Synesthesia by Richard E. Cytowic

Author:Richard E. Cytowic
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Synesthesia; binding problem; conditioned learning; epigenetic; gene; graphemes; imprinting; interoception; lexicality; mental lexicon; microgenesis; modality; Stroop interference; penetrance; phenotype; phonemes; photisms; plasticity; polymodal; paradigm shift; qualia; Retinotopic; tonotopic; somatotopic
Publisher: The MIT Press
Published: 2018-03-16T04:00:00+00:00

7

See with Your Ears

About 40 percent of synesthetes “see with their ears,” meaning the activation of color, shape, and movement by sound. “Colored hearing” is somewhat of a misnomer given that synesthesia almost always travels in one direction—in this case, sound → sight. But the reverse name has stuck, and there is no point being pedantic.

Common triggers include musical qualities, phonemes, speech, and everyday sounds such as dog barks, clattering dishes, or the timbre of voices. Colored hearing is dynamic, something like fireworks: the shapes appear, scintillate or move, and then fade away to be replaced by a kaleidoscopic montage of colored photisms so long as the stimulus continues.

Hearing and vision are already tightly coupled, as demonstrated by illusions such as ventriloquism and the McGurk effect below. In most people the interaction occurs below conscious awareness. But in synesthetes, of course, the coupling is explicit, and once established, associations become fixed between certain acoustic properties and visual qualia. As figure 5.2 illustrated, there are systematic, intuitive, and lawful similarities among different aspects of sensation thanks to anatomical connections that normally occur among different functional areas.

Intramodal interactions within the same sense are also lawful and regular. Consider the Doppler illusion: it induces a perception within the same sense modality. When a tone at constant frequency increases steadily in volume, observers hear the pitch rise as loudness increases. The experience is like the physical Doppler effect caused by a passing siren. The Doppler loudness-pitch illusion is an intramodal synesthesia just the way that color and graphemes belong to the same sense.

Ten percent of synesthetes experience photisms only in response to the basic sound units of language: phonemes. As a matter of bookkeeping, we classify these individuals as phoneme → color synesthetes rather than people with colored hearing. It is unclear why given individuals respond only to some sounds but not others. One person will see colors in response to general sounds, another only to sounds that have a musical character (e.g., tweeting birds or doorbells), and yet others only to specific musical properties. But even within these categories, not every sound elicits a visual perception.

Rebecca Price is someone who responds to the acoustic properties of speech and recognizes different voices by the pattern of photisms they cause. “One of the things I love about my husband,” she says, “are the colors of his voice and his laugh. It’s a wonderful golden brown, like crisp, buttery toast, which sounds very odd, I know, but it’s very real.” Note the vigorous positive affect in her description compared to the negative frame in which Luria’s S perceives some voices. On meeting Lev Vygotsky, the famous Russian psychologist, S said, “What a crumbly, yellow voice you have.” He later elaborated on the topic of voices in general:

You know there are people who seem to have many voices, whose voices seem to be an entire composition, a bouquet. The late [filmmaker] S. M. Sergei Eisenstein had just such a voice: listening to him it was as though a flame with fibers protruding from it was advancing right towards me.

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