Subject
Synaesthesia
From
Date
Body
Sandy P. Klein <spklein52@hotmail.com>
The Scotsman
NEWS.scotsman.com
http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=116692003
Sat 1 Feb 2003
Colours by numbers
Zoe Strachan
On first meeting, one could be forgiven for thinking that Jane Yardley is a few
sandwiches short of a picnic. I arrived at her West London home to find her
rifling through her CD collection, cryptically commenting on each track for the
photographer and his assistant.
"Ah yes, sea-green," or, "White... and dots. White dots!"
It’s hard to avoid thinking of ten-year-old Annie in Jane’s debut novel,
Painting Ruby Tuesday, who "knew better than to make statements like this out
loud. People backed away. People made ‘loony’ gestures when they thought you
weren’t looking. Or sometimes even when they knew you were."
Jane is, however, eminently sane. It’s just that she’s one of the tiny
percentage of the population with synaesthesia. As Annie explains, "We see
things in colour that aren’t. Not just music. Numbers. Letters. Days of the
week. People’s names."
For Jane, not only do numbers an! d days of the week have colours, some of them
have personalities as well: "So three is rather bumptious and hostile, rather
sneering. Two is shy and retiring."
It can be hard to put a name to this experience, and those who admit to it are
often greeted with scepticism. "I first heard the word synaesthesia driving
round the North Circular about ten years ago," Jane says. "There was something
on Radio 4, and I didn’t even know how you would spell it. I’d never heard it
being scientifically investigated before, and it was very peculiar. They were
using the term ‘these people’, and I’d never been ‘these people’ before. They
said, ‘Of course, the first thing we have to do is check that these people are
not just making it up.’"
It can get stranger still. In The Man Who Tasted Shapes, neurologist Richard
Cytowic explains that he was prompted to investigate the condition after a
dinner party at which his host apologised for the fact that "there aren’t enough
points o! n the chicken" - he meant the sauce was too bland. For some people,
taste and smell are triggers, in the same way that music, letters and numbers
are for Jane Yardley. The word synaesthesia means a mingling of the senses,
coming from the Greek for "sensation" (aisthesis) and "union" (syn).
Clear as mud? Well, it might comfort you to know that the phenomenon confuses
scientists too. With debate raging among psychologists and neurologists as to
whether the colour associations are learned, or a leakage of sound data into
bits of the brain that usually deal with vision, or some kind of shaping of the
brain in response to environmental factors, only one thing’s for certain.
Extensive studies have proved that synaesthesia does exist. It’s absolutely
involuntary, and associations are not on the banal level of "blood" being a
runny red word, or "cloud" a fluffy white one. Nor do they appear in the mind’s
eye; they are quite distinctly out there. Jane compares it to a severe !
migraine, during which the sufferer might see blackness, or perhaps shapes such
as dots or ziggurats. With synaesthesia, however, there is no pain, although in
extremely rare cases people find they have to avoid very loud noise, such as
heavy traffic or wild parties. This is not the case with Jane, though, for whom
it’s always been "a life-enriching experience, to use that hackneyed phrase. I
don’t have any problems. Except I get confusion, so if two names are the same
colour, I muddle them up. I can’t distinguish between the names Fiona and
Catrina."
When she was doing her maths A-level, algebra posed a problem, as she found it
easy to mix up letters and numbers. "R and the number two are the same colour,
and three and S. I can’t immediately see the difference."
"It's life-enriching. I don't have any problems except that if two names are the
same colour, I muddle them up. I can't distinguish between the names Fiona and
Catrina"
Curiouser and curiouser. But Jane thinks it’s much more common than scientists
have suggested. "They say one in 2,000, but I don’t think this is true. First of
all, there are gradations. They’re talking about coloured numbers or letters.
Coloured hearing is rarer. Scientific research is based on volunteers who
respond to advertisements. If they don’t know they’re synaesthetic, they’re not
going to respond."
When she was growing up, in an Essex village very like the one in Painting Ruby
Tuesday, Jane was "an imaginative, dreamy sort of child". There wasn’t anyone
else with whom she could discuss her strange sensory experience. Nobody else
talked that way about music, or words, or numbers. Since she wrote her novel,
she’s been delighted to meet lot! s of other people with synaesthesia.
Painting Ruby Tuesday has a dual narrative, the sections set in the past telling
the story of Annie as a child, whose neighbours have an inconvenient habit of
being brutally murdered - including, devastatingly, her beloved fellow
synaesthete, the beautiful Mrs Clitheroe. In the present, the adult Annie has to
deal with a difficult marriage and an alluring ex-lover, and make the decision
whether or not to follow her scientist husband to New York. Past and present
collide when Jenny Clitheroe’s old photograph album turns up in a most
unexpected place, and Annie begins a quest to uncover exactly happened in the
summer of 1965. Yardley is in no doubt that her own synaesthesia was a great
inspiration.
