Synesthesia in literature

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Fictional works that have main characters with synesthesia and non-fiction books to non-specialist audiences reflect the condition's influence in popular culture and how non-synesthetes view it. Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which one or more sensory modalities become linked. However, for over a century, synesthesia has also been the artistic and poetic devices that try to connect the senses.

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Not all depictions of synesthesia in the fictional works are accurate. Some are highly inaccurate and reflect more the author's interpretation of synesthesia than they do the phenomenon itself. For example, Edgar Allan Poe physiologically incorrectly explained synesthesia via a connection between tympanum and retina. [1] [2] Scientific works are intended to accurately depict synesthetic experiences. However, as research advances, subsequent studies may supersede or correct some of the specific details in older accounts.

In addition to its role in art, synesthesia has often been used as a plot device or as a way of developing a particular character's internal states. Synesthetes have appeared in novels including Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift and Invitation to a Beheading .

With the increased research into synesthesia from the 1990s into the twenty-first century, more novels have appeared with synesthete-characters. Since 2001, more than 15 novels featuring synesthete-characters have been published. Author and synesthete Patricia Lynne Duffy in her presentations on "Images of Synesthetes in Fiction" has described four ways in which synesthete characters have generally been used in modern fiction: (1) synesthesia as Romantic ideal; (2) synesthesia as pathology; (3) synesthesia as Romantic pathology; (4) synesthesia as health and balance for some individuals (Duffy 2006, 2007).

As romantic ideal

In Vladimir Nabokov's novel, The Gift, the main character Fyodor is a gifted young poet who experiences synesthesia. Fyodor's synesthetic experience of language is compared to that of nineteenth-century French Symbolist poet, Arthur Rimbaud (as expressed in the latter's poem, Voyelles about the perception of colored vowel sounds). Fyodor perceives a sublime beauty in letters and sounds, which he shares with others through poetic description: "If I had some paints handy, I would mix burnt sienna and sepia for you as to match the color of a 'ch' sound..and you would appreciate my radiant 's' if I could pour into your cupped hands some of those luminous sapphires that I touched as a child." In writing about synesthesia, Nabokov drew on his own synesthetic experiences, as detailed in his autobiography, Speak, Memory .

As pathology

Brain injuries can induce certain types of synesthetic experience. Duffy notes that a character's synesthesia is sometimes shown as a pathological condition related to brain injury. For example, in the novel, The Whole World Over by Julia Glass, the character Saga experiences words as having color after she has an accident that causes a head trauma. In the quote, Duffy illustrates how the perceived colors are a distraction for the character: "The word would fill her mind for a few minutes with a single color: not an unpleasant sensation but still an intrusion... Patriarch: Brown, she thought, a temple of a word, a shiny red brown, like the surface of a chestnut."

As romantic pathology

This category of synesthesia combines the previous two: the character's synesthesia is portrayed as pathology — but a "glorious" pathology, allowing them to perceive more sublime levels of reality. In Holly Payne's novel, The Sound of Blue , the character, Milan, a composer, perceives music as having beautiful color, but his synesthetic experience indicates an oncoming epileptic seizure: "Without color, he heard nothing. He filled notebooks with the sound of yellow and red. Purple. Green... Like Liszt and Stravinsky, Kandinsky and Rimbaud, Milan shared the multisensory perception of synesthetes, and unfortunately the seizures that about 4 per cent of them endured... Milan's epilepsy resulted from his multisensory experiences."

As health and balance for some individuals

Duffy argues that in this category of novel, the ability to perceive synesthetically represents health and balance for the particular character. When such characters experience emotional trauma, they lose the ability to perceive synesthetically. After the trauma is resolved, the character regains synesthetic perception, which represents health and wholeness for that individual. Examples of such characters are found in Jane Yardley's novel, Painting Ruby Tuesday and in Wendy Mass's children's novel, A Mango-Shaped Space. In the latter novel, the 13-year-old character, Mia loses her synesthesia after her beloved cat dies, but regains it after she works through the trauma. As her therapist tells her, "Your colors will return, Mia, I promise. And you'll feel three-dimensional again."

