The Key to Artistic Creativity: Synesthesia, the Mind’s Metaphor

We often think of the flow of neural impulses as linear, and emphasize its terminal locus – i.e., we classically think of perception, an action, or an utterance as the terminal stage of some process whose locus is somewhere in the cortex. We think of perception as a one-way street, traveling form the outside world inwards, dispatching a linear stream of neural impulses from one relay to ever more complex ones, so that the process is metaphorically like a conveyor belt running through stations in a factory, until a perception rolls off the end as the finished product” (Cytowic, 1995).

This description encapsulates how I perceived neurobiology and neural impulses functioned at the very beginning of the semester.  I envisioned the brain, the spinal cord, and the entire human nervous system as neatly compartmentalized structures that worked together intertwinedly to produce a neural or behavioral end product.  However, after five months of discussion about the intricacies of neurobiology and behavior, I think I have finally come to grasp the “true” unwieldy nature of neural and behavioral functions. It was through learning about the five senses and synesthesia, a neural condition “in which one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another,” (Grobstein, 2009) that I began to realize how complicated and elaborate neural transformations are.  By investigating the condition of synesthesia, I have come to better understand how diverse neural and behavioral processes range from individual to individual.  This paper argues that it is through different degrees and ranges of synesthesia that the development of mankind and human creativity, with particular attention paid to the arts, has been able to flourish.
      What is synesthesia? Synesthesia comes from the Greek root, “syn” meaning “together” and “aesthesis” meaning “perception” (Cytowic, 1995).  Therefore, synesthesia is an involuntary experience that involves one sensory or perception modality being stimulated by a completely separate sensory modality (Cytowic, 1995).  This neural condition thus involves intersensory associations that result in individuals being able to hear colors, feel sounds, and taste shapes amongst numerous other associations.  The most common synesthetia associations are: experiencing graphemes (e.g. alphabetic letter, numerical digits) as colors (66.5% of cases), experiencing time units as colors (22.8% of cases), experiencing musical sounds as colors (18.5% of cases), and experiencing general sounds as colors (14.5% of cases) (Heyrman, 2005).  Other such cross-sensory associations that are less popular are: tasting musical notes (0.1% of cases), experiencing vision through temperature fluxes (0.3% of cases), and experiencing tactile senses through smell (0.3% of cases) (Heyrman, 2005).
      Before learning about synesthesia in Neurobiology and Behavior, I only knew of it in the context of literary and poetic devices. In literature and poetry, synesthesia functions very much like as it would in the context of neurobiology; it is when a description of a sense impression (smell, touch, sound etc) is articulated in terms of another seemingly inappropriate sense (for example the phrase ‘deafening yellow’).  I was appalled, however, to discover that synesthesia is a permanent, involuntary condition that affects 1 in 25,000 individuals (Cytowic, 1995).  For those that regularly experience synesthesia on a daily basis (these individuals are called synesthetes), most can remember experiencing this condition from as early as they can remember.  Many are also surprised to learn that the general public does not share in their synesthetic perceptual experience (Grossenbacher & Lovelace, 2001).  Synesthesia is also more prominent in women and left-handers and is believed to be genetically linked since synesthesia seems to run in families (Cytowic, 1995).  Additionally, Cytowic suggests that synesthesia is associated with left-hemispheric brain functioning (1995).  But exactly how strong is the connection between the synesthetic condition and human creativity displayed through the arts?
      Art itself, whether it is in the form of poetry, painting, sculpture, or music, is a synesthetic experience that bridges the senses and relates seemingly unrelated concepts.    In its broadest definition, synesthesia, even in it’s slightest form, can be viewed as the mind’s metaphor and creative release. Thoughts, emotions, and the immaterial, somehow get transformed into the material. Poetry, paintings, and music are materialized analogies and metaphors that link together our senses and seemingly unrelated ideas.  Not only do I believe that a certain degree of synesthetic ability is required to create such works of art, but I also consider that everyone exhibits some sort of synesthesia.  Our human ability to interpret and create, functions that require cross-wiring within the brain, is sufficient evidence of the synthetic condition present in everyone.  
      Dr. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition and Professor of neuroscience and Psychology at the University of California, argues that synesthesia is much more common in artists, poets, and novelists, because of a potentially increased hyperconnectivity in their brains.  He has been studying synesthesia in hopes of further illuminating fundamental principles of brain organization.  We learned about the “bouba” and “kiki” experiment, an experiment that tested the brain’s abstraction ability (Grobstein, 2009). This research experiment, first conducted by Wolfgang Köhler then later repeated by Dr. Ramachandran, served to support Dr. Ramachandran’s theory that synesthesia gave rise to language.  The “bouba” and “kiki” experiment exposed what Dr. Ramachandran believes to be an innate and preexisting neurological bias that he claims, “would have se the stage for a shared vocabulary – a lexicon” (Romano, 2002). He expressed that this innate synesthesia present in all humans along with synkinesia, the natural tendency to move one’s lips to mimic one’s hands, allowed for the emergence of language in the human species (Romano, 2002). Thus, perhaps it is through a very slight degree of synesthesia that mankind has been able to develop language, one of the features that distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom.
      Our ability to produce works of art that require creative and interpretive cognitive skills is another distinctive feature of the human species.  I cannot help but notice how artists, musicians, and writers all cultivate a certain degree of synesthetic reasoning to create cross-sensory metaphors through their artwork. Certainly, there have been artists such as Valdimir Nabokov, Olivier Messiaen, David Hockney, and Alexander Scriabin that have been clinically diagnosed as synesthetes (regularly experience synesthesia on a daily basis for their entire lifetime) (Cytowic 1995), but this paper also argues that everyone embodies synesthetic qualities to varying degrees which has allowed creativity to flourish.  Composers draw dots on staffed paper to create symphonies that capture the spirit of something.  Artists splatter paint on their canvases to evoke an emotional trigger in the audience. Writers put together a sequence of words that as a whole create a meaning more powerful than the meaning of the individual words themselves.  In a sense, a certain degree of synesthesia is required to create such transformations.  The most successful artists, such as Shakespeare, Picasso, Beethoven, may have not been complete synesthetes, but their creative and neural cross-wirings allowed them to get in touch with their own synesthetic associations and transform these associations into brilliant works of art.
      I have always wondered what makes an artist “good” or what makes a particular piece of art appealing or captivating.  I have heard artists and lovers of art claim that productions of art tap into a creative flow that function beyond scientific understanding.  In fact, they believe that this distinction between flowing creativity and the rigidity of the natural sciences is what distinguishes art from science.  While many believe that there is hardly any science to the production and interpretation of art, I have come to conflate these two areas as deeply related and entangled.  By getting rid of the picture of neurobiology as a conveyor belt producing finished products, uniform amongst one individual to the next, I have adapted a messier more convoluted model of understanding that I think better suits the reality of neurobiological functioning.  Through the understanding of synesthesia and the degree to which the brain and spinal cord’s neural entanglement presides over our individual conditions, I have been able to bridge the not-so-rigid principles of science to the fluidity of artistic creativity in a way that allows me to better appreciate art’s position human society. And by not sectioning off art and science as completely separate conditions, I have come to realize how the breadth of  synesthetic abilities, the mind’s metaphors, contribute to the flourishing of human society and culture. 

