The colour thirty

Yesterday I spent an hour with a tattooist preparing a new design for my back. There are modifications to be made to a design pre-made and bought somewhere else. Two dragons twine around a central wooden spike, their fire breathing into a yin/yang style hoop at the top. One dragon is black and red, and the other grey and blue. The rest of the design is great but the blue dragon doesn’t work well, the tattooist and I agreed, so it’s going to be coloured burnished yellow – gold – instead. When trying to isolate the right colour, I desperately wanted to say “the colour thirty.”

In my mind, the connection between numbers and their colours is often so profound that I ignore the name of the colour entirely and just refer to it by the number my mind has chosen to shade it. There’s no mathematical association, no emotional one; it’s just that it’s easier to say “oh, that’s the colour seven” than it is to describe the colour seven to anybody else. I only wish everybody else knew what the colour seven was, or for that matter the colour thirty.

I’m going to be thirty tomorrow, and the tattoo, although we don’t begin work until November, is almost symbolic of that milestone. Thirty is the colour of a desert sunset, the breaking hard ground of the Namibian or the Mojave Deserts. It’s the colour that shines through my windows on evenings when the clouds split apart and allow the sun through after a stormy day. It is the colour of my apartment at night, when there’s only the standard lamp by my table to light it. I love this colour although I never wear it; it’s perhaps somewhere in the shades of my red hair, though.

Liaison once remarked that the scars on my wrist were my first tattoos. I once read a friend writing that tattoos are symbolic of how one feels at the time of choosing them, what stage you are at in life, written upon the flesh. In that sense, the original scars could be no more fitting than any tattooist could conjure; just as real and vital and painful as the emotions I felt at the time. Now, I am a wholly different person. It’s hard to believe I was ever there, in that place, and at other times it feels as though it was yesterday. Now, anyway, I prefer tattoos to symbolise where I am in life and what I’m doing with it.

Thirty feels as though I’ve just joined adulthood for the first time. I don’t know what it is about our society but somehow the whole of the twenties now seem like an extended adolescence. It’s taken this time to find my feet and realise I really don’t actually have anything to prove to anybody – not even myself – which is a massive relief. It also feels like the end of an era, as so much has ended and begun in the last couple of weeks it’s very disorientating. Perhaps that’s why my mother’s card struck such a chord in me. The idea of finally fluttering outside the box – which never suited me anyway – is incredibly apt.

What’s in a name?

I’ve just been reading something very interesting about names, and how certain names are dying out. Even more curious, the article talked about how people change their names because they don’t suit them, or they change their direction in life. New readers and people who haven’t known me long of course don’t know that a year and a half ago, I officially changed my name by deed poll. This is so frighteningly simple that somebody I know did it by accident, and changed his name to his wife’s, leading to no end of confusion.

Name changing is a very simple business, costing about £34 for the change, and then a few bob extra for official copies. You have to do a tour of officialdom, changing driving licences, passports and so on. After that, you are that person for the rest of your life, and only your birth certificate gives away your former identity, unless you tell people, or your parents do. I’d never really liked my name, and changing it seemed to make sense. People tend to find it very easy to call me Joely, and very little has been made of Isabel, since it’s a little formal for me. My old name was one of those large, English names. It had pomp and circumstance and wasn’t really suited to me at all.

I didn’t remotely attach to my name, and it’s taken me a while to grow into the new one, although I do respond to it without hesitation because most friends have called me that for years. I’ve always found names to be curious, because I don’t feel that I necessarily have a name that embodies me. I did try to think of a new name that was utterly me, but I still feel as though I have attached something to me that like a dress could be shed at any moment (although not in public, of course). Names seem to be such flighty little things.

This might be because I have a problem remembering names. I’ve read a little about synaesthesia and how it changes the way you remember things, and also a hereditary problem where people remember faces but not names. I have this – as does my father and his mother – and will only really remember a name if I have to keep using it repeatedly. Otherwise, I remember people by what I’ve come to think of as their “beingness”, a colour that I associate with their face, body shape, their personality and emotions. I remember people by a distinctive colour my brain gives them.

The immediate reaction people give me to this news is to ask what colour they are. Of course, I don’t just work with the colours Dulux supply. My understanding of colour is complex, multi-dimensional and embedded with sound, shape, flecks and specks. There’s no way, if I said, “You’re basically red” that the person in question would have the slightest understanding of what I meant by “red”, or what I saw. So I refuse to tell people what their colour might be, often because I can’t put it into words.

