Synesthesia — the condition you never knew you had.

Last week I was watching a video and realized I had never written about this condition which, due to its very nature, many people who have it only realize they do on a fluke. In order to understand why this is you must understand what synesthesia is. According to Wikipedia “Synesthesia (American English) or synaesthesia (British English) is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.” Basically, what this means is that when you sense something it actually triggers another sense at the same time.

One example of this is color–graphemic synesthesia, which results in seeing letters in various colors. For many people the letters on this page are all black with a white background, however, for people with color-graphemic synesthesia each letter is a different color. What these colors are varies from person to person, but is always consistent for that person though uppercase and lowercase letters may have different colors. A person with this may see every A as a specific color of pink, every a as a specific color of blue, every B as a specific color of brown, every b as a specific color of yellow, etc.

Other people may look at a picture and feel a temperature change around them. For example, when looking at a picture of winter they will feel cold even if it is the middle of summer and hot where they are. Others may be able to smell pictures, smell sounds, see sounds, hear smells, hear pictures, taste words, or any one of many other variations of combining different senses. As synesthesia appears to develop at the same time a person is first experiencing abstract concepts it is easy to see how a person may never realize they have this condition, as it is all they can remember experiencing.

So, why am I writing about this condition? It is because I have this condition as do most, if not all, of my children. Just as with most people who realize they have this condition we found out about it by a fluke. One night I was watching a program on synesthesia and thought that they were referring to a stronger response to something than what I always experienced. However, because it had made me think a bit it stayed with me enough that a few days later when we saw a giant white A in the field and my son asked why there was a pink A there it came back to me (it may have been a different color he said, but it was a color), especially as another son argued it was a different color. Both of these children I was struggling with to help them to learn to read and what I had heard in the program came back to me. I handed them something with black writing on it and asked them to name the colors of different letters. When they started listing off different colors I realized why they were struggling to learn to read, as many of the colors they mentioned were pastels which would be virtually indistinguishable on white paper!

I then began working with their teachers to both get them tested as well as to help them with their classwork and homework. The teachers began printing out the homework on colored paper and made sure that they always got a dark-colored paper. Their reading proficiency quickly increased when this happened. It took a while longer, but they were eventually diagnosed with color-graphemic synesthesia. In the meantime, I started looking into synesthesia more and found that most people never experienced any change in temperature or smell when looking at a picture. This was a surprise to both me and a few of my kids as we thought that was what made a picture so special!

I have since realized that synesthesia likely also explains why some of my family can experience living a story as we read it. When a good writer writes a book it isn’t just words on a page to us, but rather actual experiences we go through. This may also explain why, at times, it is so easy for me to write a lot. There are times when I am writing that I don’t have to stop to think about what I’m writing, rather my fingers automatically type whatever words are running through my head at that moment. This can be both good and bad as it makes getting the words onto paper easier, but at the same time it can also result in things being understandable to me but maybe not as clear to others as I imagine they will be. It is kind of like when you are talking to a friend and just saying whatever is on your mind. In talking you are able to work through your thoughts to make them clearer, especially with feedback from your friend(s). In my case, the same thing happens but if no one ever responds then I don’t have the feedback to help me clarify even more what I am trying to say. That is one reason I encourage you to respond to my posts, as your responses can help me become clearer in my own mind as to what I am trying to share.

So, back to the video I referenced at the beginning of the post. What was it that brought the subject of synesthesia to my mind? Well, it was a video of an artist painting and I could smell the paint they were using. It was the middle of the night and no one was awake. There was no paint open anywhere near me and hadn’t been for a long time, but I could smell it the same as if I was in the room with the artist.

So, why haven’t I mentioned this before? I actually forget about it and when I do remember it I don’t think of it as a disability. Instead, I think that life would be a lot less interesting without it. I can’t imagine looking at a picture and not being able to smell the fresh grass and feel the wind around me, or not to be able to smell the freshly fallen snow and feel the nip in the air, or many other things that I have the opportunity to experience because of my synesthesia!