"I had a relationship for a long time with an American, who was fascinated by my
synaesthesia. Absolutely fascinated by it. So that’s when I began to think,
maybe this is interesting. That was the trigger, I hadn’t intended from t! he
start to make the story about a girl with synaesthesia but I was thinking about
the Beatles and the Stones, and I wanted a title to work towards. Tuesday for me
is ruby red, so the song ‘Ruby Tuesday’ always had a resonance. Then I thought
of ‘Paint it Black’, and I knew it would be Painting Ruby Tuesday. And I knew
what it was about. I thought, of course she’s synaesthetic."
It was a subject which Jane found very easy to write about. There’s a lovely
scene where Annie watches Mrs Clitheroe interpret Mondrian’s painting Broadway
Boogie-Woogie for the piano. Chuck Berry and Beethoven’s Fifth morph into
exhilarating shades of green and red, until, "Mondrian’s shining lines
skyrocketed into the music, yellow as taxis." Jane smiles, "That was just laid
down, and never needed any editing."
She’s not alone in finding inspiration in her condition. Synaesthesia has
cropped up in art, music and literature since the early 19th century, but it was
in 1872 that it fou! nd a voice that couldn’t be ignored. Arthur Rimbaud’s
incendiary sonnet Voyelles quickly became a synaesthete anthem, beginning with
the line, "A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue - vowels."
The jury’s out on Rimbaud himself, however, with critics claiming that there is
insufficient evidence that he actually was synaesthetic. In his biography of the
poet, Graham Robb suggests that the inspiration for Voyelles more likely came
from a few too many evenings spent illuminating his mind with the delicious and
duplicitous "Green Fairy". He quotes Rimbaud’s friend, lover and attempted
murderer, Verlaine, as saying, "He couldn’t have cared less whether A was black
or white." It was a purely intellectual endeavour, an exploration of universal
harmony of the kind that swept through fin-de-siecle France in the wake of
Baudelaire.
Perhaps the most famous literary synaesthete of all is Nabokov. In Synaesthesia:
The Strangest Thing, David Harrison explains that not on! ly Nabokov but his
mother and his wife had coloured hearing. His son Dimitri saw colours which
sometimes seemed to be a mix of those experienced by his parents. Nabokov
described his own coloured alphabet in his autobiography, Speak, Memory: "The
long a of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a
French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g
(vulcanised rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l,
and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites."
Pretty daunting company for a debut novelist, and that’s without taking into
account artists and composers such as Kandinsky, David Hockney, Messaien and
Scriabin, all of whom have claimed, or been claimed, to be synaesthetic. On
Radio 3 recently, composer David Matthews spoke of writing his new cello
concerto as a kind of "striving towards the colour blue", explaining that "E
flat with the colour blue is one of my few colour associations".!
Perhaps not surprisingly, Jane believes it’s important to keep herself and her
work firmly grounded in the real world. "I learned to understand quickly that it
is a marketable commodity. I write comic novels. I hope they’re intelligent
comic novels."
Painting Ruby Tuesday is indeed a comic novel, but one which is elevated by the
music which flows through it, and the unusual and original descriptions of
Annie’s coloured perceptions, and how they link to memory and coincidence. A
phone number is retrieved from the depths of her mind by the similarity of the
digits to the colour of autumn: "I can hear beech woods crisp with bronze sixes;
rich, mulchy eights. Birches and their golden fives."
Despite its illustrious history, synaesthesia isn’t the sole preserve of artists
and musicians. For Maria, a bookseller, "Wednesday and three are green. I’ve
tried to rationalise it. I know I had coloured dominoes when I was a child, and
that the threes were green. B! ut I think they stick in my mind because the
colour came first, and the dominoes matched what already existed." Janice, an
advertising executive, finds that, "Friday, for example, has always been white.
These colours are just there, and they never change. So Friday will always be
white." When Yardley’s publicist, Prue, admitted that she thought of numbers as
masculine and feminine, Jane was quick to say, "Well, that’s synaesthesia."
Given her utter passion for art and music, it’s surprising that Jane’s own
background is in science. She works for a small Japanese pharmaceutical company,
flying around the world, bringing together specialist doctors and co-ordinating
clinical trials on patients. Painting Ruby Tuesday, in fact, was written on
aeroplanes and in hotel rooms in America, South Africa, France and Japan.
