It might sound airy fairy to you but this ‘merging of the senses’ is as solid in me as the pain felt from stubbing my pinky toe on the unforgiving steel plant stand in my kitchen. I thought everyone experienced what I do and it shocked me when I realized the truth. I always assumed we are all the same especially when my brother described the pain he felt one day in his side as green. It turns out he’s not synaesthesic. None of my family is. It’s supposed to be hereditary though. I’ve never met anyone who is either. Not that I bring it up much, mainly because no one EVER knows what I’m talking about so there’s no chance I’ll get anything out of the interaction, so I don’t bother. There was one time I did mention it and I was slammed as a liar. That was at a friends’ big birthday bash down at the surf club a few years back. A bunch of us were talking near the bar and I was explaining it to them and this one know it all woman, yes you know the type, goes “I don’t believe in it” like I was trying to convert her to some zealous religious sect or something. I couldn’t care less about her rebuttal but her response made me realize that I probably sounded like a lunatic. So here I am telling you about it. You can take it or leave it too of course. I won’t hold it against you if you conclude I’m a looney tune if that suits you. I’m okay with that.
Synaesthesia n. sensation produced in part of the body by stimulus elsewhere; production of mental sense-impression by stimulation of another sense.
That’s the definition of synaesthesia from my 1988 Concise Oxford Dictionary. When I hear sounds, I see in my mind’s eye shapes and colours. These shapes and forms and images change as the components of the sound changes. I love listening to techno music with synth sounds because they give me these fluid smooth and soothing patterns and lines that flow into each other. I haven’t taken LSD but I’d imagine what I ‘see’ is a slightly more restrained form of that sort of drug-induced, colourful and expansive trip. Lucky aren’t I, getting free trips all the time. Ying and yang though, loud piercing sounds give me harsh shapes and snapping sharp colours. One thing I’d really hate is to live next to a noisy traffic intersection with all the hideous patterns and forms that go with that type of constant audio stimuli.
Some people remember faces and or names, I remember voices. Each person’s way of speaking is unique and has its own indelible and unchangeable signature. Some voices I love, some just annoy the absolute hell out of me thanks to their particular set of squiggles and lines. I hear some people talk and I think, how can anyone be married to that? Luckily, I have a reliable audio memory that balances out the fact that I cannot remember people’s faces or names. In fact names can become a problem because of my synaesthesia due to what colour hair and complexion they have. How this works, or rather, doesn’t work is, when I think of or see letters in the alphabet, I see a colour with each letter. Each letter has its own unchanging fixed shade. Together, a bunch of letters form a word and that word I see as a whole colour, usually with the colour I see matching closely the first capital letter. Where it becomes confusing for me is if I meet someone or know someone who is say blonde haired and pale with a name spelt Katherine not Catherine with a C. To me, Katherine should be someone darker and brunette because K is dark blue in the word Katherine and Catherine should have an overall paler face because C to me is cream. Mix them up and I’m stuffed.
Right now, I am listening to the neighbour’s lawn being mown and it looks roughly like this; …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. . As you can see, no rocks or sticks on their grass and no backfires, a dark subdued brown in colour running along a similar toned background, small dashes and not too bright because it is in the distance, low in pitch and not right outside my door. If it were closer and louder and running over rubble, the line would be jagged, thicker, sharper edged and brighter and depending on pitch, lighter or darker plus a different colour. The background would also most likely be more contrasty like a pale one that makes the darker pattern more sharp and defined. Yukky in other words.
What I do like about what I see is it is way more accurate than other facets of my memory and I can trust it. The other night I heard one of the distinctive calls of a Yellow-bellied glider. I saw an image of something akin to a question mark with the vertical base line forming a twisting, almost spiraling pattern at the end of the call. Listening to the call from an app, gave me an almost identical image. Other possum calls from other species, (of which I have studied as part of my PhD, Scent marking and vocal communication in the rock-haunting possum Petropseudes dahli 2004), are completely different and give me their own specific signature imagery.
Although what I experience can be a kind of painful intrusion sometimes, at least it’s not as painful as my repeated stubbing of my little toe in the kitchen. I also have to be happy that my synaesthesia sight is as accurate as any photograph and it is more detailed than flat photos as I usually see 3D imagery like a hologram. Oh and it’s free for me.
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