Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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 as a child and the number 5 was red and 6 was green. This the-
people who have synesthesia. They experience the ordinary ory does not answer why only some people retain such vivid
world in extraordinary ways and seem to inhabit a mysterious sensory memories, however. You might think of cold when you
no-mans-land between fantasy and reality. For them the sens- look at a picture of an ice cube, but you probably do not feel
es touch, taste, hearing, vision and smell get mixed up in- cold, no matter how many encounters you may have had with
stead of remaining separate. ice and snow during your youth.
Modern scientists have known about synesthesia since Another prevalent idea is that synesthetes are merely being
1880, when Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, pub- metaphorical when they describe the note C flat as red or say
lished a paper in Nature on the phenomenon. But most have that chicken tastes pointy just as you and I might speak of
brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and a loud shirt or sharp cheddar cheese. Our ordinary lan-
mescaline can produce similar effects) or a mere curiosity. guage is replete with such sense-related metaphors, and perhaps
About four years ago, however, we and others began to un- synesthetes are just especially gifted in this regard.
cover brain processes that could account for synesthesia. Along We began trying to find out whether synesthesia is a gen-
the way, we also found new clues to some of the most mysteri- uine sensory experience in 1999. This deceptively simple ques-
ous aspects of the human mind, such as the emergence of ab- tion had plagued researchers in this field for decades. One nat-
stract thought, metaphor and perhaps even language. ural approach is to start by asking the subjects outright: Is this
DAVID EMMITE
A common explanation of synesthesia is that the affected just a memory, or do you actually see the color as if it were right
people are simply experiencing childhood memories and asso- in front of you? When we tried asking this question, we did
ciations. Maybe a person had played with refrigerator magnets not get very far. Some subjects did respond, Oh, I see it per-
tween the taste cortex in a region called bers whereas others see colors when they by blocking the action of an inhibitory
the insula and an adjacent cortex repre- hear phonemes or musical notes. People neurotransmitter or failing to produce an
AND VILAYANUR S. RAMACHANDRAN AND EDWARD M. HUBBARD (inset)
senting touch by the hands. who have one type of synesthesia are more inhibitor would also cause activity in
Assuming that neural cross wiring likely to have another, which adds weight one area to elicit activity in a neighbor.
does lie at the root of synesthesia, why to this idea. Such cross activation could, in theory, also
does it happen? We know that it runs in Although we initially thought in terms occur between widely separated areas,
families, so it has a genetic component. of physical cross wiring, we have come to which would account for some of the less
Perhaps a mutation causes connections to realize that the same effect could occur if common forms of synesthesia.
emerge between brain areas that are usu- the wiring the number of connections Support for cross activation comes
ally segregated. Or maybe the mutation between regionswas fine but the balance from other experiments, some of which
leads to defective pruning of preexisting of chemicals traveling between regions also help to explain the varied forms
connections between areas that are nor- was skewed. So we now speak in terms of synesthesia can take. One takes advan-
mally connected only sparsely. If the mu- cross activation. For instance, neighboring tage of a visual phenomenon known as
tation were to be expressed (that is, to ex- brain regions often inhibit one anothers crowding [see illustration on opposite
ert its effects) in some brain areas but not activity, which serves to minimize cross page]. If you stare at a small plus sign in
others, this patchiness might explain why talk. A chemical imbalance of some kind an image that also has a number 5 off to
some synesthetes conflate colors and num- that reduces such inhibitionfor example, one side, you will find that it is easy to dis-
thesia. Ramachandran directs the Center for Brain and Cognition at the University of Califor- within the fusiform gyrus itself in num-
nia at San Diego and is adjunct professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. He trained ber-color synesthesia, because that struc-
as a physician and later obtained a Ph.D. from Trinity College, University of Cambridge. He has ture is mainly involved in analyzing the vi-
received a fellowship from All Souls College, University of Oxford, the Ariens Kappers Gold Medal sual shape, not the high-level meaning of
from the Royal Netherlands Academy, and the plenary lecture award from the American Acad- the number. One intriguing twist: Imag-
emy of Neurology. He gave the BBC Reith Lectures for 2003. This is his fourth article for Sci- ine an image with a large 5 made up of lit-
entific American. Hubbard is a fourth-year graduate student in the departments of psycholo- tle 3s; you can see either the forest (the
gy and cognitive science at U.C.S.D. His research combines psychophysics and functional mag- 5) or focus minutely on the trees (the
DAVID EMMITE
netic resonance imaging to explore the neural basis of multisensory phenomena. A founding 3s). Two synesthete subjects reported
member of the American Synesthesia Association, he helped to organize its second annual that they saw the color switch, depending
meeting at U.C.S.D. in 2001. on their focus. This test implies that even
activated when he sees numbers. higher synesthetes show less activation at phor involves making links between
In brain-imaging experiments we are these earlier levels. seemingly unrelated conceptual realms.
conducting with Geoff Boynton of the Perhaps this is not just a coincidence.