It’s hard to resist the notion that the adult Annie represents a little bit of
wish fulfilment on behalf of the author. Annie’s a successful musician,! who
writes scores and teaches students. It was important, Jane says, to write the
character not only as a child, but as "an adult who hadn’t quite grown up, who
still had that quirkiness. And also whose interest in popular music had produced
a career, despite her father saying it would never come to anything."
Jane’s teachers used to tell her that there was no point in filling her head
with pop music. Now she feels like shouting out loud, "There is, I’ve written
this novel!"
Regardless, Jane exudes the aura of a rock chick manquee, and had "a whim" not
drawn her into the world of the biological sciences, I suspect she could have
given Marianne Faithfull a run for her money. But she is no new-age space cadet
or Sixties acid casualty. "I’d be far too scared to try anything like that," she
says, and besides, with her synaesthesia she probably doesn’t need it.
Nevertheless, "Pink Floyd is the music that runs through my veins," she says
wistfully. I resist the te! mptation to ask whether Pink Floyd is, in fact,
pink.
She says that she’ll always write about music, but that Painting Ruby Tuesday
will probably be the only time she tackles the subject of synaesthesia. It was a
great disappointment to her that she wasn’t able to use lyrics from the Stones
songs which run through the novel, but copyright is owned by the notoriously
litigious Allen Klein and his company ABKCO, and they weren’t budging.
So far, Jane’s loving her writing career. One day, she hopes to see someone
laugh out loud while reading one of her books on the Tube, "Or better still,
miss their stop. I suppose you could say that I’d like to seriously
inconvenience people!"
Meanwhile, she’s editing her second novel, Rainy Day Women. This one’s about
teenagers, who, she warns, may not be quite as endearing as Annie. The cover
mock-up features a photo of her younger self, looking a dead ringer for Jane
Asher. And there’s a third book already in the pip! eline. All in all, things
are looking rosy.
If it wasn’t for fear of falling foul of ABKCO’s legal eagles, Jane Yardley
knows exactly how she’d sum up her intensely colourful life, "I know it’s only
rock and roll...!"
Painting Ruby Tuesday is published on Thursday (Doubleday, £12.99)
_______________________________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*
The Scotsman
NEWS.scotsman.com
http://news.scotsman.com/features.cfm?id=116692003
Sat 1 Feb 2003
Colours by numbers
Zoe Strachan
On first meeting, one could be forgiven for thinking that Jane Yardley is a few
sandwiches short of a picnic. I arrived at her West London home to find her
rifling through her CD collection, cryptically commenting on each track for the
photographer and his assistant.
"Ah yes, sea-green," or, "White... and dots. White dots!"
It’s hard to avoid thinking of ten-year-old Annie in Jane’s debut novel,
Painting Ruby Tuesday, who "knew better than to make statements like this out
loud. People backed away. People made ‘loony’ gestures when they thought you
weren’t looking. Or sometimes even when they knew you were."
Jane is, however, eminently sane. It’s just that she’s one of the tiny
percentage of the population with synaesthesia. As Annie explains, "We see
things in colour that aren’t. Not just music. Numbers. Letters. Days of the
week. People’s names."
For Jane, not only do numbers an! d days of the week have colours, some of them
have personalities as well: "So three is rather bumptious and hostile, rather
sneering. Two is shy and retiring."
It can be hard to put a name to this experience, and those who admit to it are
often greeted with scepticism. "I first heard the word synaesthesia driving
round the North Circular about ten years ago," Jane says. "There was something
on Radio 4, and I didn’t even know how you would spell it. I’d never heard it
being scientifically investigated before, and it was very peculiar. They were
using the term ‘these people’, and I’d never been ‘these people’ before. They
said, ‘Of course, the first thing we have to do is check that these people are
not just making it up.’"
It can get stranger still. In The Man Who Tasted Shapes, neurologist Richard
Cytowic explains that he was prompted to investigate the condition after a
dinner party at which his host apologised for the fact that "there aren’t enough
points o! n the chicken" - he meant the sauce was too bland. For some people,
taste and smell are triggers, in the same way that music, letters and numbers
are for Jane Yardley. The word synaesthesia means a mingling of the senses,
coming from the Greek for "sensation" (aisthesis) and "union" (syn).
Clear as mud? Well, it might comfort you to know that the phenomenon confuses
scientists too. With debate raging among psychologists and neurologists as to
whether the colour associations are learned, or a leakage of sound data into
bits of the brain that usually deal with vision, or some kind of shaping of the
brain in response to environmental factors, only one thing’s for certain.
