Why Do So Many Artists Have Synesthesia?
For
most people, a bad toothache feels like a persistent throb or a sharp
pain. But without a dentist visit, there’s no way to tell whether it
warrants a root canal. A synesthete, however, might wake up one morning
and see the tooth glowing orange. For Manhattan-based artist and co-founder of the American Synesthesia Association Carol Steen, physical discomfort manifests as color (usually, a bright chrome orange).
And in Steen’s case, much to her dentist’s surprise, she was able to
diagnose a dying nerve before any clinical signs of tooth damage.
The word synesthesia means “union of the senses,” and synesthetes — roughly 4 percent
of the population — are adults whose senses mingle in a sort of
cross-wiring of the brain. Based on self-reporting and scientific case
studies so far, there appear to be 80 varieties
of these involuntary sensory perceptions. Shapes and sounds can have
particular tastes, while letters or numbers can embody distinct
personalities and genders. To take examples based on scientific
literature, for one synesthete, the sound of a high C on a trumpet
induces a flash of Ferrari red. For another, eating chocolate-covered
raisins causes a sensation in the fingertips. For a synesthete with
“ordinal-linguistic personification,” the number 9 might be a bearded
hipster, while someone else swears 9 is a high-ponytailed blonde. It’s
that idiosyncratic. Greta Berman, a Juilliard art historian who studies
synesthetic artists, explains synesthetes don’t just think 9 is this or that. They know it is, and they will “fight to the end” that a number has a certain persona or is a specific shade. For Steen, five is cadmium yellow medium. Though her father, also an artist, insisted five was yellow ochre. And like most with synesthesia, Steen can’t recall “5” ever being a different hue or not having joined senses.
These days, so many celebrities seem to be proclaiming their synesthesia, it feels, as best-selling novelist and radio host Kurt Andersen references in one of his Studio 360 podcasts, like a kind of neurological “humblebrag.” Kanye has it. So does Beyoncé. And Lady Gaga’s got it, too.
In
fact, a growing body of evidence shows synesthesia is more common among
creative types and that some of the most imaginative minds — Hockney,
Kandinsky, Nabokov
— were indeed synesthetic. According to those who study the condition,
cross-sensory experiences may offer a particular artistic advantage: a
greater aesthetic sensitivity than the rest of us, and thus a greater
likelihood to gravitate toward artistic fields. After all, synesthetes
are able to express seemingly unrelated concepts in a variety of
mediums: numbers with personalities, colors with pain, moving shapes with sound.
And unlike their colleagues, synesthetic artists — those who use their
neurological trait as a foundation of their practice — respond
intuitively to what Steen calls the “multimedia-like stimuli” going on
around them. An “ordinary” painter either captures a landscape before
her or something she imagines. A synesthetic one paints what she
actually visualizes when hearing a specific concerto — or as Steen
explained, what she sees when she feels the jab of a tetanus shot.
“There
are times when the vision I have is great and I can’t wait to run home
to paint what I’ve seen,” said Steen, who is known for incorporating her
synesthesia in her art. Her abstract painting Full View
is what she perceived when her acupuncturist removed the needles at the
end of a session. Still, not everything she experiences is
“synesthetically wonderful.” “I assure you that if I smell something
really bad,” she explained, “it’s not anything anyone would want to
see.” Steen describes the reaction as an immediate physical response. In
fact, she listens to music when she goes to the art-supply store,
carefully removing the paint-tube cap to see if the color matches the
sound she’s hearing.
But
until fairly recently, synesthesia had its share of skeptics. In 1980,
according to George Washington University neurologist Dr. Richard
Cytowic, synesthetes were still often dismissed as “looking for
attention” or just “speaking metaphorically,” such as “bitter cold” or
“loud tie.” In his book, Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia,
Cytowic recalls how colleagues joked about his research subject,
Michael, who “claimed” he felt intense flavors running down his arm.
According to them, Michael was either “crazy” or “on drugs.” Synesthesia
couldn’t be real, because it contradicted the dominant scientific paradigm that senses travel along five separate channels.
