Richard Cytowic, MD, is one of the world’s leading researchers on synesthesia, a mindblowing neurological condition in which two or more senses are linked so that you might, for example, “taste” sounds or “hear” colors. Cytowic and neuroscientist David Eagleman have a new book out, Wednesday Is Indigo Blue, about synesthesia, exploring the intersection of neuroscience and philosophy, and the subjectivity of reality. Jonah Lehrer, author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist and How We Decide, interviewed Cytowic for Scientific American. From SciAm:
LEHRER: What can synesthetes teach us about the nature of human perception?
CYTOWIC: Far from being a mere curiosity, synesthesia is a consciously elevated form of the perception that everyone already has. Minds that function differently are not so strange after all, and everyone can learn from them.
Synesthesia has opened up a window onto a broad expanse of the brain and perception. Younger researchers are now active in 15 countries. Because the trait runs strongly in families, it is easy to collect DNA from a large number of synesthetic relatives. This means that synesthesia may be the very first perceptual condition for which science can map its gene. This inherited quirk is teaching us that cross-talk among the senses is the rule rather than the exception–we are all inward synesthetes who are outwardly unaware of sensory couplings happening all the time.
For example, sight, sound, and movement normally map to one another so closely that even bad ventriloquists convince us that whatever moves is doing the talking. Likewise, cinema convinces us that dialogue comes from the actors’ mouths rather than the surrounding speakers. Dance is another example of cross-sensory mapping in which body rhythms imitate sound rhythms kinetically and visually. We so take these similarities for granted that we never question them the way we might doubt colored hearing.
“When Senses Intersect” (SciAm)
Buy “Wednesday Is Indigo Blue” (Amazon)