Week of January 10, 2001

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Host Dr. Fred Goodwin begins the show referring to examples of sensory overlap that anyone can relate to: a loud color, a sharp taste, . Dr. Goodwin then explains that synesthesia is a similar merging of the senses, that is involuntary. Goodwin says synesthesia might be explained by the fact that different sensory pathways run across one another in the brain.

Our first guest is Cynthia Cochran, a therapist and synesthete who lives outside Savannah, Georgia. She talks about her experiences both seeing sound and hearing vision. She gives an example of the sound of static on her radio manifesting as a gray, sausage shape that snaked from her radio into her car. Cochran didn’t know that other people had synesthesia and that the phenomenon had a name until her husband recently came across the term on the Internet.

Dr. Peter Grossenbacher is the next guest. Grossenbacher is a professor of psychology at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado and a board member of the American Synesthesia Association. He describes the many forms of synesthesia, including sound-to-sight, hearing-to-sight, and, the most common form, color-number association. With that type of synesthesia, people see numbers and letters as having their own colors. He says there is some objective evidence of the phenomenon, including brain scans that show that parts of the brain are active in people during synesthetic experiences that are not in non-synesthetes. Dr. Grossenbacher says that synesthetic visions that accompany either sound or touch don’t usually disrupt or replace other kinds of perception and are often “seen” in what’s called “the mind’s eye.”

He also discusses some more unusual forms of synesthesia, including sounds being experienced as touch or associated with different positions of the body. Grossenbacher says that, while synesthesia is not yet well understood, the phenomenon may have to do with the brain’s “normal architecture,” in which neuron pathways go in two directions. He also says there are many parts of the brain in which at least two senses converge. The incidence of synesthesia, he says, is sometimes estimated at one in 2,000, but may actually be as common as one in 300. To reach Peter Grossenbacher or find out more about the American Synesthesia Association, you can email him at peterg@naropa.edu

We hear next about how synesthesia is used in work. Reporter Sharon Lerner spoke with Cynthia Kurtz, a researcher who uses her association of letters and numbers with colors to read more quickly and write better. Kurtz says that if a sentence is grammatically incorrect, it can look like it’s exploding. We also hear from Carol Steen, an artist who makes sculpture and paintings based on the shapes she sees with sounds and touch. Then language teacher and author, Pat Duffy, talks about how she used her the colors she associates with the letters of the Western alphabet to learn Chinese. To get in touch with Carol Steen or find out more about her work, you can contact her at rednote@infohouse.com

Next, we hear from The Infinite Mind’s commentator, John Hockenberry, who talks about the whimsical nature of the body’s nerves. Perception, he says, has a complicated relationship with reality.

  Finally, Dmitri Nabokov discusses synesthesia he shares with his father, the writer Vladimir Nabokov. Like both his parents, Dmitri Nabokov associates colors and letters. He talks about how this way of perceiving factored into his father’s writing and his own opera-singing. He also reads from his father’s autobiography, Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, and recites an unpublished poem on synesthesia.

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