What color is the number 700? How does the word "poignant" taste? If these questions make sense to you, you may be somewhere on the spectrum of people with synesthesia. It's a scrambling of the senses often found to be part of the creative process. In The Soloist by Mark Salzman, both cellists, teacher and student, see the sounds of the music they make. What do you see when you listen to music? Scenic vistas? Geometric shapes? Come to the WestportREADS program at the Library on Tuesday March 6 at 7:30 pm to explore this concept with the Norwalk Symphony Woodwind Quintet.
Recent publicity has brought autistic savant Daniel Tammet to attention. He solves complicated mathematical problems with astonishing facility and says he sees the computations as colored shapes. His story is Born on a Blue Day: Inside the Extraordinary Mind of an Autistic Savant.
To learn more about synesthesia, read The Man Who Tasted Shapes by Richard E Cytowic or Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens by Patricia Lynne Duffy. For younger readers, there is the novel Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass, in which a 13-year-old synesthete's confusing and beautiful view of the world is presented along with all the complications it causes in her life.
P.S. Want to learn more about the senses? I suggest you spend some quality time with Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, one of my favorite writers, for fascinating facts wrapped in beautiful language.
Comments (1)
The word "synesthesia" is often used to describe Shelley's imagery. In "To a Skylark" the skylark's song issues from a state of purified existence, a Wordsworthian notion of complete unity with Heaven through nature. The lark's song "rains" down upon the world:
"All the earth and air
With thy voice is loud,
As when night is bare,
From one lonely cloud
The moon rains out her beams and heaven is overflow'd."
Posted by Tilly | February 9, 2007 2:32 PM
Posted on February 9, 2007 14:32