When people find out I changed my name I find it hard to explain why and usually point the finger towards my writing, and how I adopted my nom de plume. But the truth is, I didn’t need to, and many writers who use pseudonyms demonstrate that one doesn’t really need to pay out money to make the official swap. They’re happy to use the alternative, like wearing a different coloured coat to work.

The real reason goes back to synaesthesia once again. All my life, I’d lived with this name that is an assortment of green, red, with flecks of white. I really didn’t like it at all. I didn’t want to be green and red, they weren’t colours I had any great fondness for. So I changed my name really because I wanted to have a name that presented colours I loved, and my choice, deep down, was a set of letters in colours with deep meaning behind them. Of course, that never makes sense to anybody but me, and the occasional synaesthete I run into, of course.

Through the ice

A smooth white plain of ice, pockmarked only in the places where a meagre ax had attempted to penetrate, greeted my blinded eyes. It extends in every direction imaginable, for interminable distances and above it the sky, equally white, is oppressive. The cold is so insistent, so present that it seems as though there is no air to breathe. Yet here we are, and we’re dressed not for cracking the ice of this emotional Antarctica but in jeans, t-shirts, jumpers.

I know and do not know them. I know them not through their faces, for they are invisible to me; their grey shades I recognise through their ‘beingness’, a term I give in real life to the way I identify people synaesthetically. The colour and light of their personality that shines around them, gives them life. Everyone has this thing, and it is unique. There are those there I recognise, in particular you, and you. Why you are there, what it is that you are meant to do, in order to break through this sheet of compressed and frozen emotion, I do not know.

This great white sheet, this continent of compacted snow has long served me well. Buried beneath it, frozen in deep cold, are all the things I do not wish to feel. Normally I do not even stand upon this surface; I barely even knew of its existence. I could slip whatever I wished down into its chilly grasp and never know, never even notice that I’d done it, so effective was my denial. A smile, a mask, a new job with long hours, forgotten text messages and absent friends. The cold holds, the great white ice land keeps buried beneath it something deep and coiled.

Below, where we cannot reach yet with our scraping and miserable attempts to break through. The landscape is awesome and terrible, a glacier of such impressive scope that we cannot see the end of it. We do not even know how we came to reach this point. Yet in fleeting moments, I know what awaits.

A deep cave, a pool, a comic book caricature, almost, the lurking realms of Grendel’s mother. Whatever lurks here flits on small, golden wings. I have tried to reach out, to touch and to release these hidden things, these flying fears, but I cannot reach them. They appear momentarily only, then disappear once more into the shadows. They are a prelude of what is to come.

Crazy talking author

Some time ago, during a coffee outing with a group of friends, I was talking about Amnar and said something along the lines of “I don’t know yet whether it’s going to go that way. I don’t really understand enough about it yet…”

My friend looked at me and said, “Don’t talk about it like that. It’s not real, you know.”

I do have a habit of talking about Amnar as though it’s real. I was asked once how I did “characterisation”, how I developed characters and I was at a loss to answer. The truth is, I just meet them, and there they are. If I feel as though I’m in safe company, I might say; “Well, I like her, but I don’t really know her that well yet. We haven’t spent much time together.”

Anybody who knew me growing up would remember that I talked very confidently and openly about people who existed nowhere beyond the confines of my head, and yet regarded them as real. I realised, before my teens, that this open discussion of non-existent but thoroughly real imaginary people wasn’t an accepted feature of adult conversation and stopped doing it. It reminds me of the story in Girl, Interrupted about the guy whose friend saw purple people. He was sectioned and given a great deal of treatment. One day he told them all he’d stopped seeing purple people and they let him go. Of course, he still saw purple people. He just didn’t tell anybody else about it.

Knowing that my grip on reality might be rather tenuous, I don’t generally talk about “the business of writing”. I don’t do “the business of writing”. I can’t tell you about creative spaces or times, really. I can’t tell you how to develop great characters, realistic worlds, functional languages, or any of that clever stuff. It’s just in my head, and it’s always been there. It’s hard to explain that it’s real and yet not real. Perhaps it’s the same as saying I understand that the letter J, when written in black ink, is both black (which it is), and purple, which according my synaesthetic interpretation of it, it also is. Amnar is a real place filled with real people, but only in my head. It doesn’t actually exist, except that it does in my mind. None of that made any sense, I know.

I was talking about this yesterday with the Producer, as he was driving me back into town after this week’s recording session. I occasionally have blips in my life when I really, seriously question my sanity, and I’d just been through one so I was exploring all the past random diagnoses I’ve received over the years. Like the guy who saw purple people, what you get labeled as depends on what you tell your doctor you’re perceiving. After telling the Producer that Amnar is kind of real and kind of not, he related something he’d heard on the radio very recently.

Back in the 70s, a little series of fantasy books called “The Borribles” came out, written by a man called Michael De Larrabeiti. The stories are focused around children, the Borribles, and their adventures in and around London. The Producer had heard an interview with De Larrabeiti discussing writing the books and the Borribles, during which he said that he only knew about Borribles in London because he hadn’t met any from anywhere else. He talks, and describes them, exactly as I talk about and describe Amnar, which was a relief, at least to some extent. Based on the Producer’s assessment, this is just normal, when it comes to creating such places.

I was asked, not long ago, about creating worlds and somebody remarked that he would take a year to “build his world” and then sell the stories online. I thought that was very nice but I was secretly puzzled. How do you build a world? I’d always thought you just stepped into your mind and there it was. Almost like Narnia, it resides regardless of whether you pay it any heed, although if it’s anything like Amnar it causes a lot of trouble if you ignore it for too long.

All this probably sounds utterly insane. Or not. For a while, I wrote a few very highbrow pieces here about writing and developing Amnar, but the truth is I was covering up for its randomness, and its realness, inside my head. I guess that’s just the way it goes.

And just to reassure any members of my audience not backing away carefully right now, no, I don’t see purple people – although if I did I wouldn’t tell you.

Hunting for a book on Asperger’s

This is kind of a plea into the wilds of the internet for a book, one of those personal/painful lives stories, about a young man growing up and living with Asperger’s syndrome. I don’t know the title or the author but I know that the book has a blue cover decorated with silver and blue letters and numbers all over them. The first name of the author might have been Daniel but I’m not great with names.

I saw this on the new books shelf in the central library the other day while I was looking for something else and didn’t have time to take the details of it to go back for it later. The reason why it interested me was because the back cover copy included a quote from the book where the author described knowing the date of his birthday because it was a Wednesday, and Wednesdays are blue.

“No they aren’t,” I thought; “they’re orangey-red.”

There is a connection between synaesthesia and Asperger’s. Actually, there may be a connection between a lot of these conditions. I don’t have Asperger’s but I was very curious to read about somebody else who has date-time synaesthesia as I do. I remembered the book this morning and went back to hunt for it. Thanks to being a synaesthete I knew exactly where it should be on the shelf but it wasn’t there. Foolishly, I didn’t have a clue what it was called or who wrote it. I can remember the cover of the book perfectly, though, in all respects other than what was written on it.

This is a demonstration that you can have a sparkly CV and a PhD and still be prone to acts of gross stupidity. In fact, possibly more prone to them.

It reminded me, actually (to meander off into a related subject), that although a few people still wrinkle up their faces when you talk about synaesthesia to them, one of the easiest ways to pick up on a genuine synaesthete, or pair of synaesthetes, is to get two of them with the same kind, or similar kind, of synaesthesia and get them talking.

“The letter A is red,” my friend said confidently.

“It’s white!” I replied indignantly. I was very annoyed to discover on a website about synaesthesia later that in colour-grapheme form (which I also have), that it’s actually more common for A to be red than any other colour. They’re wrong. It’s definitely white.

All you non-synaesthetes right now are going “What’s she talking about?”

This is the point, you see. Because the way you perceive things is utterly fundamental, an objective truth, if you like, the discovery that something isn’t the way you thought for somebody else is rather discomfiting. So it is for synaesthetes, who when they first discover that not everybody can see, taste, feel, smell or whatever the way they do, it comes as something of a shock. Until I was in my teens and saw a program about it, I thought everybody on earth saw the alphabet the way that I did. It never occurred to me that this might be in any way unusual.

