Instant Genius - Synaesthesia: How some of us experience music as shapes and colours and words as flavours

Episode Date: March 22, 2024

Do you experience sounds or music visually as certain shapes? Or perhaps you are able to ‘taste’ words or ‘hear’ colours. If so, it sounds like you have synaesthesia, a neurological phenomenon that leads to some of us experiencing a merging of different senses that are not typically connected. In this episode we catch up with Prof Jamie Ward, a psychologist and synaesthesia researcher based at the University of Sussex. He tells us about the varying forms synaesthetic experiences can take, what we know about their impacts on cognition and creativity and how it’s likely that you’ve met a synaesthete without even realising it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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so you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Hello and welcome to Instant Genius, a bite-sized masterclass in podcast form. Each week you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor, a BBC science focus. Do you experience sounds or music visually as certain shapes?

Or perhaps you're able to taste words or hear colours? If so, it sounds like you have synesthesia. a neurological phenomenon that leads to some of us experiencing a merging of different senses that are not typically connected. In this episode, we catch up with Professor Jamie Ward, a psychologist and synesthesial researcher based at the University of Sussex. He tells us about the varying forms as the aesthetic experiences can take, what we know about their impacts on cognition and creativity,

and how it's likely you've met a synesthetes without even realising it. So first off then, broadly speaking, what exactly is? synesthesia? So synesthesia is a remarkable way of experiencing the world. So people with synesthesia don't just hear music, they might see it as well. So every note or every phrase within the music might have its own color, its own shape, its own texture, and they will move dynamically over time. So it's a psychedelic kind of experience, but these people have it throughout their lives, and they can't imagine what it's like to only listen to music and not be able to see it as well. Other people might taste words. So when they're listening to me speaking

now, it might be like an ebbin flow of sour or sausages or something bizarre like this that's felt on their tongue as like a texture and a temperature and maybe feels slightly chewy in a way that I find very hard to imagine. So we can define it as being an extra sensation that people with synesthesia have that most other people do not have. So when did we first discover it? Well, interestingly, synestasyzee was documented in a medical thesis in 1812 in Germany, so an awful long time ago. The reason this person documented it is that he happened to be an albino. So he was doing kind of studies on himself in terms of having unusual colored hair and skin

and so on. And it was just noted, oh, and by the way, I experienced colors that other people don't have. We don't think that there's any connection between being a Cineser and albinos. It's just one of those things that if you've got two rare things, it's like, what are the chances? But it can happen by chance, and I'm sure that that's what happened in this first case. And then in the 19th century, other cases came out, and there was a bit of a debate whether this was coming from the eyes or the brain. Some people thought it might be the opposite of colorblindness, so colorblindness people experience too few colors. So they imagine with synesthesia, maybe you're experiencing too many colors.

But that's not really the way of thinking about it, because you're experiencing colors through an individual. entirely different way and it has nothing to do with the eyes. And this idea was quashed quite quickly on. It made no sense even in the mid-19th century. So having said that, do we know how common it is amongst the population? One of the challenges in answering that question is that synesthesia comes in lots of different varieties. So we can answer the question, how common is this type of syracies and how common is that type of synesthesia? And then when we stack them together, we do end up with quite a large number of probably at least five percent of the population. So the way that I describe this to people is that everybody knows somebody with synesthesia,

but you don't necessarily know who it is unless you go and say, what does that piece of music look like to you, or what colour is Monday, or what does my name taste of? Because everybody's experience as a private and don't go around with a big sign on their head, we can see that they are different from other people in the population, but you wouldn't know just by bumping in somebody in the street that that was the case. You've kind of got to explore it in other ways. There are some kinds which are very rare. So having taste experiences to words is certainly a fraction of a percent. It's so rare that I can't give you a figure.

We almost can't count it. Things like colours from music is a fraction of a percent, maybe less than half a percent. The most common ones are some people when they think about time or numbers experience it in a spatial form. So it's like a landscape of time and number and so on. And this is the sort of thing that takes it up to at least 5 percent of the population. Yeah, well, I'm definitely going to ask everybody I know now to see if I do know anybody that has it. Is it possible that somebody has it without realizing, you know, they just think everyone experiences the world in this way?