Extensive studies have proved that synaesthesia does exist. It’s absolutely
involuntary, and associations are not on the banal level of "blood" being a
runny red word, or "cloud" a fluffy white one. Nor do they appear in the mind’s
eye; they are quite distinctly out there. Jane compares it to a severe !
migraine, during which the sufferer might see blackness, or perhaps shapes such
as dots or ziggurats. With synaesthesia, however, there is no pain, although in
extremely rare cases people find they have to avoid very loud noise, such as
heavy traffic or wild parties. This is not the case with Jane, though, for whom
it’s always been "a life-enriching experience, to use that hackneyed phrase. I
don’t have any problems. Except I get confusion, so if two names are the same
colour, I muddle them up. I can’t distinguish between the names Fiona and
Catrina."
When she was doing her maths A-level, algebra posed a problem, as she found it
easy to mix up letters and numbers. "R and the number two are the same colour,
and three and S. I can’t immediately see the difference."
"It's life-enriching. I don't have any problems except that if two names are the
same colour, I muddle them up. I can't distinguish between the names Fiona and
Catrina"
Curiouser and curiouser. But Jane thinks it’s much more common than scientists
have suggested. "They say one in 2,000, but I don’t think this is true. First of
all, there are gradations. They’re talking about coloured numbers or letters.
Coloured hearing is rarer. Scientific research is based on volunteers who
respond to advertisements. If they don’t know they’re synaesthetic, they’re not
going to respond."
When she was growing up, in an Essex village very like the one in Painting Ruby
Tuesday, Jane was "an imaginative, dreamy sort of child". There wasn’t anyone
else with whom she could discuss her strange sensory experience. Nobody else
talked that way about music, or words, or numbers. Since she wrote her novel,
she’s been delighted to meet lot! s of other people with synaesthesia.
Painting Ruby Tuesday has a dual narrative, the sections set in the past telling
the story of Annie as a child, whose neighbours have an inconvenient habit of
being brutally murdered - including, devastatingly, her beloved fellow
synaesthete, the beautiful Mrs Clitheroe. In the present, the adult Annie has to
deal with a difficult marriage and an alluring ex-lover, and make the decision
whether or not to follow her scientist husband to New York. Past and present
collide when Jenny Clitheroe’s old photograph album turns up in a most
unexpected place, and Annie begins a quest to uncover exactly happened in the
summer of 1965. Yardley is in no doubt that her own synaesthesia was a great
inspiration.
"I had a relationship for a long time with an American, who was fascinated by my
synaesthesia. Absolutely fascinated by it. So that’s when I began to think,
maybe this is interesting. That was the trigger, I hadn’t intended from t! he
start to make the story about a girl with synaesthesia but I was thinking about
the Beatles and the Stones, and I wanted a title to work towards. Tuesday for me
is ruby red, so the song ‘Ruby Tuesday’ always had a resonance. Then I thought
of ‘Paint it Black’, and I knew it would be Painting Ruby Tuesday. And I knew
what it was about. I thought, of course she’s synaesthetic."
It was a subject which Jane found very easy to write about. There’s a lovely
scene where Annie watches Mrs Clitheroe interpret Mondrian’s painting Broadway
Boogie-Woogie for the piano. Chuck Berry and Beethoven’s Fifth morph into
exhilarating shades of green and red, until, "Mondrian’s shining lines
skyrocketed into the music, yellow as taxis." Jane smiles, "That was just laid
down, and never needed any editing."
She’s not alone in finding inspiration in her condition. Synaesthesia has
cropped up in art, music and literature since the early 19th century, but it was
in 1872 that it fou! nd a voice that couldn’t be ignored. Arthur Rimbaud’s
incendiary sonnet Voyelles quickly became a synaesthete anthem, beginning with
the line, "A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue - vowels."
The jury’s out on Rimbaud himself, however, with critics claiming that there is
insufficient evidence that he actually was synaesthetic. In his biography of the
poet, Graham Robb suggests that the inspiration for Voyelles more likely came
from a few too many evenings spent illuminating his mind with the delicious and
duplicitous "Green Fairy". He quotes Rimbaud’s friend, lover and attempted
murderer, Verlaine, as saying, "He couldn’t have cared less whether A was black
or white." It was a purely intellectual endeavour, an exploration of universal
harmony of the kind that swept through fin-de-siecle France in the wake of
Baudelaire.