Synaesthesia isn’t just seeing letters in colour, tasting words or seeing sound, though. It’s almost like an entire means of functioning. I order my entire universe, from times and dates of events (I never forget an appointment or function, for example), to locating things I’ve lost and remembering the passages in books – not to mention masses of functional data for Amnar, using synaesthesia. For a long time, I thought everybody worked this way, but everybody doesn’t.

What struck me about the book was that connection between Asperger’s and synaesthesia. I thought it might shed some light on how he ordered his universe. I do find it difficult to read about other people’s synaesthesia, though. There’s a kind of automatic objection to people seeing the same thing differently, just as I suppose some people would be baffled to discover that I saw the letter A as white when clearly, on a printed page, it’s black, or whatever other colour is being used. These things run deep, you know.

Despite this, I was curious, especially as this week I read an article on LiveScience about mirror-touch synaesthesia. I have a very, very slight form of this, but not a particularly noticeable form, as far as I’m aware. At the bottom of the article, if you read it, a researcher notes that this connection between empathic understanding and its amplification in synaesthesia might shed light on the lack of empathy shown in autism spectrum disorders. It just goes to show what an amazing thing the human brain is. Reading the article made me wonder if the problem I have with raised voices (I really cannot stand shouting), might be to do with being a synaesthete. I see the words I hear outside myself inside my body, which is difficult to describe. A raised voice, no matter what the cause, feels as though it’s stabbing through my chest. This isn’t pleasant at all.

Anyway, I shall leave you with those thoughts. Should anybody who reads this know or think they know the book I meant at the beginning of this long and pointless ramble, please let me know.

This is my brain on earthquakes

A few months ago, I was woken by a very powerful shuddering. My whole mind filled up with a soft, slightly fluffy blue-grey colour as a rocking sensation took over my reality. I opened my eyes and looked around, listening to the rocky sound of the building shuddering as though somebody had told it something grotesque. There was a deep rumbling to go with it. I was experiencing my first earthquake.

For somebody who was giddy over plate tectonics (so sue me I’m a geonerd) for a good part of her teens, it’s a little odd that I’d never been through an earthquake before. Yet unlike volcanoes, that other big feature of the tectonics theory, earthquakes can’t be visited or experienced in quite the same way. There’s very little – if any – warning, and they can occur anywhere. They’re most likely on plate boundaries but as was evidenced by the UK in March, intraplate earthquakes can happen anywhere anytime.

Britain made a massive fuss, because we’re not a place of extremes and lately, when they happen, we abandon the traditional stiff upper lip and go slightly crazy. Facebook groups like “I survived the quake 08″ and “were you awake for quake 08″ and even “I didn’t notice the quake 08″ appeared within hours, and reporters everywhere were posted next to signs of dishevelment around the country to demonstrate that we had been rocked hard by something serious.

The best thing – other than finally experiencing some tectonic activity of some kind without having to travel to it – was that I had a new synaesthetic experience. It doesn’t happen often. I had most of my new experiences when I was too young to notice them, and these days it’s rare to encounter something so thoroughly new and overpowering at the same time. The earthquake, which was both sound and physical experience, since I was being moved around by the rocking of the building (not to mention my bed), was a totally new input. And it was a kind of soft blue.

One thing I’ve always wanted to know is why synaesthesia exists at all. I’ve read a lot of research, and although everybody is fascinated by it or wants to experience it, nobody’s really asked, from an evolutionary standpoint, why some people have brains that do things like this. I generally find, every time I think there’s something weird going on with me, I’ll stumble onto a study that says “this type of synaesthesia…” and I suddenly realise it’s all part of the same massive phenomenon. It was interesting to discover, that night, that I even respond synaesthetically to being moved around in certain ways. I simply hadn’t noticed before, but a completely new means of being gently jolted gave me a new experience and I noticed it.

In Different Minds

I have been introduced to a video which had an incredible impact on the internet community when it first appeared, and was later turned into an article in Wired. It was produced by an autistic woman introducing us to her language, and explaining how she interacts with the world. What you see, to start with, looks ‘weird’, some people might even call it crazy or retarded. Then, in the second half, we are introduced via a computer voice to an incredibly intelligent woman describing her interaction with the world around her, that every movement seen is a specific communication with the world that surrounds her. She is articulate, with a strong command of a language she doesn’t speak, and able perfectly to describe why and how she does what she does.