That's exactly right. So people with 70s have go through various stages of discovery. Their initial stage is assuming that everybody else experiences the same things that they do because that's just a starting point. You know, I would have that kind of belief. Then they would probably have that challenged in some way. might say this to a teacher. And certainly 50 years ago, that could be the end of the conversation forever, because it would be like, don't ever say this again. And now people are kind of a bit more

open-minded and curious and accepting of difference. So you've got the stage of assuming everybody has it, then the stage of assuming you are the only person in the world with it. And then you've got the final stage, which is discovering the name. And a lot of people can remember when they've come across the word sentences or somebody else that says, oh, yes, I have this. And that's I suppose, the final stage of discovery or coming out as the Cinescese, if you want to phrase it that way. So having said that, is there a sort of gold standard scientific test for it? Well, we could show that Cinesia is real in a whole variety of ways. The actual test that we use is just very simple, although there are more sophisticated ones,

and it's just looking at how stable the associations are over time. So if you think that the letter A is a particular shade of red, it doesn't change if I test you now or next week or a year's time. It will be broadly the same. I mean, there are a few exceptions to this, but it's good enough to use that as a gold standard. Is this kind of consistency and reliability? Of course, we can look in the brains of synestines, which again, people find perhaps more convincing, but actually this test, retest reliability of the colours is something that's very easy to do online. We've got tests on our website that people can do to have a look how they do on these. So it's a really interesting subject, you know. I bet you get asked this all the time.

So how did you begin researching it? And do you experience it yourself? No, I don't experience synesthesia. If anything, I'm kind of the opposite and I don't think in visual images at all. So there is a name for this as well. This is called A Fantasia, as a lot of things said about that. I just happened to meet somebody with synesthesia and it was actually a friend of a friend, and my friend said to me, oh, my flatmate has synesthesia. I said, what syneciseum? And at this point, I had a PhD in a degree in psychology, and I never encountered it in any of my studies. Although we've known about it with 200 years, essentially research on this pretty much died of death. It wasn't forgotten, but it certainly wasn't a topic of academic study.

And then in the year 2000 or so, people became interested in this again for various reasons. And I met my first synesty. I thought, wow, this is so rare. I'm never going to meet a second person with synesthesia. So let's study them. And of course, I've met hundreds of people with synesthesia now, maybe thousands. So how do you go about studying it? Because I'm an expert in in a solicitor position of people with synesthesia find me. But because it is, you know, it is there as a rare variant, even within the university, if we screen enough students, you know, several hundred students, we're going to get a bit of a sample. So recruiting them, we are in a fortunate position to be able to do that. So for me, I think obviously studying

what the synesthetic experience is like are an important kind of start. So why is it that the letter is read and why is it that a sound evokes a certain colour? And there are explanations for that. And actually the way that all our brains work is that we do mix our senses. We just don't do it in quite the same way as synesthetes do. So high-pitch notes tend to be brighter and lighter and more jaggedy and so on. And this is true of both people with synesthesia and people without. So we can look at what are the rules by which the different senses come together. You know, how is something in music like pitch related to something visual like shape or like colour? We can also look at what goes with synesthesia. So aside from the synesthetic experiences

themselves, we can ask questions like to cynic think in different ways, do they have different abilities, different personalities. So these might be things that are directly caused by synesthesia, but it might be just things that go within the synesthesia package, if you will, that synesthetes differ not just in terms of these experiences, they differ in multiple dimensions. That it becomes like a, well, yeah, a package, a collection of features. And of course, we can look inside the brain of synesthetes as well, and we've done interesting research there. So what's that uncovered then? What do we know about any sort of physiological differences in the brains of people with synesthesia? So people have been very interested in the idea that people with

synesthesia are connecting things together in ways that other people aren't. I mean, that is kind of the lay definition. So what you might imagine in the brain is that you've got physical connections between parts of the brain involved in, say, music and vision that other people don't have. And there is some truth in this. We can show these structural differences, but actually there are differences in many places throughout the brain of synestines. So it's not just that their brains are kind of rewired in the things that are directly relevant to synesthesia. Their brains are kind of structured rather differently. And you don't see this to the naked eye. You know, you can use clever machine learning AI things that kind of uncover a range of differences that are there in the

synesties brain. But the most enduring way of describing it is that synesties have extra pathways or connections in their brain that others don't. And we can think that there is some truth in that and that this probably emerges early on in life as well. Because I mean, just in terms of talking to a citizen seat, they say, I've had this for as long as I know. We can show it comes on, or the coloursful letters and numbers comes on when you go to school. But it might be that you've had unusual experiences before that as well. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building.

