Synesthesia discussed on ABC Radio National

Synesthesia has never been a problem for me. I first came to realise I was a synesthete -- that I had synaesthesia, or synesthesia ("a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway" - Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia) -- in 1970, when I was 17, about 25 years before I knew there was a word for it. I still have a poem I wrote about it the same year, called 'Jack is Orange', in which I was attempting to communicate how I see words and letters as colours. The word 'jack' is still orange to me. Most, if not all, words have colours for me. For decades I thought they did for everybody.

All in The Mind http://tinyurl.com/ktkyc8 has an interesting interview this week with David Eagleman, "a leading researcher in synesthesia, studying people who taste sounds, hear colours, and live in a remarkable world of sensory cross-talk".

Eagleman says, "it's not that they're being silly, or metaphorical, or artistic"; "it's really quite common, at least one per cent of the population"; "most synesthetes will go through their life not realising that other people don't see the world as they do".

I can vouch for the fact that it took me until I was well into middle age to discover that not everybody was like me in this regard. I don't count it as a curse or a blessing. I'm an artist (writer), but I don't see synesthesia as arty-farty, although I think it has influenced my writing. It just is. I can imagine that for some people it could be a curse.

The radio program, with audio and transcript on the website, is very interesting -- at least to a synesthetic person like me. Worth listening to.

Categories: psychology, art, consciousness