It fascinated me because I felt a deep empathy with her. I don’t have autism, I have synaesthesia. I’m very lucky, because rather than obstructing my ability to communicate with people in a ‘conventional’ manner, the condition enhanced it. Because synaesthesia makes it easier to do maths or spell, to remember things, to create and study, it’s treated as an ability, almost, rather than being labeled as a disorder. Autism is treated as a disorder, because it doesn’t fit, because it’s too different and doesn’t accord with our rules for normality. And yet we both have unique interactions with our environment that nobody outside us can see and understand.

We have such narrowly prescribed ideas about how people should experience the world, anybody outside it is almost condemned for life because they aren’t ‘normal’. Below is a video from The Work of Byron Katie, where a man with dyslexia describes how it feels to be treated as stupid because he can’t read or write. He lives in a 3D world, and his mind can’t cope with letters and numbers on a flat field. Genetically, synaesthesia and dyslexia are siblings, and there are times when I think there will come a time when science will decide that they are one and the same thing, but different expressions of it. Synaesthetes and dyslexics can describe very similar experiences of reality, with letters and numbers that float around in space or refuse to stay in one place. It seems to me a tragedy that such different ways of living and being as these two people are treated as ‘retarded’ or ‘weird’ when in fact they offer us a unique and very beautiful different view of reality and the mind.

The most interesting thing about these developments is that we’re beginning to expand our understanding of what constitutes intelligence, ability and the diverse ways that the human mind and brain works with the reality around it. Our tendency to view anybody who can’t fit within the narrow channel of reality understood by the majority as disabled can only limit our understanding of the human mind. What makes a massive difference is when people are able to find ways to communicate their reality to the wider world to introduce others to what it means to be them, and their view of the world. Watching her video, I find myself intensely curious to experience her world as she does, just as many people are envious that they can’t experience my world as I do.

Life as a Synaesthete

I’m often asked, amongst those who know about it, what it’s like having synaesthesia. I meanwhile, wonder what it’s like not to have it. It’s not until you start having to look at the way you see the world that you start to think consciously about how you perceive that reality. Have you tried describing how you see red? Can you describe red in words? I’m hardly aware that I have synaesthesia most of the time because it’s natural to me. I’m often asked if it bothers me, because people who aren’t used to seeing letters and numbers floating about in front of their faces assume it must be rather bothersome and intrusive, and yet because for me it’s reality, it’s normal. I wonder how people cope without it.

Many aspects of my synaesthesia remain absolutely unnoticed to me until something points it out to me. When I first really started to use the Sedona Method, I made all kinds of discoveries about the way I perceived emotions that I just hadn’t noticed before. They were always there, but I simply hadn’t made the conscious recognition in the past. I hadn’t really noticed that fear is green, and rather fluffy. Emotions move around like liquid, sliding over each other in the manner of an especially volatile lava lamp. They have locations around my body, and releasing can look as though a kind of steam is rising off my shoulders and arms.

The problem I have with letters and numbers relates specifically to the font I’m reading them in. I realised only last night as I considered writing this post that the reason I write in Bell MT is because it’s the easiest on my senses. My eyes tell my brain that the letters they are observing are black (or rather the light waves coming off the page or screen are black). My brain then accepts that the letters are black and then adds that they also have colour. This is easy when I’m looking at black text, but harder when it’s yellow. Yellow is a loud, garish colour, and it can be very distracting. I’m very good at dealing with black/multi-coloured text, but there can be a slight sense of tension when I’m reading in very unusual colours.

The alphabet is full of power and energy and personality. I could probably write a book on the complexities of my personal alphabet. Letters have colour, but when combined in words, have a varying level of impact on each other. O, which is golden-yellow, is a powerful letter and infuses whole words with shades of its individual colour. Some words have halos of colour and light around them. Not only this, but letters seem to have personality, a trait which is one of those more peculiar features of synaesthesia. We relate to objects, words, concepts and individual letters as though they give off the same qualities that cause other people to avoid certain others in bars or pubs.

I have a visual calendar, and organise days internally with the use of colour and shape. I see time floating off in front of me and behind me in a gigantic ragged loop. This would seem to be why I’m good at remembering what happened when, as on top of this annual loop, each month has a colour. April is green, for example. January is very deep grey, and May is white. Weekdays and weekends are shaded in different colours, which is why I don’t struggle to remember, even though I don’t usually need to know the difference, what day it is.

