Synesthesia for Polyglots

Blessing, curse, or as much of either as it is to simply be alive? If you're synesthetic, you assume everybody else is too. Then you learn that most people aren't, and even those people who are also synesthetes have colors that clash with yours.

Whether a consciously crafted poetic effect or an unconsciously formed sense filter, synesthesia is a crossing of the senses. It's been on the popular radar since the late nineteenth-century French Symbolist poets, among others, strove to replicate it in their works. Lately there have been a number of interesting psychological and neurological studies showing that (1) yes, it exists and people aren't making it up (although some people try to fake it) and (2) it is often inherited (the condition / ability, though not necessarily the particulars of it). For some synesthetes, sounds have shapes, tastes, or textures. But for a majority of synesthetes, what happens is that words have colors. 

I love colors. I love words. So did Rimbaud, so did Nabokov, so does the character Mia in A Mango-Shaped Space, a wonderful YA novel about synesthesia by Wendy Mass. For me, words tend to have the colors of their starting letters, unless a very strong visual component of another color associated with the word overrides it. For example, generally words starting with A are bright yellow, but apple is a reddish yellow--the color, in fact, of many apples--since the word is so often associated with the color red. D is a standard crayon green, such that danger flashes green for me, not red. Magic, miracle, marvelous, mystery, mischief, malevolence all share the smoky crimson of M. But then, so do the names Marcos and Marilyn. And Débora and Doug are green. Not the people, not their auras - just their names, when I think of them. But the name association "colors" perception of the people, like a faint watercolor.  

I've wondered if synesthesia as a neurological phenomenon begins to happen as one is learning to read, meaning that it is more rooted in a visual association, or if it starts to occur before learning how to read, meaning that it is more rooted in aural stimuli. The vowels, for me, tend to show the least defined hues, which I interpret as evidence for the latter assertion. The synesthetic condition may well begin before learning to read and then intensify after learning to read; however, another purely phonic example from my case is that B and P both are shades of blue, D and T are shades of green, and G and K share a brownish-orange spectrum. Somehow my synesthetic ability captured these phonically related pairs in color, long before I became aware of them structurally through the study of linguistics. Only many years later in graduate school did I learn that B and P are voiced and voiceless versions of the same sound, with D/T and G/K as further examples. Not only did the related sounds take on related colors in my synesthetic scheme, but in each of these pairs, the voiced consonant, which is a stronger sound, holds the deeper hue!

More evidence, from my personal case, for this kind of synesthesia being rooted in non-visual senses, is found in the days of the week. Monday, for instance, has nothing to do with smoked crimson M. It's a kelly green, and fingernail-pink Tuesday (nothing to do with spring green T) follows it on the left, as if seen from the inside of the calendar. Fire engine-red Saturday and somber black Sunday trail off and down to the left at the end of my week. Apparently this kind of spatial overlay is a not uncommon element of synesthetic renderings. The months for me also have colors, but these tend to follow their initial letters or else the colors of associated holidays, and they have no spatial arrangement in my conception of them. Numbers have colors, barely. The numerical association was never strong in my synesthesia, and even the alphabetic association is not as strong as it was when I was younger.

What happens when you're multilingual? Are you a multisynesthete? In my case, books, in the abstract at least, are a bright royal blue, but livros and libros are lemon yellow. Sometimes serendipity strikes: love and amor (Spanish) and amor (Portuguese; same spelling, different pronunciation) all share the same joyous range of yellow. Hunger, hambre and fome find themselves viscerally pink: the fresh wet shine of gums for F, the sullied pink of a pig's hide for H. (When I learned that often the H of a word in Spanish corresponds to an F in the Portuguese, it made perfect visual sense to me.) Majesty, majestad, and majestade glow with the smoky crimson of M, but the K of king has a rather sandy, wooden look to it, and the Q of queen is precisely periwinkle, while rey, reina, rei and rainha lie and vie in the rolling reach of R's red wine hue. Fork, garfo, tenedor: three tines of three colors. Imprecise translations can sear and trace across idioms: the S of saudades radiates an orange ember glow that tinges longing's L a dusky yellow and roasts the nut brown of the Ñ in añoranza. I studied Hindi during an intensive summer course as a teenager, but I don't remember enough, unfortunately, to know whether I had transferred shades to the Devanagari script, or how exactly synesthesia played a role. Yet Portuguese, Spanish, English, and even Hindi are all Indo-European languages; perhaps synesthetes who speak languages from different linguistic families experience wilder, splashier interactions.

Some non-synesthetes learning about synesthesia are jealous. Others are indifferent. Some few are concerned for my well-being, convinced that it must be a debilitating condition impeding everyday thought processes. On the contrary - because it's with you from a young age, you grow up with it, and you take it into account in the same way as you do other abilities. Like most anything else, it has advantages and disadvantages, but I know that if I somehow had the option to eliminate it from my life, I absolutely would not. It's an essential part of my being-in-the-world, an internalized rainbow that weaves languages together even as their colors blend to create, literally, new patterns of thought.