History of Synesthesia (excerpt)
Richard E. Cytowic MD
various questions in this group.
Excerpt from:
"The Man Who Tasted Shapes"
(copyright) 1993 by Richard E. Cytowic, MD
Jeremy Tarcher/Putnam Publishing
From Cpt 8: "Down in the Basement: The History of Synesthesia"
<BODY PH>Back down in the library sub-basement, I pried open the
yellow pages that revealed synesthesia's past. What a scientist
ultimately wants is a theory that explains things, and what I was
looking for was a theory to explain the brain mechanism of
synesthesia. I was searching for that higher plane.
<BODY>What I found instead was confusion. The archaic
nineteenth-century language was not that impenetrable, nor were
the na ve errors and anatomic speculations of what I found.
Amusing phrases such as "a tangle of the optic and auditory nerve
fibers" or the more flowery "echoing of the hearing nerve to the
chromatic fibers" could be forgiven, considering how much our
conceptualization of nervous tissue had changed in a century.
Rather, the confusion stemmed from lack of agreement in what
people meant by the word synesthesia.
Some authors clearly were talking about imagination, in which,
for example, volunteer students imagined that words like "fiery"
and "red" somehow went together appropriately with the music of a
marching band. Other writers spoke of metaphoric speech,
speculating on the origins of such commonplace sentiments that
"yellow" was a "bright" color. Others accurately described
synesthesia but apparently could not locate any real synesthetes;
they erred in using non-synesthetic volunteers in their
sense-to-sense matching experiments.
"What a mess," I muttered to myself. A good portion of what I
read was nothing like the experiences of Michael or Victoria, or
even of Luria's S. Those three did not stop to think about their
sensations. They just happened.
I found a few papers that focused on physical sensations. In
these cases, a stimulus in one sense would make subjects
involuntarily experience something in another sense. They claimed
they had "nothing to do with it," but that it just "happened by
itself." Moreover, they were surprised to discover that anyone
would consider it unusual, assuming that everyone felt this way.
No wonder history had been unable to explain synesthesia, I
thought. People had used the same name for different experiences.
It was like having a single word that stood for Greyhound buses,
shoelaces, and treacle tarts. How could anyone be sure what you
were referring to? No, this only confuses the issue, I thought.
My first step would be to weed out cases that failed to
explicitly refer to synesthesia as an involuntary experience in
which the stimulation of one sense caused a perception in
another. Later, I would have to pen a strict definition so that
others would at least be certain what I was talking about.
No matter what subject science scrutinizes, the historical,
descriptive, and experimental approaches are its three mainstays.
Which method you use depends on the problem and the tools at
hand. I would eventually apply all three methods to synesthesia,
diving into its rich history first. No matter how a scientist
approaches a problem, however, each method demands evidence,
clear reasoning, testable hypotheses, a search for explanatory
and predictive theories, and an effort to identify and avoid
bias. These are the foundations of the scientific enterprise.
The first medical reference to synesthesia was about 1710, when
an English ophthalmologist, Thomas Woolhouse, described the case
of a blind man who perceived sound-induced colored visions. Even
earlier, in 1690, the philosopher John Locke1 had written of "a
studious blind man who . . . bragged one day that he now
understood what scarlet signified. . . . It was like the sound of
a trumpet."
I was puzzled that neurologists, specifically, had hardly
pondered synesthesia. It would have seemed a natural subject. It
was mentioned sporadically throughout the eighteenth century, but
in the nineteenth it attracted serious attention, scientific and
otherwise. It particularly interested psychologists, artists, and
natural philosophers. For example, in 1704 Sir Isaac Newton2
struggled to devise mathematical formulas to equate the
vibrational frequency of sound waves with a corresponding
wavelength of light. He failed to find his hoped-for translation
algorithm, but the idea of a correspondence took root, and the
first practical application of it appears to be the clavecin
oculaire, an instrument that played sound and light
simultaneously. It was invented in 1725.3,4 Charles Darwin's
grandfather, Erasmus, achieved the same effect with a harpsichord
and lanterns in 1790,5 although many others were built in the
intervening years on the same principle, whereby a keyboard
controlled mechanical shutters from behind which colored lights
shone. By 1810 even Goethe was expounding correspondences between
color and other senses in his book, Theory of Color.6
I had soon found many cases of synesthesia recorded in both the
scientific and general literature, as well as two books devoted
to it. Colored Hearing7 was published in French in 1890, while a
German text appeared in 1927 called Colored Hearing and the
Synesthetic Factor of Experience.8 Most accounts emphasized
colored hearing, which I discovered was the most common form of
synesthesia.
This disproportion in the types of synesthesia was itself
intriguing. The five senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and
smell could have ten possible synesthetic pairings--sight with
sound, sight with taste, sight with touch, and so on. Synesthetic
relationships usually operate in only one direction, however,
meaning that for a particular synesthete sight may induce touch,
but touch will not induce visual perceptions. This one-way
street, therefore, allowed twenty permutations of sensory
pairings. Given this number of possible pairings, I noted with
interest that some senses, like sight and sound, were involved
much more often than smell, for example. To persons endowed with
colored hearing, sounds--especially speech and music--were not
only heard but produced a visual m
lange of colored shapes,
movement, patterns, and brightness.
Some pairings had never been witnessed. While in one of
Victoria's synesthetic combinations sight produced smell, I could
find no cases in which smell itself was the trigger. And I only
found one other in which, like Michael, taste induced
synesthesia. In this instance, it was a case of colored taste.
Aside from Michael's own geometric taste, perhaps the strangest
example of synesthesia I uncovered was "audiomotor," in which a
fourteen-year-old boy positioned his body in different postures
according to the sounds of different words.9 Both English and
nonsense sounds had certain physical movements, the boy claimed,
which he could demonstrate by striking various poses. By way of
convincing himself that this sound-to-movement association was
real, the physician who described it planned to retest the boy
later on without warning. When the doctor read the same word list
aloud ten years later, the boy assumed, without hesitation, the
identical postures of a decade earlier.
The addition of physical movement as a potential synesthetic
response really meant that there were six possible components
rather than five. Correspondingly, this implied thirty
permutations. And yet only a handful of synesthetic combinations
accounted for most of the cases. I made a mental note to remember
the curious fact that some senses were privileged to occur in
synesthesia, while others rarely, if ever, did. Perhaps anatomy
would turn out to have something to do with it.
****** End of Excerpt*****
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Em segunda-feira, 18 de outubro de 1993 03:35:39 UTC+1, Richard E. Cytowic MD escreveu: