Synesthesia

Does the color blue taste like dirty laundry? Like SweetTarts? Like beef jerky? Like mud?

Synesthesia is a brain condition that creates just this sort of sensory crossover.  Some synthesthetes “smell” colors or “taste” words. For these people, sounds can be cold or damp or spiked, and scents may have distinct textures.  

It's a condition that runs in families, and might affect as many as one in every two dozen people.  The crossover is not universal (not everyone tastes green as mint, but there is some overlap from person to person...) Oh -- and the condition sometimes visits the brain with help from traumatic brain injury, seizure disorder, psychedelic drugs.

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Vladimir Nabokov, famously, had one of the most common forms of this condition called grapheme-synthesthesia or “color reading.” Both he and his wife Vera associated colors with various letters. In his memoir, Speak Memory, he writes that the “V” of his own name is “quartz pink” and the number 5 is red. Regardless the typographical convention, the Arabic numeral 5 was red to him. 

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There's a whole lot more to say about synthesethia -- research means to search again, right? -- but at the end of my reading and Googling and day-dreaming about colors and smells and neurological conditions, it comes back to this rather bootless question: 

If Nabokov were 27 today, brilliant and multi-lingual, fascinated by butterflies and riddles, chess problems and multi-layered puns, seeing words in color -- what would he be doing with himself? 

Would he be one of those writers who sticks with a Bic pen and a college-ruled notebook? 

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Maybe Nabokov would be creating a role-playing game with hyperlinks and imbedded trapdoors and puzzles to decode.

Or would he have chosen to follow his bliss into science, studying butterflies for a living, becoming an even more accomplished lepidopterologist? 

And what -- probably most to the point -- would Vera have suggested?  

Definition: Bootless, (adj.) (archaic)

• (of a task or undertaking) ineffectual; useless:
• "remonstrating with him seems ever to have been a bootless task

."

--from the Oxford Dictionary online 

The Brain That Ate Paris!

According to Paul MacLean’s triune brain theory, we can divide the brain into three parts (like Gaul, the Universe, and every other random thing). 

At the core is the reptilian brain, which keeps a body breathing and startling at stimuli. Around the outside, the brainy Neocortex holds onto science, language, art, math, and questions and answers for "Jeopardy!"  

In between is the limbic system, which includes brain structures with wonderful names like the hippocampus, the amygdala and the hypothalamus. The limbic system provides emotion -- and through them judgement (take that, Mr. Spock!).  

In The Man Who Tasted Shapes (GP Putnam's Sons, New York, 1993) author Richard E. Cytowic suggests that we are all born with some degree of synesthesia but learn to filter it out. The limbic system sorts data and selects what's salient, and then passes the data on to the Neocortex, which in turn creates our "reality."

Believe me when I say that it gives me an actual pain to spare you Cytowic's fascinating explanation.