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The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series Auctions, Timothy P. Hubbard and Harry J. Paarsch Cloud Computing, Nayan Ruparelia Computing: A Concise History, Paul E. Ceruzzi The Conscious Mind, Zoltan L. Torey Crowdsourcing, Daren C. Brabham Free Will, Mark Balaguer The Future, Nick Montfort Information and Society, Michael Buckland Information and the Modern Corporation, James W. Cortada Intellectual Property Strategy, John Palfrey The Internet of Things, Samuel Greengard Machine Learning: The New AI, Ethem Alpaydin Machine Translation, Thierry Poibeau Memes in Digital Culture, Limor Shifman Metadata, Jeffrey Pomerantz The Mind–Body Problem, Jonathan Westphal MOOCs, Jonathan Haber Neuroplasticity, Moheb Costandi Open Access, Peter Suber Paradox, Margaret Cuonzo Post-Truth, Lee McIntyre Robots, John Jordan Self-Tracking, Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus Sustainability, Kent E. Portney Synesthesia, Richard E. Cytowic The Technological Singularity, Murray Shanahan Understanding Beliefs, Nils J. Nilsson Waves, Frederic Raichlen Synesthesia Richard E. Cytowic, M.D., M.F.A. The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England © 2018 Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. This book was set in Chaparral Pro by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Cytowic, Richard E. Title: Synesthesia / Richard E. Cytowic, M.D. Description: Cambridge, MA : MIT Press, [2018] | Series: The MIT Press essential knowledge series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017038744 | ISBN 9780262535090 (pbk. : alk. paper) eISBN 9780262346276 Subjects: LCSH: Synesthesia. Classification: LCC RC394.S93 C963 2018 | DDC 152.1/89--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038744 ePub Version 1.0 Also by Richard E. Cytowic Wednesday Is Indigo Blue (with David Eagleman)—Winner of the Montaigne Medal The Man Who Tasted Shapes Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses (2nd edition) Nerve Block for Common Pain The Neurological Side of Neuropsychology To Margaret November 11, 1925–August 25, 2017 Table of Contents Series page Title page Copyright page Also by Richard E. Cytowic Dedication Series Foreword Preface 1 What Synesthesia Is and Isn’t 2 A Brief Two-Hundred-Year History 3 Alphabets, Numerals, and Refrigerator Magnet Patterns 4 Five Distinct Clusters 5 Just How Constrained Is Your Umwelt? 6 Chemosensation: Citrus Feels Prickly, Coffee Tastes Oily Green, and White Paint Smells Blue 7 See with Your Ears 8 Orgasms, Aura, Emotions, and Touch 9 Number Forms and Spatial Sequences 10 Acquired Synesthesia: More Different Than Same 11 Mechanisms Glossary Further Reading Index About Author Color Plates List of Tables Table 3.1 Shades of Green for Nonsynesthetes and Synesthetes Table 4.1 Frequency of Synesthesia Types Based on 1,143 Individuals Table 6.1 Shapes Smelled by AJ Table 6.2 Sounds Named according to Tastes Experienced by ES Table 6.3 Critical Phoneme Triggers for JW’s Synesthetic Tastes Table 7.1 Age of Acquisition for Cognitive Traits and Synesthesia Types Table 7.2 Laurel Smith’s Kinetic Postures Induced by a Base Line Harmony Table 10.1 Inducer-Concurrent Couplings Table 10.2 Comparison of Phenomenological Features of Different Synesthesia Types List of Illustrations Figure 1.1 Masking, wherein a figure projected into one’s peripheral vision becomes invisible when surrounded by other items. Synesthetes likewise cannot make out the masked digit, but nonetheless perceive a color. See color plate 1. Figure 1.2 A field of 5s in which a pattern outlined by 2s is hidden. Synesthetes who see 2s as differently colored than 5s have an advantage in visual searches and more quickly find the oddballs. See color plate 2. Figure 2.1 Peer-reviewed papers about synesthesia by decade from 1850 through 2016. The turn of the twentieth century saw considerable interest, but then came a considerable drop during the decades that behaviorism held sway as the dominant psychological paradigm. Behaviorism’s height of popularity occurred between 1920 and 1940. The recent decades show a dramatic increase in interest, indicating a second renaissance of synesthesia research. Figure 3.1 Subtle variations in color saturation depending on the visual features of a given typeface for synesthete CC Hart. See color plate 3. Figure 3.2 Example of a grapheme-color synesthete whose induced colors vanish when graphemes are presented at low contrast. The letter F at 40, 30, and 10 percent, and 10 percent on a second occasion (top). The letter F at 5, 4, and 2 percent contrast (middle). The letter H at 30 and 5 percent; B at 30 percent (bottom). See color plate 4. Figure 3.3 A Navon figure has a global feature (in this case it looks like a 5) as well as a local feature, here the small 2s that make up the 5 configuration. In 1977, David Navon showed that global