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Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, also known by the pen name Vladimir Sirin, was an expatriate Russian and Russian-American novelist, poet, translator, and entomologist. Born in Imperial Russia in 1899, Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian (1926–1938) while living in Berlin, where he met his wife. He achieved international acclaim and prominence after moving to the United States, where he began writing in English. Nabokov became an American citizen in 1945 and lived mostly on the East Coast before returning to Europe in 1961, where he settled in Montreux, Switzerland.

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The clavier à lumières, or tastiera per luce, as it appears in the score, was a musical instrument invented by Alexander Scriabin for use in his work Prometheus: Poem of Fire. Only one version of this instrument was constructed, for the performance of Prometheus: Poem of Fire in New York City in 1915. The instrument was supposed to be a keyboard, with notes corresponding to colors as given by Scriabin's synesthetic system, specified in the score. However, numerous synesthesia researchers have cast doubt on the claim that Scriabin was a synesthete.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Grapheme–color synesthesia</span> Synesthesia that associates numbers or letters with colors

Grapheme–color synesthesia or colored grapheme synesthesia is a form of synesthesia in which an individual's perception of numerals and letters is associated with the experience of colors. Like all forms of synesthesia, grapheme–color synesthesia is involuntary, consistent and memorable. Grapheme–color synesthesia is one of the most common forms of synesthesia and, because of the extensive knowledge of the visual system, one of the most studied.

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Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled. For example, in a form of synesthesia known as Grapheme → color synesthesia, letters or numbers may be perceived as inherently colored. In another, called number → form synesthesia, numbers are automatically and consistently associated with locations in space. In yet another form of synesthesia, called ordinal linguistic personification, either numbers, days of the week, or months of the year evoke personalities. In other forms of synesthesia, music and other sounds may be perceived as colored or having particular shapes. Recent research has begun to explore the neural basis of these experiences, drawing both on neuroscientific principles and on functional neuroimaging data.

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Synesthesia is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. There are many occurrences of synesthesia in books, television and film.

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Synesthesia or synaesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. For instance, people with synesthesia may experience colors when listening to music, see shapes when smelling certain scents, or perceive tastes when looking at words. People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes. Awareness of synesthetic perceptions varies from person to person with the perception of synesthesia differing based on an individual's unique life experiences and the specific type of synesthesia that they have. In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme–color synesthesia or color–graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored. In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, or days of the week elicit precise locations in space, or may appear as a three-dimensional map. Synesthetic associations can occur in any combination and any number of senses or cognitive pathways.

<i>Wednesday Is Indigo Blue</i> Book by Richard Cytowic

Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia is a 2009 non-fiction book written by Richard Cytowic and David Eagleman documenting the current scientific understanding of synesthesia, a perceptual condition where an experience of one sense causes an automatic and involuntary experience in another sense. The afterword is written by Dimitri Nabokov, a synesthete, and the son of the well-known author and synesthete Vladimir Nabokov.

Carol Steen is an artist, writer and curator who lives and works in New York. She has had over 20 solo gallery exhibitions, her first solo exhibition in 1973 was at the Detroit Institute of Arts, and her work has been in over 50 group exhibitions including shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Brookgreen Gardens Museum in South Carolina, the Cranbrook Museum in Michigan, and the DeCordova Museum in Massachusetts. Steen's work has also been exhibited at the Theatre for a New Audience in Brooklyn, NY, the Museum of Modern Art of Ukraine, and Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan.

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Berit Oskar Brogaard is a Danish–American philosopher specializing in the areas of cognitive neuroscience, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language. Her recent work concerns synesthesia, savant syndrome, blindsight and perceptual reports. She is professor of philosophy and runs a perception lab at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Florida. She was also co-editor of the Philosophical Gourmet Report until 2021.

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Ideasthesia is a neuropsychological phenomenon in which activations of concepts (inducers) evoke perception-like sensory experiences (concurrents). The name comes from the Ancient Greek ἰδέα and αἴσθησις, meaning 'sensing concepts' or 'sensing ideas'. The notion was introduced by neuroscientist Danko Nikolić as an alternative explanation for a set of phenomena traditionally covered by synesthesia.

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References

  1. Poe, Edgar Allan (November 1844). "Marginalia [part I]". United States Magazine and Democratic Review. 15: 484–494.
  2. Pérez Arranz, Cristina (2018). Edgar Allan Poe desde la imaginación científica (PhD). Universidad Complutense de Madrid. p. 73.

Duffy's presentations on "Images of Synesthetes in Fiction"