Works Cited

Bouba/kiki effect. (2010, April 29). Retrieved  from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect

Campen, Cretien. (1997). Synesthesia and artistic experimentation. Psyche, 3(6), Retrieved from http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=1&ved=0CB8QFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theassc.org%2Ffiles%2Fassc%2F2290.pdf&ei=j2LjS4y1FsGC8ga24M2gDw&usg=AFQjCNFaJdTgG0xFd59BozLZw70WJu03jw&sig2=zXtKDAL9KShqy6QE7dgwuA

Cytowic, Richard. (1995). Synesthesia: phenomenology and neuropsychology. Psyche, 2(10), Retrieved from http://www.theassc.org/files/assc/2346.pdf

Grobstein, Paul. (2009, April). Perception: from five senses through synesthesia and beyond . Retrieved from /exchange/grobstein/perception

Grossenbacher, Peter, & Lovelace, Christopher. (2001). Mechanisms of synesthesia: cognitive and physiological constraints. TRENDS in Cognitive Sciences, 5(1), Retrieved from http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S1364661300015710

Heyrman, Hugo. (2005, July 31). Art and synesthesia. Retrieved from http://www.doctorhugo.org/synaesthesia/art/index.html

Hubbard, Edward, & Ramachandran, V.S. (2005). Neurocognitive mechanisms of synesthesia. Neuron, 48. Retrieved from http://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0896627305008354

Musicians, artists, and writers 8x more likely to have synesthesia than general population. (2007, December 22). Retrieved from http://winewriter.wordpress.com/2007/12/22/musicians-artists-and-writers-8x-more-likely-to-have-synesthesia-than-general-population/

Romano, C. (2002, July). The Mind's eye - neuroscience, synesthesia, and art. NeurologyReviews.com, 10(7), Retrieved from http://www.neurologyreviews.com/jul02/nr_jul02_mindseye.html