"Sometimes described as
a blending of perceptions, synesthesia occurs when one of
the five senses is aroused, yet two respond."
How Synesthetes Color Their Worlds
By Patricia Lynne Duffy
Foreword by Dr. Peter
National Institute of Mental Health
so endlessly creative, has managed things so that each of
us, hosts of synesthesia or not, perceives a slightly
different world... a world colored by our one-of-a-kind
pattern of neurons and experiences" -- Patricia
Excerpt from the book
I was sixteen
when I found out. The year was 1968. My father and I were in
the kitchen, he, in his usual talk-spot by the pantry door, my sixteen year-old
self in a chair by the window. The two of us were reminiscing about
the time I was a little girl, learning to write the letters of the alphabet.
We remembered that, under his guidance, I'd learned to write all of the
letters very quickly except for the letter 'R'.
"Until one day," I said to my father, "I realized that to make an 'R'
all I had to do was first write a 'P' and then draw a line down from
its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter
into an orange letter just by adding a line."
"Yellow letter? Orange Letter?" my father said. "What do you mean?"
"Well, you know," I said. "'P' is a yellow letter, but 'R' is an orange
letter. You know - the colors of the letters."
"The colors of the letters?" my father said.
It had never come up in any conversation before. I had never thought
to mention it to anyone. For as long as I could remember, each letter
of the alphabet had a different color. Each word had a different color
too (generally, the same color as the first letter) and so did each
number. The colors of letters, words and numbers were as intrinsic
a part of them as their shapes, and like the shapes, the colors never changed.
They appeared automatically whenever I saw or thought about letters or words,
and I couldn't alter them.
I had taken it for granted that the whole world shared these perceptions
with me, so my father's perplexed reaction was totally unexpected. From my
point of view, I felt as if I'd made a statement as ordinary as "apples
are red" and "leaves are green" and had elicited a thoroughly bewildered
response. I didn't know then that seeing such things as yellow P's and
orange R's, or green B's, purple 5's, brown Mondays and turquoise Thursdays
was unique to the one in two thousand persons like myself who were hosts
to a quirky neurological phenomenon called synesthesia. Later in my
life, I would read about neuroscientists at NIH and Yale University
working to understand the phenomenon... But that day in the kitchen, my father
and I, never having heard of synesthesia, both felt bewildered. For
me, it was one of those coming-of-age moments when I glimpsed that the world
might not really be as I had grown up perceiving it. It was a moment
when that most basic of questions that binds human beings socially, "do you
see what I see?" seemed to hang in a vacuum, independent of any shared context.
I suddenly felt marooned on my own private island of navy blue C's, dark
brown D's, sparkling green 7's, and wine-colored v's. What else did
I see differently from the rest of the world? I wondered. What
did the rest of the world see that I didn't? It occurred to me that
maybe every person in the world had some little oddity of perception they
weren't aware of that put them on a private island, mysteriously separated
from others. I suddenly had the dizzying feeling that there might be
as many of these private islands as there were people in the world.