Salk Institute for Biological Studies in San A Way with Metaphor Numerous high-level concepts are
Diego, we have obtained preliminary ev- O U R I N S I G H T S into the neurological probably anchored in specific brain re-
idence of local activation of the color area basis of synesthesia could help explain gions, or maps. If you think about it, there
V4 in a manner predicted by our cross- some of the creativity of painters, poets is nothing more abstract than a number,
MAY 2003
THE PUZZLE OF LANGUAGE
produce an equally sudden inflection of the IF ASKED which of the two figures below is a bouba and which is a kiki, 98
tongue on the palate (or consider the spoken percent of all respondents choose the blob as a bouba and the other as a kiki. The
authors argue that the brains ability to pick out an abstract feature in common
words diminutive, teeny-weeny and un
such as a jagged visual shape and a harsh-sounding namecould have paved
peu, which involve pursing the lips to mimic the way for the development of metaphor and perhaps even a shared vocabulary.
the small size of the object. The brain seems
to possess preexisting rules for translating
what we see and hear into mouth motions
that reflect those inputs.
Second, a kind of spillover of signals
occurs between two nearby motor areas:
those that control the sequence of muscle
movements required for hand gestures and
those for the mouth. We call this effect
synkinesia. As Charles Darwin pointed out,
when we cut paper with scissors, our jaws
may clench and unclench unconsciously as if
to echo the hand movements. Many linguists gestures were translated through synkinesia
do not like the theory that manual gesturing into movements of the mouth and face
could have set the stage for vocal language, muscles, and if emotional guttural
but we believe that synkinesia suggests that utterances were channeled through these
they may be wrong. mouth and tongue movements, the result psychologist Patricia Greenfield of the
Assume that our ancestral hominids could have been the first spoken words. University of California at Los Angeles, we
communicated mainly through emotional How would we import syntax, the rules propose that frontal brain areas that evolved
grunts, groans, howls and shrieks, which are for using words and phrases in language, into for subassembly in tool use may later have
known to be produced by the right hemisphere this scheme? We believe that the evolution been co-opted for a completely novel
and an area in the frontal lobes concerned of tool use by hominids may have played an function joining words into phrases and
with emotion. Later the hominids developed a important role. For example, the tool- sentences.
rudimentary gestural system that became building sequence first shape the Not every subtle feature of modern
gradually more elaborate and sophisticated; hammers head, then attach it to a handle, language is explained by such schemes, but we
it is easy to imagine how the hand movement then chop the meat resembles the suspect that these elements were critical for
for pulling someone toward you might have embedding of clauses within larger setting in motion the events that culminated
progressed to a come hither wave. If such sentences. Following the lead of in modern language. V.S.R. and E.M.H.
vided seeds for language [see box above]. Synaesthesia: A Window into Perception, Thought and Language. V. S. Ramachandran and
When we began our research on E. M. Hubbard in Journal of Consciousness Studies, Vol. 8, No. 12, pages 334; 2001.
synesthesia, we had no inkling of where Synaesthetic Photisms Influence Visual Perception. D. Smilek, M. J. Dixon, C. Cudahy and M. Merikle
it would take us. Little did we suspect in Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, Vol. 13, No. 7, pages 930936; 2001.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging of Synesthesia: Activation of V4/V8 by Spoken Words.
that this eerie phenomenon, long regard- J. A. Nunn, L. J. Gregory, M. Brammer, S.C.R. Williams, D. M. Parslow, M. J. Morgan, R. G. Morris,
ed as a mere curiosity, might offer a win- E. T. Bullmore, S. Baron-Cohen and J. A. Gray in Nature Neuroscience, Vol. 5, pages 371375; 2002.
dow into the nature of thought. For more on synesthetia, visit www.sciam.com/ontheweb