Perhaps the most famous literary synaesthete of all is Nabokov. In Synaesthesia:
The Strangest Thing, David Harrison explains that not on! ly Nabokov but his
mother and his wife had coloured hearing. His son Dimitri saw colours which
sometimes seemed to be a mix of those experienced by his parents. Nabokov
described his own coloured alphabet in his autobiography, Speak, Memory: "The
long a of the English alphabet has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a
French a evokes polished ebony. This black group also includes hard g
(vulcanised rubber) and r (a sooty rag being ripped). Oatmeal n, noodle-limp l,
and the ivory-backed hand mirror of o take care of the whites."
Pretty daunting company for a debut novelist, and that’s without taking into
account artists and composers such as Kandinsky, David Hockney, Messaien and
Scriabin, all of whom have claimed, or been claimed, to be synaesthetic. On
Radio 3 recently, composer David Matthews spoke of writing his new cello
concerto as a kind of "striving towards the colour blue", explaining that "E
flat with the colour blue is one of my few colour associations".!
Perhaps not surprisingly, Jane believes it’s important to keep herself and her
work firmly grounded in the real world. "I learned to understand quickly that it
is a marketable commodity. I write comic novels. I hope they’re intelligent
comic novels."
Painting Ruby Tuesday is indeed a comic novel, but one which is elevated by the
music which flows through it, and the unusual and original descriptions of
Annie’s coloured perceptions, and how they link to memory and coincidence. A
phone number is retrieved from the depths of her mind by the similarity of the
digits to the colour of autumn: "I can hear beech woods crisp with bronze sixes;
rich, mulchy eights. Birches and their golden fives."
Despite its illustrious history, synaesthesia isn’t the sole preserve of artists
and musicians. For Maria, a bookseller, "Wednesday and three are green. I’ve
tried to rationalise it. I know I had coloured dominoes when I was a child, and
that the threes were green. B! ut I think they stick in my mind because the
colour came first, and the dominoes matched what already existed." Janice, an
advertising executive, finds that, "Friday, for example, has always been white.
These colours are just there, and they never change. So Friday will always be
white." When Yardley’s publicist, Prue, admitted that she thought of numbers as
masculine and feminine, Jane was quick to say, "Well, that’s synaesthesia."
Given her utter passion for art and music, it’s surprising that Jane’s own
background is in science. She works for a small Japanese pharmaceutical company,
flying around the world, bringing together specialist doctors and co-ordinating
clinical trials on patients. Painting Ruby Tuesday, in fact, was written on
aeroplanes and in hotel rooms in America, South Africa, France and Japan.
It’s hard to resist the notion that the adult Annie represents a little bit of
wish fulfilment on behalf of the author. Annie’s a successful musician,! who
writes scores and teaches students. It was important, Jane says, to write the
character not only as a child, but as "an adult who hadn’t quite grown up, who
still had that quirkiness. And also whose interest in popular music had produced
a career, despite her father saying it would never come to anything."
Jane’s teachers used to tell her that there was no point in filling her head
with pop music. Now she feels like shouting out loud, "There is, I’ve written
this novel!"
Regardless, Jane exudes the aura of a rock chick manquee, and had "a whim" not
drawn her into the world of the biological sciences, I suspect she could have
given Marianne Faithfull a run for her money. But she is no new-age space cadet
or Sixties acid casualty. "I’d be far too scared to try anything like that," she
says, and besides, with her synaesthesia she probably doesn’t need it.
Nevertheless, "Pink Floyd is the music that runs through my veins," she says
wistfully. I resist the te! mptation to ask whether Pink Floyd is, in fact,
pink.
She says that she’ll always write about music, but that Painting Ruby Tuesday
will probably be the only time she tackles the subject of synaesthesia. It was a
great disappointment to her that she wasn’t able to use lyrics from the Stones
songs which run through the novel, but copyright is owned by the notoriously
litigious Allen Klein and his company ABKCO, and they weren’t budging.
So far, Jane’s loving her writing career. One day, she hopes to see someone
laugh out loud while reading one of her books on the Tube, "Or better still,
miss their stop. I suppose you could say that I’d like to seriously
inconvenience people!"
Meanwhile, she’s editing her second novel, Rainy Day Women. This one’s about
teenagers, who, she warns, may not be quite as endearing as Annie. The cover
mock-up features a photo of her younger self, looking a dead ringer for Jane
Asher. And there’s a third book already in the pip! eline. All in all, things
are looking rosy.
If it wasn’t for fear of falling foul of ABKCO’s legal eagles, Jane Yardley
knows exactly how she’d sum up her intensely colourful life, "I know it’s only
rock and roll...!"
Painting Ruby Tuesday is published on Thursday (Doubleday, £12.99)
_______________________________________________________________________________________
STOP MORE SPAM with the new MSN 8 and get 2 months FREE*