Since
then, the science of synesthesia has come a long way, thanks to
neuroimaging and the ability to connect somebody’s sense of the reality
of the world to her brain’s architecture. A person no longer has to
“claim” that Wednesday is indigo blue; researchers can compare activity
between her cortical areas when she sees the word to a non-synesthete’s
brain scan. To take a handful of studies, there’s now a known genetic link in families, as well as a neurological basis for the most common form of synesthesia, “grapheme-color,” when numbers and letters have distinct colors. A 2013 paper in Cerebral Cortex also identified a neural link between feeling and hearing, showing that in rare instances, synesthesia can also be acquired after a stroke. Using MRI, neuroscientists found that, indeed, the body can “mix up” sound and touch even without brain damage.
“We all have a little bit of synesthesia,” said Tony Ro, CUNY
Graduate Center professor of psychology and the article’s lead author.
Nails on a chalkboard make us cringe; a buzzing mosquito makes us itch.
But today, Ro explained, scientists understand the anatomical basis for
the seemingly random reactions, and how synesthetes have greater neural
crosstalk than the rest of us. Still, for most people, it’s nearly
impossible to grasp what intertwined senses are like; how it feels to
live with chromesthesia — the “sound-to-color” that Steen has — or her
experience of “colored pain.” But at least artists like Steen provide
some visual equivalence for non-synesthetes. Steen works in three
dimensions, too. Her twisted bronze and steel blue sculpture, Cyto,
conveys the shapes and color of the first two syllables of Dr.
Cytowic’s name. Even today, the synesthesia community feels tight-knit.
In 1993, after hearing Dr. Cytowic on the radio, Steen reached out to
discuss her synesthesia, which she’d kept hidden for decades. They soon
became friend-colleagues, and she gifted him Cyto as thanks for giving her “knowledge” and “freedom.”
Photographer Marcia Smilack
is also known for using synesthesia as a cornerstone of her process. As
a “reflectionist” — her term of art — Smilack takes trippy pictures of
the ocean’s surface the moment she has a synesthetic reaction, some of which have a Screamesque
quality to them. And Smilack appreciates the comparison, feeling an
uncanny connection to Edvard Munch, and the “sound waves” she sees in
his famous, distorted images. (Incidentally, Berman thinks Munch
might’ve been a synesthete too.) “I think of my work as painting by
camera,” Smilack explained. “The colors I see are more like colored
light than paint pigment.” For example, Cello Music illustrates
Smilack’s auditory perceptions of reflections one night, off moving
water. “I aimed my camera at the source and clicked the shutter the
moment I felt satin against my skin,” she said.
At
the same time, synesthesia can lead artists awry. Sean Day is a
musician who sees shapes, movements, and colors when he hears timbres.
For 20 years, he’s operated the Synesthesia List,
an online forum, regularly cited by synesthesia experts and scientists.
Day started scoring music in his early teens, composing by the colors
he wanted to view and finding inspiration in fellow-synesthete Duke Ellington.
In college, however, Day realized his synesthesia was actually hurting
his creativity. “I focused way too much on my synesthetic colors,” he
wrote in an essay for Oxford’s Handbook of Synesthesia.
“I was ignoring what I was learning about balancing orchestration,” Day
explained, “and my music sometimes was ludicrous, like mandolins and bagpipes.”
So,
by his mid-30s, when writing music, Day started either ignoring his
synesthesia completely or, if the piece called for a solo, focusing only
on that one color or texture, without trying to combine instruments.
Synesthesia does not make you a better artist, he said (emphatically and
multiple times). Synesthetes are just as likely to be “crappy
untalented musicians” as anybody else. Excellence in any art form comes
from talent, practice, and mastery — not from having different
sensations as most people. But, he clarified, if music makes you see
colors and shapes, you might be more likely to pick up a guitar or sit
at a piano in the first place — since music feels so multilayered.
A survey of 358 fine-arts students at three large universities, published by the Creativity Research Journal
in 1989, suggests synesthetes are more common on artistic turf.
