
One study found synesthesia can also increase over time, suggesting the possibility that in some cases it might be learned[10], although a friend of mine, then a fellow Air Force officer, told me that as a child she had to take special classes to unlearn some of her synesthesia before she was able to learn to read. In rare cases synesthesia can be gained suddenly with a head injury.[11]
In general, far from being a hindrance, most synesthetes can’t imagine life without their ability, and feel sorry for those of us who lack it. It is not usually harmful and can be very beneficial. Synesthetes are better at distinguishing between smells and colors, and they can solve puzzles faster. And it can give someone a spectacular memory. In particular, it seems to aid many mathematicians. Daniel Temmet, an autistic savant who can multiply very rapidly, explained, “When I multiply numbers together, I see two shapes. The image starts to change and evolve, and a third shape emerges. That’s the answer. It’s mental imagery. It’s like maths without having to think.”[12]
It shouldn’t be surprising that synesthetes gravitate toward creative endeavors. They include artists Vincent van Gogh, David Hockney, Wassily Kandinsky, musicians Franz Liszt, Duke Ellington. Tori Amos, Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder, Lorde, Pharrell Williams, Mary J. Blige, novelist Vladimir Nabokov, actor Marilyn Monroe, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, and, no doubt, many others.
Interestingly, we all seem to have the potential to experience it, since it can be induced by hypnosis[13].or hallucinogens. There are a couple of cases where it was caused by strokes.[14] This suggests that for most people, cross-communication between the senses is inhibited, but can be released in these circumstances. In one experiment a color blind synesthete was induced to see colors that their eyes were unable to see.[15]
It might even operate in everyone at a subconscious level. Consider the common metaphors: loud shirt, hot pink, deep purple, sharp cheese, bright sounds, bitter chill, heavy rain, hot blooded, sweet woman, cold fish, cool cat, and the blues.
So overall it appears that each of us is isolated in our own sensory world that’s unlike those of everyone else.
All of this, of course, raises questions about the validity of reviews of things like movies and music. It also presents major difficulties for chefs who need to come up with recipes that will please people who have a huge range of palates.
There are many variations and gradations of the senses. It’s likely that the way you perceive the world is completely unique. There are also other variations, such those who can’t recognize faces—even of their family—and there are super-recognizers who can recognize a face from the side that they only saw once years before. Some people have an extremely vivid mind’s eye and there are those who lack one altogether and are unable to visualize anything. There are people who hear a narration in their head, with some hearing inner voices of others talking, while others only hear themselves thinking, and still others never hear anything. For all of these differences, most people fall somewhere between the extremes.
There’s even a wide variation in the ways people think—verbal (monologue, dialogue, debate or argument, emotional, dispassionate, negative or positive), visualization (object visual, spatial visual, visualizing text, visualizing in images, visualizing as movies), emotions, sensations, and unsymbolized thoughts. And again, much of our thinking takes place before we become aware of it. We experience some or most of these, but each in widely varying degrees.[16]
The way each of us experiences the world varies considerably, so we’re back to the question of how much of the world you perceive is real? You can see here that we’re on shaky ground.
The research continues, with more interesting discoveries on the way, no doubt.
Click here for the next article in this series:
[1] William Booth, “The Universe Of Ray Bradbury”, The Washington Post, November 14, 2000, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/2000/11/14/the-universe-of-ray-bradbury/5b840371-6b56-4f12-a1e1-d0ab8b09df64/. See also Notes and Queries, “Is it possible to remember being born?”, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-2899,00.html.
[2] Anil Ananthaswamy, “Into the minds of babes”, New Scientist, no. 2983, August 23, 2014, pp. 40-43, and as “Trippy tots: How to see the world as a baby”, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329830-700-trippy-tots-how-to-see-the-world-as-a-baby/.
[3] University College London, "Children and adults see the world differently, research finds", ScienceDaily, September 14, 2010, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100913153630.htm, citing Marko Nardini, Rachael Bedford, and Denis Mareschal, "Fusion of visual cues is not mandatory in children", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1001699107.
[4] Clare Wilson, “David Eagleman interview: How our brains could create whole new senses”, New Scientist, no. 3334, May 15, 2021, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25033340-900-david-eagleman-interview-how-our-brains-could-create-whole-new-senses/, May 12, 2021.
