Red Eight, Green Crash: Synesthesia and Poetry
A Community Consciousness and Brain Health Essay.
Close your eyes and for a moment imagine the number eight. What color is it? Listen for the hum of a computer fan or refrigerator or a car passing by. What color is the sound? How does the word poetry taste? Is it brittle and sweet like a sugary candy or earthy like a beet or something else entirely? People for whom this is an easy exercise are accessing different senses at the same time. This is known as cross-modal processing.
It is common in people with synaesthesia, an inherited condition in which sensory or cognitive stimuli (e.g., sounds, words) cause additional, unusual cross-modal percepts (e.g., sounds trigger colors, words trigger tastes). Sometimes poets can also access words that create vivid images and touch several senses with the same word. Think of the word, aquamarine. It is a color but does it evoke an image of something beyond the color? If you hear the word, West, does it only evoke a direction or do you see a weather vane with a W or conjure up a map of the Western part of the country or does it evoke a scene from a Western movie?
How many senses are activated when you read a poem, book, or essay?
Talking about a connection between certain words, sound symbolism, and our senses, researchers recently noted, “Sound symbolism is a property of certain words which have a direct link between their phonological form [sound] and their semantic meaning. In certain instances, sound symbolism can allow non-native speakers to understand the meanings of etymologically unfamiliar foreign words, although the mechanisms driving this are not well understood. We examined whether sound symbolism might be mediated by the same types of cross-modal processes that typify synaesthetic experiences.” (Bankieris, K. and J. Simner (2015). “What is the link between synaesthesia and sound symbolism?” Cognition 136: 186–195.)
Another study found, “colored-hearing synesthetes [people with synesthesia] experience colors when hearing tones or spoken utterances. The auditory-evoked potentials to words and letters were different between synesthetes and controls.” (Beeli, G., M. Esslen, et al. (2008). “Time course of neural activity correlated with colored-hearing synesthesia.” Cereb Cortex 18(2): 379–385.). In other words, when some people hear words it activates the visual sense of colors as well as the auditory sense of hearing.
When you write an essay or a poem or a letter to a friend do you use metaphors that include several senses? In an article entitled, “bright sneezes and dark coughs, loud sunlight and soft moonlight,” researchers noted, “synesthetic metaphors (such as “the dawn comes up like thunder”) are expressions in which words or phrases describing experiences proper to one sense modality transfer their meanings to another modality. In a series of four experiments, subjects used scales of loudness, pitch, and brightness to evaluate the meanings of a variety of synesthetic (auditory-visual) metaphors. Loudness and pitch expressed themselves metaphorically as greater brightness; in turn, brightness expressed itself as greater loudness and as higher pitch. Although loudness thus shared with brightness a metaphorical connection, pitch and brightness showed a connection that was closer and that applied more generally to different kinds of visual brightness. The ways that people evaluate synesthetic metaphors emulate the characteristics of synesthetic perception, thereby suggesting that synesthesia in perception and synesthesia in language both may emenate from the same source-from a phenomenological similarity in the makeup of sensory experiences of different modalities.” (Marks, L. E. (1982). “Bright sneezes and dark coughs, loud sunlight and soft moonlight.” J Exp Psychol Hum Percept Perform 8(2): 177–193.)
Is there any value in consciously focusing on words that activate more than one sense? Is poetry that uses metaphors like loud sunlight or associates the color blue with the number six “better” than poetry that is focused within one sensation or lacks a sensory quality? What do you feel?
Originally published at http://www.innerchildmagazine.com/the-community-of-humanity.php on January 15, 2016.