Twenty-three percent of respondents experienced synesthesia in a
“spontaneous and consistent mater”— over five times expected in the
general population. The study also found that synesthetes scored
significantly higher on four standardized creativity measures. For
example, they had a mean score of 38.4 (40 being the creative gold
standard, 20 the norm) on the Barron Welsh Art Scale,
which asks respondents to “like” or “dislike” 86 designs, specially
selected to distinguish between the typical judgments of artists and
nonartists. As Dr. Cytowic describes, synesthetes see the similar in the
dissimilar (music and color; pain and color; syllables and shapes), and
people who excel at making metaphors are generally more creative. “But
far greater in number than famous artists who happen to be synesthetic, “
he said, “are ordinary synesthetes who happen to be skilled in literary
arts, paintings, or playing a musical instrument.”
And creativity has many guises. Marcos Lutyens is a cutting-edge artist who stages “perceptual interventions”
at museums like Paris’s Centre Pompidou and the Los Angeles County
Museum of Art. He uses hypnosis and performance to challenge the way
viewers respond to stimuli, and has worked with synesthetes, especially,
to examine how they perceive reality. In San Francisco, Lutyens sent a
group of individuals with synesthesia to McDonald’s — the most
ubiquitous American place he could imagine. One participant, who
experiences words as color, said the Golden Arches symbol is “wrong”
because it should be “red.” For another, the kitchen equipment sounds
“shuddered [her] neck and back in a softer, indescribable kind of
shock.” “What we classify as artistic,” Lutyens said, “is just normal to
them.” And artists with synesthesia work outside of traditional venues,
too. For instance, Lutyens describes how an award-winning mixologoist, a
synesthete based in Manchester, England, Jody Monteith, mixes the color of drink flavors to “tap into the perfect taste.”
“Do
synesthetic artists have a common way of seeing even when they aren’t
consciously using synesthesia in their process?” asked Greta Berman, who
co-curated (with Steen) the 2008 exhibit, Synesthesia: Art and the Mind, at the McMaster Museum of Art
in Hamilton, Ontario. According to the show’s catalogue, she (and
Steen) brought four recognized, “genuine” synesthetes together for the
first time: David Hockney, Joan Mitchell, Marcia Smilack, and Carol
Steen. Based on personal writing and his oeuvre, Berman suspects van Gogh was a synesthete too.
“Here’s
the difference,” Berman said. “I don’t think Monet had synesthesia.
He’s trying to reflect a physical scene, looking directly at a
landscape, and not a sensory vision he had.” As an indication of
synesthesia, Berman often searches artwork for “Kluver’s form
constants”— geometric patterns (often lattice or spider-web-like),
discovered by psychologist Heinrich Kluver in the 1920s, which regularly
appeared during peyote hallucinations and synesthetic perception.
“Anyone looking at paintings by van Gogh, Charles Burchfield, Wassily
Kandinsky, and David Hockney, for example, will surely observe these
form constants repeatedly,” according to Berman and Steen’s essay in Oxford’s Handbook on Synesthesia.
Yet
the true power of synesthetic art may lie in what the 96 percent of us
who are non-synesthetes can gain from it. “Synesthesia shows you how
different sensory perception can be for everyone,” said Day. He calls it
a lesson in “neural diversity” and that synesthetic art “strives
towards a new understanding” of what’s “normal” for the human brain.
Normal, he explains, is diverse. On the humanist side, Dr.
Cytowic said in an email, synesthetic studies affirm subjective points
of view: how two people can see the same “objective” thing quite
differently — each equally valid — in a time “when citizens are
becoming increasingly polarized.“
Most
of us will never hear colors or taste shapes. But it is pretty common
for a non-synesthete to get chills during an operatic crescendo or the
high notes of the “Star-Spangled Banner,” or standing in the Sistine
Chapel. These are dual-sensory experiences — auditory, visual, and physical
stimulation — but more importantly, a way of deeply inhabiting a moment
in time and the world more richly, which is, in the end, what it means
to have a genuine connection to art.
http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/07/why-do-so-many-artists-have-synesthesia.html