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Let's have a look at some of the other things that might contribute then. I mean, is there any evidence of genetics playing a role? So what's been known since the 19th century is that synesthesia does run in families, so you might have mother-son, two brothers with it. One of the things that was spotted early on is that the way synesthesia's manifested differs even within families. So you might, if you've got two brothers with it, they're going to have arguments about what colour Tuesday is

or what a word tastes like. And they will even argue about whether something has a taste or a colour. So within a family, you might have somebody who tastes words and somebody who has colours for music. So what this suggests is that syneciseia does run in families, but what the genetic contribution is like a disposition to develop synesthetic associations or synesthetic ways of experience. But actually the way it manifests in each individual brain

is to do with how that brain develops either as a result of experience. or maybe just as a result of chance, that one pathway just becomes a bit more exuberant in one person, and a little less in the other. So the genetics are kind of increasing the probability that synesthesia will emerge, but what the synesthesia will look like is a wide variety of things and not just genetics.

So having said that, do we know if synesthesia plays a kind of role in evolution? Is there an evolutionary purpose for it existing? Yes, this is a great question. that I've tried to kind of think about, and we have no evidence about whether the prevalence of Cinesis is going up, whether, you know, if it's positively selected for, you know, are we all going to become Cinescent, and I'm not sure that that's necessarily going to be right.

I think ultimately what you kind of want in the population is genes that enable you to be good at certain things, but you're not necessarily going to have genes that enable you to be good at everything. So we know that Cinesets, for example, they've got good attention to detail. They do score well on creativity tests, but there are other things that they don't do.

And you don't necessarily want all of your population being like this. You want some people who then go into certain creative niches and some people who go into other kinds of niches within a population. So it's not necessarily the case that a one-size-fits-all. Just because you're good at certain things when we test you in the lab, it doesn't mean that the whole population should look like you because you want that kind of diversity and you will just feel certain jobs and certain careers

and certain abilities according to your disposition. And synesthesia kind of helps with that, at some extent. So let's have a look at that more closely then and the potential impacts that it could have on people's lives. I've heard, like you mentioned earlier, memory, I've heard that it can have an impact on somebody's ability to remember facts. I mean, is that true? Yes, there are various ways in which I think synestisic can influence memory. So one is that you can use your synesthetic experience as a bit like a tool. So it might be now that I've forgotten your name, but I know your name is a red name, and the letter J is red. So you can go through this kind of logic that you've almost got this extra acute. I think in general, the fact that synesthetes brains are wired

differently means that actually memory works in different ways in synesthetes, even when they're not using it as like a mnemonic strategy, that actually having a different kind of wiring pattern in the brain means that synesthetes remember differently anyway. And they think in visual images as well. So even when they're not having synesthetic experiences, if you ask a synestead to remember a childhood holiday, for example, going to the beach before the age of 10, and then you ask them to raise how vivid this is, how much detail they can do. They report this in a lot more detail. So it's not just about having these extra associations that they can remember. They can remember things in general in a more vivid, more pictorial way than the average person. Yeah, so you mentioned earlier creativity. So, I mean, perhaps not but I'd suspect that synesthetes have an advantage or perhaps at least a different approach to visual art than the rest of us. I mean, is that true? Well, that's right. So some synesthetes obviously look to kind of create their visual experiences. So most synesthetes are like abstract art. So that's what it looks like. In terms of music, we do find that synesthetes who experience colours for music

are more likely to train in musical instruments. So again, there are these biases depending on how you experience things to go and do that. But actually we find that even on kind of more boring lab-based tests, we find that there are differences. So synesthetes who experience colours, whether it's for music or anything, are really good at telling colours apart. So if you imagine two shades of red, that other people will look, I can't tell whether it's the same or different. Acidity will be able to give you the answer. So they do seem to have more finely tuned perceptual abilities that, again, might kind of help as a more aesthetic sense, if you will, then they can tell things apart that others can't. And simply, if you imagine music that might have visual patterns with it,

you can effectively remember the music as a visual pattern then. So if you're trying to reproduce a piece or using your own private experience as the musical score rather than the thing that's written on the black and white paper. So sort of on the opposite side of that, are there any reports of synesthesia having a negative impact on people's lives? So I'd imagine, for example, if something triggers an unpleasant taste, then that's probably quite a distress in the experience. Yes, so synesthetes have limited control over the experiences, so they can't really change the nature of experience and make it positive or negative. To some extent, they can tune it out in the same way as I can tune out my peripheral vision and focus on the sinful things,