I’ve discussed the importance of music before. Musical experiences can be so vivid that I get completely lost in the colours and shapes around me. Some songs have more energy than others, more colour, but some can be almost overpowering. Pain and physical sensation, as well as taste and smell, are all vividly coloured and shaped. I couldn’t even begin to describe how this can affect me, given an almost infinite range of colours and shapes, which often move around in their own special way. A headache is white on a deep red background, but the type of headache can change the colour and shape. It can make visits to the doctor very interesting. Last year I had a slight breathing problem during running, and when I saw my doctor about it, actually had to tell her I was a synaesthete and use that language to explain what I was experiencing.

That is all I can really provide as a brief overview of my life as a synaesthete. Like many others, I find it easy to locate things but I’m not actually especially organised (an apparent characteristic). Because I assume I can remember pictorially where something is I don’t worry about keeping things in a specific location. When I’m trying to find anything, I visualise where it is and then go and look. I’m normally right. It affects, I’m sure, everything from the way I relate to people to reading a book, which makes it impossible to convey the real, lived experience to somebody who doesn’t have it.

Creating Amnar with Synaesthesia

I mentioned in my last post that I would write a little bit about the experience of using synaesthesia in my writing, and started off with an exploration of the use of music to ’see’ the world. Synaesthesia has, however, been instrumental in the creation of Amnar in other ways. Possibly the most distinctive of these is the use of coloured letters in names. For this it’s often helpful to have an understanding of how I see the alphabet and relate to it.

Yes, synaesthetes relate to alphabets emotionally. The most fascinating discussions between synaesthetes involve the ways in which they give personalities to letters, numbers and objects. This isn’t the same as naming your car Jim, which is a conscious choice you make. This is an automatic response to a letter, just as we might automatically respond to a person by making certain assumptions to them. I’ve known a few synaesthetes in my time, one of whom felt very suspicious about the letter B. Personally, I’ve got nothing against the letter B but I’ve always had my suspicions about E, which seems to get everywhere. This probably sounds crazy to anybody reading who isn’t a synaesthete, so all I can say is “Welcome to a new reality – my reality.” Synaesthetes also order things using personalities. Line up three identical objects in a row and a synaesthete will be able to distinguish between them using the same random application of personal human characteristics. We don’t think they talk or have their own lives, but we respond to them in a gut way, either positively or negatively. I honestly have no idea why we do this. I used to think it was perhaps because I didn’t like the colour of the letter E, or its shape. I’ve never found any researcher who could explain the purpose behind developing ‘irrational’ and emotional responses to things like individual letters of the alphabet.

I see the alphabet in full colour, and chose most of the names of my characters based on associations with colour. There are nine Capillites in Amnar, all of whom have white faces and black hair. This very distinctive black/white visual characteristic is reflected in their names. Letters like I, C, and L appear to me as black, indigo, and black and feature quite strongly in the names of the Capillites, along with A and N, S, and H, which are white and various shades of grey. Thus we have characters with the names Icaan, Isha, Apsilar and Anarya. Interesting exceptions include Alix (the letter X is bright green) and Io (the letter O is yellow).

Building the Amnari language is a work in progress. One of the problems I’ve had is that I need to design shapes that trigger the same colour response in my head as the letters of the English alphabet. Having learned languages like Chinese and Hebrew in the past, I’ve found that using different symbols can elicit a very different response from my synaesthetic mind. All the words I’ve used so far in Amnari have tended to use the same colour and emotional sensations that I’d expect from their English equivalents, just because that helps me to remember them. I’m not sure how this will work in the long term, especially as the basic Amnari alphabet is phonetic and includes two different Hs and Js. I have had one person suggest a symbolic alphabet for Amnar but unfortunately it didn’t fit with what I’d ’seen’ in my mind.