[5] Anonymous, “Haloes are real—what colour is yours?”, New Scientist, no. 2898, January 2, 2013, p. 13, www.newscientist.com/article/mg21728985.200-haloes-are-real--what-colour-is-yours.html, citing Vilayanur S. Ramachandrana, Luke Millera, Margaret S. Livingstoneb, and David Branga, “Colored halos around faces and emotion-evoked colors: A new form of synesthesia”, Neurocase, vol. 18, no. 4, 2012, pp. 352-358, www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13554794.2011.608366, https://doi.org/10.1080/13554794.2011.608366
Also, University College London, “My favourite aunt is purple: Why some people see ‘auras’ around their loved ones”, UCL News, October 18, 2004, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2004/oct/my-favourite-aunt-purple-why-some-people-see-auras-around-their-loved-ones, citing Jamie Ward, “Emotionally Mediated Synaesthesia”, Cognitive Neuropsychology, 2004, 21(7), p761.
[6] For a detailed outline of synesthesia and its many types, see Aleksandra Rogowska, “Categorization of Synaesthesia”, Review of General Psychology, 2011, Vol. 15, No. 3, 213–227, http://brainnarratives.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu/files/2012/12/categorization-of-synesthesia-2012.pdf, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0024078.
[7] Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman, Wednesday Is Indigo Blue, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2009.
[8] Richard E. Cytowic, The Man Who Tasted Shapes, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993 (2003), pp. 64-65.
[9] Julie McDowall, “Experience: I taste people’s names”, The Guardian, April 5, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/apr/05/experience-i-taste-peoples-names-synaesthesia.
[10] Julia Simner, Jenny Harrold, Harriet Creed, Louise Monro, and Louise Foulkes, “Early detection of markers for synaesthesia in childhood populations”, Brain, vol. 132, no. 1, January 2009, pp. 57–64, https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awn292.
[11] Rachael Rettner, "Musician's head injury triggered rare synesthesia, causing him to 'see' music”, Live Science, May 18, 2023, https://www.livescience.com/health/neuroscience/musicians-head-injury-triggered-rare-synesthesia-causing-him-to-see-music.
And Tanya Lewis, "A Beautiful Mind: Brain Injury Turns Man Into Math Genius", Live Science, May 5, 2014, https://www.livescience.com/45349-brain-injury-turns-man-into-math-genius.html.
[12] Dana Smith, “Can Synesthesia in Autism Lead to Savantism?”, Scientific American Mind, December 4, 2013, https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/can-synesthesia-in-autism-lead-to-savantism/.
[13] Roi Cohen Kadosh, Avishai Henik, Andres Catena, Vincent Walsh, and Luis J. Fuentes, “Induced Cross-Modal Synaesthetic Experience Without Abnormal Neuronal Connections”, Psychological Science, vol 20, no. 2, February 1, 2009, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02286.x.
And University of Turku,, "Tasting colors? Synesthesia induced with hypnosis", ScienceDaily, December 13, 2017, www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/12/171213120032.htm, citing Sakari Kallio, Mika Koivisto, and Johanna K. Kaakinen, "Synaesthesia-type associations and perceptual changes induced by hypnotic suggestion", Scientific Reports, 2017; 7 (1), https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-16174-y.
[14] “James Bond theme music sends stroke victim into ecstasy”, CBC News, July 30, 2013, https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/james-bond-theme-music-sends-stroke-victim-into-ecstasy-1.1332053. And Elizabeth Preston, “Man Develops Synesthesia after Stroke, Finds James Bond Theme ‘Orgasmic’ ”, Discover Magazine, August 2, 2013, https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/man-develops-synesthesia-after-stroke-finds-james-bond-theme-orgasmic, citing Tom A. Schweizer, Zeyu Li, Corinne E. Fischer, Michael P. Alexander, Stephen D. Smith, Simon J. Graham, and Luis Fornazarri, “From the thalamus with love: A rare window into the locus of emotional synesthesia”, Neurology, 2013, https://doi.org/10.1212/WNL.0b013e31829d86cc.
[15] Vilayanur S. Ramachandran and Edward M. Hubbard, “Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes”, Scientific American, May 2003, pp. 53-59, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/hearing-colors-tasting-shapes/, and in Scientific American Mind, vol. 16, no. 3, October 2005, pp. 16-23.
[16] Kate Douglas, “How are you thinking?”, New Scientist, July 22, 2023, pp. 32-35, and as “Revealed: What your thoughts look like and how they compare to others’ ”, July 19, 2023, https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg25934484-800-revealed-what-your-thoughts-look-like-and-how-they-compare-to-others/.
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