features are perceived more quickly than local ones (a trait called global precedence). When synesthetes shift their attention back and forth from global to local, the perceived color changes. David Navon, “Forest before Trees: The Precedence of Global Features in Visual Perception,” Cognitive Psychology 9, no. 3 (1977): 353–383. See color plate 5. Figure 3.4 In grapheme-based synesthesia, homonyms look different. Often, the first letter “shades” the entire word (first-letter effect), whereas vowels tend to lighten or darken it. See color plate 6. Figure 4.1 Five distinct groups of synesthesia. N = 12,127. The radius of each type is proportional to the probability of independently expressing that type. From Scott Novich, Sherry Cheng, and David M. Eagleman, “Is Synaesthesia One Condition or Many? A Large-Scale Analysis Reveals Subgroups,” Journal of Neuropsychology 5, no. 2 (2011): 353–371. Figure 4.2 The spatial location where Sean Day sees his photisms: about thirty degrees up from the horizontal plane, and thirty degrees lateral to the sagittal plane. The distance from self to the percept varies depending on the source (e.g., voice versus music). Courtesy of Joy A. Day. See color plate 7. Figure 5.1 Humans are sensitive to less than a ten-trillionth slice of the universe’s energy spectrum, which covers a billionfold span. We simply lack the biological sensors to sample other parts of the electromagnetic spectrum, and so our “reality,” or umwelt, consists only of what we can perceive. Brain-machine interfaces such as cochlear and retinal implants as well as sensory-substitution devices can change and enlarge this. See color plate 8. Figure 5.2 Lawful and orderly relationships among different aspects of sensation increase or decrease in step with other variables (i.e., they are “monotonic”). Increasing darkness also becomes larger, louder, and lower in pitch, for example. Color priming sways observers to believe that white wine surreptitiously colored red is actually red wine. Smell and taste judgements are also affected. See color plate 9. Figure 5.3 A sample menu from the Synesthesia Dinner put on by Michelin chef Jozef Youssef, Oxford University gastrophysicist Charles Spence, and the team at Kitchen Theory. Figure 5.4 Perception, memory, and metaphor are all interrelated and embodied. We conceive of them only from the reference point of having a physical body attached to our brain. Courtesy of the author. See color plate 10. Figure 7.1 Carol Steen’s Cyto sculpture, bronze and steel with blue patination, conveys the shape, color, and twisting movement of the first two syllables of Dr. Cytowic’s name (left). The shape of Dr. Cytowic’s (misspelled) spoken name as seen by Mike Morrow (right). Figure 8.1 The generic shapes of Klüver’s form constants are common to hallucinations, synesthesia, imagery, and other cross-modal associations. Figure 9.1 Sequences seen by Colleen Silva. Figure 9.2 Colleen Silva’s perceptions of her age and history. Her personal forms have changed as she has aged. Figure 9.3 Calendar and month forms for Marti Pike (left). June is topmost, and July– September take up more space than the other months. Brownish November contains a nested serpentine form for the days of that month. “Highlighted” days such as 7, 13, 16, and 25–26 mark appointments, birthdays, and special occasions. These aid her memory. Overlapping three-dimensional spirals mark the hours and minutes of a given day (right). The Xs indicate the positions where she can look from different vantage points. For further details, see the text and color plate 11. Figure 10.1 Pareilolias are common drug-induced visualizations compared to those seen in developmental synesthesia. Figure 11.1 Diminished inhibition leads to spreading activity. When inhibition levels are normal (a), activity in one area stays sequestered because inhibition counterbalances excitation. With diminished inhibition (b), activity in one area spreads unhindered to excite the other. See color plate 12. Figure 11.2 The schematic proposes that neurons coding for graphemes and those coding for colors connect with varying strengths. Because of this, some graphemes can drive activity in the color area above the threshold for consciousness, represented by the upper plane, while other grapheme activations are too weak and remain below the level of detection. See color plate 13. Figure 11.3 The set-up for Edwin Land’s color Mondrian demonstration. See text and color plate 14. Figure 11.4 Physics of Land’s “color Mondrian” experiment in which identical energy fluxes reaching the eye nevertheless yield different color sensations. See color plate 15. Figure 11.5 Sketch of Isadora Duncan, Abraham Walkowitz (American, 1878–1965). See color plate 16. Series Foreword The MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers accessible, concise, beautifully produced pocket-size books on topics of current interest.