but my peripheral vision doesn't disappear in the same way somebody's syracizia doesn't disappear, it's always there, and the extent to which it kind of grabs your attention or is the focus of attention can be, to some extent, control. But yes, you might have, some synesthetic experiences that are unpleasant. I've known some people who don't like the colour of their name. There was a famous synestique called Sarah, who changed the spelling of a name to C-E-R-A because it was just a more attractive kind of colour palette. You know, so, okay, that's a fairly major lifestyle decision to have changed the spelling of your name due to the colours. So is there anything sort of more general we can learn about the way the brain works by studying

those with synesthesia? One of the things that's very interest to, it's kind of modern your sense, is around individual differences in the brain. So obviously, decades ago, people would understand individual difference in the brain in terms of a normal brain and an abnormal brain. You've got this kind of clear, black and white. And now we don't kind of cast it in those terms. Everybody's brain's different.

But at what point do they become fundamentally different? What are the dimensions in which the brain varies? And what point does it become a problem? And what point is natural variation just is what it is? And I find semiseiseer a very interesting kind of test case for looking at that. So Cinescy typically don't go to their doctors and say, oh, I'm experiencing colours and something. It's them. It's perfectly normal. It's just what they're used to. But from a scientific point of view, how is it that the brain varies? What does this actually mean?

You know, does it protect you against having dementia if your brain's wired differently? Are you less likely to go with that? Are you more likely to have other problems if you're experiencing visual images all the time? You've got a fantastic memory. Are you more likely to have PTSD? Sometimes there are things you want to forget. And if you've got a good memory, experience things in a very vivid way, maybe that's going to be unhelpful if something bad happens to you that you want to move on from. So you mentioned there it comes in many different forms. Is the definition of synesthesia evolving? You know, is it changing? Are we adding new kinds of synesthetic experiences to our sort of knowledge database? Yeah, and there's always gray areas as to, you know, where synesthesia ends and other

things begin. I mean, the one example that I kind of have a bit of debate with colleagues about is that some people have genders and personalities for letters and numbers. So the number five might be bossy and male and six is, I don't know. But again, is this synesthesia? It certainly doesn't feel like the examples of synesthesia I gave earlier, but actually people with the more traditional types of synesthesia, so colours for music are more likely to have personalities for letters and numbers. So it seems to go together. are other things that we don't quite know about, so they don't quite fit the picture. But for me, that isn't necessarily a problem, because for me, I don't think that synesthesia is just about having these unusual experiences. I think synesthetes do have a broad profile of differences

in their brains and their personalities and the way that they think. So the fact that you've got these things that don't quite fit in the definition of sydicegia isn't hugely problematic to me, but it does throw up some interesting questions. So did they share any other sort of common characteristics then, having said that, are they more likely to have certain personality types than others, for example? Yes, so the personality type that comes out with Cinesu is called openness to experience, which is around kind of imaginative thinking. And so you might imagine, you know, if you've got unusual experiences, that that is the kind of personality you would have anyway. But this is the one that comes out more strongly. And again, this type of personality is linked to

artistic pursuit. And so people who have that personality trait more strongly and more likely to go down those hobbies and professions. So famous people who have this would be Billy Eilish, Lord, both pop stars actually, but there were plenty of examples from classical music as well and from visual arts. So sort of we've kind of an awful lot there. And it's one final question by way of closing. What would you say is the future of synesthesia research? You know, what are some of the things that personally you'd really like to uncover? For me, I think of synesthesia as being one aspect of a neurodivergent phenotype or a diverse set of traits. And for me, I'm very interested in kind of unpacking that from the level of genes through

to brain to ultimately what influences people's lifestyle, their way of experiencing the world, their way of thinking. So for me, synesthesia is just a fascinating example of how you can link science all the way from genetics through to somebody's private inner world and understanding what that actually means. Where does this come from? How does it help? How does it explain, you know, neurodiversity in general, the fact that people do think differently and experience things differently?

Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius. Brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Professor Jamie Ward, a psychologist and synesthesia researcher based at the University of Sussex. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your preferred. app store. You can also find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

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