The Producer, who happens to be a fan of fantasy fiction and would like to create his own, remarked that he couldn’t seem to come up with good fantasy words. This came after I rattled off a stream of common Amnari terms as though I spoke the language perfectly during the recording of one of the chapters. I didn’t even hesitate to express the Amnari phrase ‘Such Ishcai-Nashim n’Cai si braha’ and apparently sounded as though I was speaking a real language. That, I think, is a result of having spent a long time studying language and thinking about how these people might say what they want to say. Building languages, real languages that have evolved over time and have intricate cultural relationships, is a difficult business. I rely quite heavily on words ‘looking’ right to me, since I’m dependent on a thought mechanism that understands words as strings of different colours.

Another area in which I’ve found I use synaesthesia is not in the world itself but in the organisation of it. I’ve read a great deal about the way synaesthetes use internal visual calendars (I believe it’s sometimes called sequential synaesthesia). It’s a memory aid, which is why synaesthetes have higher than average memory capacity. I have a visual matrix for each book I write that floats out like a string in front of me. The action or event included in each chapter colours the chapter ‘box’ in the matrix and means that when I’m working on a book and need to go back and look at another chapter, I can usually tell exactly which chapter I need to go to straight away without referring to my set sheets. All of this, of course, I thought everybody did until I heard a researcher discussing it on the radio not that long ago.

Synaesthesia, Writing and Reality

Last night I happened across an interesting extract from a book on the subject of synaesthesia (synesthesia if you’re living in the USA), and found myself for the first time reading a scientific account of the role of emotion in reason, synaesthesia and our lives. Most interesting to me was the discussion in Section 9 of the extract on the way that we reject direct experience in our lives. The author notes that one of the synaesthetes he studied was actually prepared to reject his own direct experience of synaesthesia if a machine told him he didn’t have it or it wasn’t possible. It made me realise that we don’t have much faith in what we see, hear and experience in our lives, especially if it can’t be verified by what we see as mainstream science. Even worse, given that the majority of people have only a basic understanding of the current themes and debates in the scientific world, we reject our own reality in favour “scientific” truths that are behind the times.

Until I was fourteen, I assumed that everybody saw letters in colour. It came as a shock when I watched a Horizon documentary on the subject of synaesthesia, where individuals were asked during a study to colour in shapes according to how they saw them in their mind. In the first place I had no idea that not everybody could immediately associate a colour with a specific shape, music with a particular colour, and in the second, I immediately thought that quite a lot of the synaesthetes participating got it wrong. Of course the letter A is white. Everybody knows that, don’t they?

People who hear that I have synaesthesia generally treat me as highly unusual or almost like a freakshow. They want me to listen to things and describe what I see, or tell me what colour their names are. It’s impossible, though, to convey the reality of synaesthesia, given that I have access to an almost unlimited number of colours to pick from. I exist in a universe where there is a colour “R” and a colour “U”, for example. They’re very specific colours and I don’t like to say that they’re brown or off-white because what you might imagine is completely different to what I’m seeing. People generally feel better knowing that I’m somehow different, and that there’s a name that explains why I can’t see their reality, because of course their reality is real, and synaesthesia is an aberration. We’re very keen for there to be an objective reality that can be tested, and we don’t trust anything that hasn’t already been rigorously tested and verified by people in white coats. Whilst this is can be healthy in some instances, to reject our own realities purely because we’ve been told to by scientists who can’t prove that our realities are real, feels as though we’ve lost touch with a basic sense of trust in ourselves and what we experience. As long as our internal realities aren’t dangerous to ourselves and others, there is certainly scope for relying more heavily on what we live and experience as real. I’m certainly not waiting around for a machine to be built to “prove” what I already see and experience as a synaesthete.

I’ve been reading a great deal lately on beliefs and the way they shape our world, neuroscience and in particular neuroplasticity and the development of the way we relate to the world around us, and the idea of a subjective reality. Cytowic has taken the line, along with a variety of others in the field of neuropsychology, that what we think of as “reason” and “logic” is actually based on deeply rooted emotional understandings. We decide that we will choose “logic” either because it makes us feel safer than trusting “gut instinct”, mostly because people with doctorates don’t have a very good understanding of what gut instinct is, yet. But what is our logic, especially when science is a continually evolving area and knowledge is constantly changed, developed, torn down, rebuilt and re-assessed over and over. After spending nearly ten years at university, mostly in the current serials section of the library, I realised there was no way to concretise knowledge, as it is an ever-changing, fluid experience of what reality might or might not be. What is outlandish today will be accepted ‘fact’ tomorrow, and outdated and foolish the day after. Suddenly, given that we reason emotionally (whether we like it or not) and our perception of reality is determined by the structure of our brains, suddenly, it’s impossible to be “right” about things. We might decide we’re right, and gather evidence to prove it, but in the end, there will always be those who can identify their own version of “right” that disagrees with ours. Perhaps this is why we’ve abandoned faith in our own experience: a fear that we need to be “right” about things and demonstrate it with “evidence.”

