[Frederica-l] Synesthesia Alphabet

[Frederica at aol.com]

You know the sequence in "Fantasia," that accompanies a symphony with colors, 
lights, and shapes that "embody" the music? That's called synesthesia -- 
mixing two senses, so that a violin passage "sounds like" a series of yellow 
dashes on a black background. 

Some people have more of an instinctive capacity for synesthesia than others, 
and the most common way for it to manifest is to associate colors with 
letters and numbers. I have this kind of synesthesia. I thought everybody did--I 
thought it was obvious that A is red, B is blue, C is yellow, and so on. I didn't 
really realize that other people don't have the same associations until I 
read Rimbaud's poem, "The Vowels," in a college French class. The other students 
thought it was trippy; I thought it was annoying. To deliberately mix up the 
colors and say that A is black, for example -- that's a pretty cheap basis for 
a poem. 

(It turns out that synesthetes *don't* agree on most of the colors; the 
exception is that O is usually white and I is usually black.)

A few years ago I sat down with an interior decorator's box of paint chips 
and selected the color closest to the "right" color for each letter of the 
alphabet. I made a few notes on the back of each sample about the personality of 
each letter (they don't just have colors, they have personalities. H, for 
example, is shy. He doesn't like to lead words, and tries to hide behind the letter 
coming after him.) 

My daughter-in-law Jocelyn Mathewes used those paint chips to produce a 
series of cards, one for each letter, depicting the "right" color. On the back of 
each card there's a description of the letter's personality. Here's the 
original work as it was first completed:

http://www.jocelynmathewes.com/alphabetbook.php

She is preparing to do a new printing and I said I'd ask here if anyone would 
like a set. This time she's printing the cards alone, and a full set of 26 is 
$90. I imagine these being used like the delightful card deck of photographs, 
the "House of Cards" (1952) by Charles and Ray Eames -- a fun & appealing 
item to keep in the living room or family room, for guests and family to play and 
decorate with, rearrange and display. (We've had the House of Cards in the 
living room for a dozen years, and never get tired of them.) If you're 
interested in buying a "Synesthesia" card set, drop her a line at jmathewes at gmail.com

A couple of years ago I participated in a study of people with synesthesia. 
The author, Carol Crane, found that people with synesthesia (most likely to be 
a female with light-colored eyes--mine are blue) have extremely high language 
development. She cites the theory of other researchers that "synesthesia is 
the basis of all language development." Language is itself a form of 
synesthesia, because we are linking a sound we make with our mouths to an object in the 
physical world. And metaphor would be a further development of synesthesia, 
where two things are held together in the mind and their connection can be 
sensed. I get that -- my linking of A and red, for example, is not that I see the 
letter A turn red when I read it; it's that A, a bold, confident letter, is 
associated with the same characteristics as red--they "click" together, like "you" 
and "sunshine" do when you sing, "You are my sunshine." 

Crane writes, "If synesthesia is the end point on a contiuum of 
characteristics shared by all humans, and if the devleopment of langauge is the result of 
synesthetic processes, and if language is hyper-developed in synesthetes, then 
are synesthetes the hint of an evolutionary process?" In other words, is a 
synesthete like me an example of the continuing evolution of the human race? What 
a hoot!

My son David says that would be neat, because it would make me like the 
X-Men. I could be called "Synesthor." :-)


********
Frederica Mathewes-Green
www.frederica.com
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