We All Hear Voices

Synesthesia: a gift that blurs the border of ordinary reality

One fall afternoon as Jack and Mary Ann walked along the riverbank, Jack fixated on a bright-red maple tree. For an hour, he sat and stared at the tree and its fiery red leaves.

         “Pretty, huh?” Mary Ann said.

          “Yeah, and loud, too,” Jack replied.

            “What do you mean, loud?”

            “Don’t know how to explain it—but it’s not just pretty.” Jack pointed to a yellow-leafed birch at the water’s edge. “See that pretty yellow tree on the bank? It makes a sound as well—kind of a soft hum. But that maple is loud. Sometimes, when the sun hits them just right, the sounds and shapes come together, like in a Van Gogh painting.”

Do you have the gift of synesthesia?

            Jack’s gift of synesthesia is far more common than once thought. Recently as I sat in my office checking e-mail one of our young staff members was sitting near me drawing up flu shots. She asked, “I understand you are writing a book. What’s it about?” When I began to explain about Jack's gift of ‘seeing sounds and tasting colors’, she remarked, “You mean like when every time you see the number 1 it’s red.” After talking for a brief period of time we both became convinced that she had a form of synesthesia called grapheme.

            The term Synesthesia literally means to combine the senses. Twenty years ago it was thought to be as rare as 1in 100,000 but with the advent of the internet some estimates are that it may affect, in one form or another, 1 in 20 people in our society.   It runs strongly in families but the precise mode of inheritance has not been worked out.  At one point in WE ALL HEAR VOICES Sylvia explains to Jack that special gifts are not as rare as we all think.  “Most people are so concerned with doing the ‘right thing’—with being accepted by other people,” she says. “The idea of standing out in a crowd scares them to death. They never see their gifts; they never know they exist. Sometimes, they get a glimpse, but it’s fleeting.”

            After reading VOICES, if you think that you might have synesthesia I have listed several websites on this page that can help provide some clarity. 

     I have also included a blog site  where you can share your thoughts about synesthesia and its role in art, literature and cooking. 

weallhearvoices.com/blog.html 

      If you are interested in learning more about the subject of synesthesia, I have included several resources:

Wikipedia, the free internet encyclopedia, has a very nice summary of the most recent information about the subject

Dr. Richard Cytowic has written several excellent books on the subject and his writing tends to be very accessible.  The Man Who Tasted Shapes is a delightful book as is his  Synesthesia: The Union of Senses.

The American Synesthesia Association and the UK Synaesthesia Association provide a series of resources and assistance.