Translator: Rhonda Jacobs Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
Hello.
I'm going to talk to you today about a condition of mine and many other people
that you may or may not have experience with before.
But, throughout this talk, I'm not just going to expect you to listen,
I want you to ask yourself if any of this sounds familiar to you.
Most people with this condition
don't understand that it is actually kind of unique.
So synesthesia is just like anesthesia, the word,
so it is "without feeling," but instead, "joined feeling."
Synesthesia is when two senses are crossed.
So, for instance, the stimulation of one cognitive or sensory pathway
leads to an immediate response in another.
This is pretty common with a lot of people on a spectrum, of sorts,
and its most basic level is this classic example of bouba and kiki.
Ramachandran and Hubbard re-did this experiment recently,
and what they did is they asked subjects
which one of these objects is kiki and which one is bouba.
So, the majority of people say the spiky one is kiki
and the rounded one is bouba.
This suggests that the human brain
attaches abstract meaning to shapes and sounds, just naturally.
More abstract forms of synesthesia are grapheme-to-color synesthesia.
So for me, S is always red.
It always has been; it always will be.
It's just what it is.
And this is the same for every single other letter of the alphabet.
Although, if you have this type of synesthesia,
these aren't the "correct" colors, you'll see different colors;
it's cool, it's fine.
Cool test for this - or, this is a funny example -
is because you can see different colors with different letters and symbols,
you'll see messages that other people can't see,
so hi mom. (Laughs)
I think she's over there somewhere. Yeah.
Another example of more abstract forms of synesthesia
are the auditory synesthesia.
For me, I can physically see sounds as pitches to colors.
So this is my sort of scale,
so C is red, D is blue, E is yellow.
Always has been, always will be.
And this is really awesome when I jump in on jam sessions,
if no one knows what key they're in, I just see what color they're doing,
and I just kind of mimic the shapes.
It's pretty awesome.
Or, I never studied ear training because what I would do for intervals,
they always ask you, like, just remember different songs,
and relay that interval to that song, and you'll figure it out.
I would figure out what the colors were,
and then I would do the math in my head.
It's kind of cheating.
So, one of the more fascinating types of synesthesia
comes to us from the UK.
It's an amazing man named James Wannerton.
He tastes words.
So logically, like everyone would do in this situation,
he mapped out the London Underground based on what he tasted of each stop.
And he was quoted as saying he'd have to get off a stop early
if he didn't like the taste of where his destination was.
So, that's kind of funny but ...
(Laughter)
kind of awesome.
A lot of people think that synesthesia is a sort of hallucinogenic experience.
And it's really not.
There's a genetic element to it, and it's just everyday if you have it.
So, there's actually two different categories of synesthesia.
So those that are the projectors, those that experience their "photism,"
so, for instance, if I hear a color as a shape
in the outside world.
Anything that happens in the outside world to you, you are a projector.
Things that you associate, "associators" - more memory based, hippocampal,
you're an associator.
So that type of synesthesia would be,
like, if I see a letter and I know what color it is,
I just know what it is.
It's not out there in the outside world.
Some cool questions you can start asking yourself to see,
"Is this me? Do I have synesthesia?"
are, how do you remember someone's name?
What does it mean to, "You look like a Scott"?
What does that mean?
Do you use associations like,
"I had a friend named Scott, and you look kind of like him."
For me, I might have a problem remembering someone's name
if the color that their name is,
is different from the color that I see with them as a person.
So I apologize if that happens.
Another thing is, does everyone remember middle school,
where you had those crazy vocabulary [lessons],
where you had to remember, like, 20 words, really quickly?
Or, obviously, you should have studied over a week,
(Laughter)
but I would wait until the very last minute,
and what I would do is I would just, like, "Okay, cool, red word means this, okay.
And then blue word means this. Awesome."
So I take the test and do pretty alright,
except that I still cannot spell to this day.
Whatever. It worked.
So ...
Other questions you should ask yourself is how do you experience a sense?
What happens when you smell things?
What happens when you hear things?
How do you understand how this is all coordinated in your mind?
What happens when you smell your favorite food?
Is there a color associated with that?
There's a reason you remember things.
And it can be very abstract,
and your brain likes to have as many associations as possible
in order to remember things.
So, who are these people? Who has this?
It's a big question, and, for instance, you just never know about it,
and you don't understand it's unusual.
I was 20 years old before I understood what was going on.
I was in my final class for my music degree,
and our professor mentioned,
"Hey, you know, it's kind of cool,
some people physically hear colors with sound."
And I was like, "Duh."
But I had no idea that people didn't do this.
So it was just like a movie, everyone turned.
It was like, no, that's not okay, what's happening here?
So, that led me to get my neuroscience degree
just to understand it a little better.
So -
Oh -
I've been demoted to microphone.
(Laughter)
So the original projections for this are about one in 25,000 people.
That's pretty rare.
Then they learned a little bit more about it.
We know that it has a genetic element to it.
So now some numbers were one in 2,000 people had this.
It's kind of cool; it's not as rare.
And I've seen numbers as high as one in 23 people have this.
It's a pretty isolating experience
when you find out that you're unusual in some way.
And I will tell, for myself, I had this big experience
of, oh, my gosh, everything made sense.
I am weird!
All these years of being made fun of
for coloring my mom as pink and light blue,
when you're coloring in elementary school,
like, "Those aren't the right colors for people."
And all these things, it just made sense.
So enter in The Synesthesia Network I made with my husband.
It's a Facebook for people who have it,
and the idea is to get as much data on us as possible.
Because it's very important to understand synesthesia,
just to understand cognition and to understand consciousness.
And also, if you can figure out the mechanism
that has this lack of inhibition in between the lobes
with this extra connectivity, even just genetically,
it would be huge for neurodegenerative diseases.
It would be great, and it's so understudied.
So for instance, you can take a grapheme-to-color test on the site,
so you just use a little scrubby guy, and you pick out what color it is.
And you just go through them twice and you get a sweet data page.
So, what we know about this is that as synesthesia research goes on
and evolves just like any sort of science study does,
we are re-understanding what the normal human experience is
for cognition and for consciousness.
Going from one in 25,000 people to one in 23 for statistics,
that's pretty great.
And it makes you wonder, yeah, maybe it's pretty normal, actually.
So what is this normal?
Our worlds are the same to us,
but just because we see things in different ways -
I see colors with notes, and numbers in letters,
and you don't, and that's fine.
Your world could look like this, and my world could look like this,
but it doesn't matter as long as we can relate to each other.
Never knew there was a difference
in between me and someone that did not have synesthesia
until I was 20.
So, at this time, what I'm going to do is do something a little bit personal.
My husband created a synesthesia light show,
where you can see the notes in the colors
that I associate with my auditory synesthesia in real time.
So, I actually picked a song by a fellow synesthete,
Mr. Pharrell Williams, and it's called "Happy,"
and I hope you enjoy.
So real quick, you can actually see the notes in the colors right now,
just so you can see that it's all in real time.
So D is blue.
A is like an orangish red.
E is yellow.
Just for the basics.
(Music)
(Applause)
Thank you.