Synaesthesia itself has gone through the mill when it comes to whether or not it’s real. For a long time, researchers assumed it was behavioural, that if we grew up learning the alphabet with coloured letters, we naturally spent our lives making a learned connection between certain letter and another colour. What that doesn’t explain are the many strange and unique phenomena surrounding synaesthesia, the fact that if you had two synaesthetes in a classroom with the same set of coloured letters, they would each decide those colours were wrong, and neither would agree on what the colours really were. Synaesthesia is that point where you begin to question the idea that it’s possible to see and experience an “objective reality”, and that everything you experience is funneled through the very personal make up of the brain in your head receiving it. When discussing synaesthesia with somebody recently, he suddenly said, astounded: “So I have no way of perceiving objective reality! It all depends on my brain!” Reality then is something inside us. You can’t even argue that if we touch a table we know it’s there, and we know it’s a table: quantum physics reminds us that actually, it’s only a table because we’ve observed it to be, and that it’s actually made up mostly of tiny little particles, and a great deal of space.

There is a mutually agreed sense of what reality is, or isn’t, and this is how society defines whether or not one is mentally healthy. That is a fairly sensible thing to do, given that certain psychiatric disorders can be highly damaging to both the individual and those around them if not treated as being unsuitable. What’s sad is that we often become convinced that there is nothing valid in our experience unless validated by other sources. I find myself with an urge to “prove” experiences, as though my having them isn’t enough, that I need to demonstrate that I’ve been tested and some external agent has demonstrated that my synaesthesia is indeed valid. Nobody has ever been able to demonstrate that I do have synaesthesia, but on the other hand, neither can they say that I – or anybody else who experiences it – doesn’t. It is so bound to everything I do, think and feel that I doubt, even if a machine came along and said I don’t have it, I would be able to give it up. When I think about the way that we treat mental illnesses, I’m reminded of the story in Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen, about the man who saw purple people. He spent a long time being investigated and told he was crazy because he saw purple people. Then one day he told people he didn’t see them anymore and they declared him sane. He still saw purple people, but just didn’t tell anybody about it. That reminds me that very often we can live with very different understandings of reality, see things that nobody else can see, and yet live normal, happy lives. Who’s to say the purple people weren’t there just because he was the only one who could see them? I’m the only one who can see letters the way I see them, music the way I see it. And yet there is no way to say that this reality of mine isn’t real, isn’t valid.

Synaesthesia has been instrumental in building Amnar and all my writing, and it’s something I think I’ll be devoting a few blog posts to over the coming days. I was informed a couple of months ago, when discussing the way that I write – using music to help me ’see’ the world I’m describing – was ‘false’ and I needed to get out and see the real world because I couldn’t possibly be able to use music. I was rather stunned, but then reminded myself that the individual in question wasn’t a writer, and more importantly, wasn’t me. I was informed that I couldn’t possibly ’see’ a world through music. That seemed slightly barmy to me, especially as until I was a teenager I thought everybody did it. As a child I thought all my friends could see what I saw, experience what I experienced, and live in the same way that I did. As an adult, I carry around in my head not just the experience of synaesthesia but this massive, ever-expanding world, which I usually access through the medium of music.

Sound and music have colour, light and shape. While all sounds produce visual responses in my brain, there is something unique about particular pieces of music that will instantly trigger very specific visual impressions of Amnar. I don’t need music to write in the sense that I’m quite capable of writing in silence, but there is something about music, about the visual triggers which pushes me to a state where I can write without thinking about it. This is so powerful that I can go back and read sections and not remember the words I used. Whether this is a form of psychic channelling, I refuse to comment on, because to me the experience is of seeing something very, very clearly and writing it down as fast as possible. I could, I suppose, draw or paint what I see, but writing is the medium I choose to express these ‘visions’, for lack of a better word. I will talk in other posts about the conscious use of synaesthesia to build Amnar.