Synesthesia
Monday, 13 September, 2004
Ben has this.
When Matthew Blakeslee shapes hamburger patties with his hands, he experiences a vivid bitter taste in his mouth. Esmerelda Jones (a pseudonym) sees blue when she listens to the note C sharp played on the piano; other notes evoke different hues—so much so that the piano keys are actually color-coded, making it easier for her to remember and play musical scales. And when Jeff Coleman looks at printed black numbers, he sees them in color, each a different hue. Blakeslee, Jones and Coleman are among a handful of otherwise normal people who have synesthesia. They experience the ordinary world in extraordinary ways and seem to inhabit a mysterious no-man's-land between fantasy and reality. For them the senses—touch, taste, hearing, vision and smell—get mixed up instead of remaining separate ...
One skill that many creative people share is a facility for using metaphor (“It is the east, and Juliet is the sun”). It is as if their brains are set up to make links between seemingly unrelated domains—such as the sun and a beautiful young woman. In other words, just as synesthesia involves making arbitrary links between seemingly unrelated perceptual entities such as colors and numbers, metaphor involves making links between seemingly unrelated conceptual realms. Perhaps this is not just a coincidence ...
Both metaphors and puns involve revealing hidden similarities. So why are schizophrenics bad at one and good at the other? Actually, puns are in some ways the opposite of metaphors: a metaphor reveals a deep similarity, whereas a pun is a superficial similarity masquerading a deep one—hence its comic appeal. So perhaps it's not all that surprising that punning can survive or even be enhanced while abstraction and metaphor are compromised ...
Blinks:
A way of funding writing in the future: pitch and idea and get people to support it.
Place where you can hire play equipment for parties, etc.
How to recalibrate the home button on your iPhone.
Unsolicited manuscripts accepted by Pan Macmillan with certain conditions.
Thought Balloon is a group blog in which the writers tackle a new theme every week? month? with one-page scripts. This URL is for their Phonogram ones.
How to sew a zipper on a knitted garment.
Issues organised by tale.
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That’s heaps interesting, Karen - I’ve only heard bits about synesthesia. I wonder if there’s been any serious work on it (though it would be hard to test, I imagine).
BTW, schizophrenics generally have a grand amount of disorganisation going on, which might account for their poor ability at metaphors (or puns, whichever the excerpt is referring to). Then again, the different kinds of schizophrenia manifest in different ways, so it might be a product of that, too (for example, certain kinds of schizophrenia invoke lots of phonological distortions, e.g. clang associations).