Something weird about my brain
I am a truly horrific singer.
Sometimes I will disclaim this statement by adding phrases like, “I used to have some potential but talking over attention challenged sixteen year olds has ruined my voice,” or “I think if I had more consistent training I would have had a shot at it” or “I sound a lot different when I’m alone.” But I’ve come to terms with the delusion of those statements.
However, I am a very good listener.
Let me rephrase that, I am good at listening in that selective sounds hold great value in my brain. Allow me to elaborate. There are certain sounds, pitches, tones, combinations of melodies and notes that exist in my brain in a very peculiar way. Let’s just call it what it is, synesthesia.
When I’m bold enough to share this word with other people they quickly ask what it means or what it feels like. I typically open with the line, “you know how when you take LSD and your senses are all mixed up…” and I am met with skeptical, empty states. Unfortunately most people I engage in conversation with on the daily were not privy to drug exploration years of the mid century. In fact, being born in the 90s, neither was I, yet this is the only description I’ve found to be most explicit when describing this sixth sense.
Synesthesia is like your senses were jumbled up. Your brain perceives messages from certain senses in different ways. Synesthesia, like most weird brain things, comes in many shapes and sizes. Some people can hear a sound and they see a shape. Some people think of a day of the week and feel that it is a certain color. I myself experience synesthesia in several ways that I would like to describe here today. However, there are several rules when discussing my brain.
- Don’t ask what your color is.
- Don’t ask where your voice lives.
- Don’t pretend you’re sitting with number 14, they would never sit with you.
- Save your eye rolls for when you read about it on Wikipedia later
Symptom 1: The Color Waves
Imagine this. Classic 80s movie. A woman with permed bangs and high shoulder pads sits at her desk. A phone rings and her long red acrylics reach to press the line button as she twists her pencil in the cord. Her boss is asking her to call his client, something that starts with a “J” but he can’t remember the name. Her boss asks her to read him contacts with last name starting with “J.” She reaches for her rolodex and flips through with a satisfying zip.
Imagine a rolodex of color, zipping around a common axis. That’s the motion of sound in my brain. Zip, zip, zip looking for meaning in my address book of color. A sound enters my ears and is catalogued in my brain rolodex. Each sound corresponding with a color. So when you talk, or when a door slams or someone clicks their pen, a rolodex spins as my brain collects the sound and shows it to me in color. These sounds enter my brain and file across in gradient strips, expressing the nuance and tones of each cohesive sound.
Like most things in this world, there is a hierarchy of sound/color. A deep blue sound is quite preferable. This is the sound of my heart beat, my mother’s voice, a cat purr. Deep blue sounds are calming and clear. You can see/hear deep blue without interrupting other sound/colors. Magenta, that is interesting. It will hover in my brain waiting to be paid attention to. Most whispers are magenta, consistent rhythms, conversations I’ve lost track of. They will hover at magenta with their distinct color identities shuffling behind.
The physics of lights demands that all color added together is white. Acrylic paint demands that all color added together is black. But the correct answer is actually orange. When sounds are added together, in unpleasant combinations, irregular beats, noise if you will, I see orange. Orange takes precedence above all other color/sounds. When there is orange sound I cannot hear/see anything. There are several sounds that are orange on their own; a truck backing up for more than the appropriate amount of time, someone finger drumming without regard for rhythm or musicality, a leg wearing swishy pants shaking anxiously under a table. But orange is most often seen/heard when several other noises clash. No color/sound can be out rolodexed by noisy orange.
Symptom 2: A smokey distraction
Many people with synesthesia can associate certain notes with colors or shapes. These people often suffer from the great privilege of perfect pitch. I have not found my brain to be so generous. My brain does not associate specific notes to color but rather more complete sounds. Therefore, I cannot reproduce these sounds as someone with perfect pitch can reproduce notes. I have decided this is the culprit to my terrible singing ability. I do not know how sound works, please do not ask any follow up questions, thank you.
However, when someone is playing the piano, or strumming a guitar or I hear a violin (of which I studied for 8 years with no success) I can see/ hear when something is wrong. I can’t name it, because as we’ve discussed I have no musical talent, but I can see it. It is orange among a cloud of smoke.
I do not like to listen to music with other people. I do not like to listen to music in the background. I do not like to listen to music when I have to be listening to something else in any way. Music, or the connection of notes in a melodic way, appears to me as smoke. If sounds appear in my brain as color card gradients, almost like a paint chip from Home Depot, music is like string of smoke whispering off a single burning flame. The smoke will sometimes come in color, or at least illuminate the paint chip gradients wheeling behind it. But more often than not the music is just gray. Gray smoke, dancing around in my brain.
You can image, similar to being in a smokey room, the smell of wine and cheap perfume, thinking or seeing or breathing is quite difficult. With music, that feeling goes on and on and on and on. I really like music. The smoke lives in my shoulders (see symptom 3) and I find that really relaxing. It’s when the music and the smoke is interrupted by sounds I can’t see well. It is frustrating and confusing. I don’t understand how people can think when there is music smoking.
Symptom 3: The voice space
I think one of nature’s strangest choices was giving people such distinct voices. People’s voices are so weird. They exist in ways totally different than other natural creatures. The weirdest thing about people’s voices is where they live.
When someone talks to me, directly to me, so that I am experiencing their voice through my ears and through my superpower brain, I can feel where their voice lives. My friend Maureen, her voice is right on my soft pallette. My assistant at school, her voice is camped out in that soft spot between your earlobe and jaw bone. Some people live in the base of my throat or my glands, behind my nose or settled in the gums on my bottom four teeth. That is where their voice lives. I suppose this description would mean that I also have the kind of synesthesia where a sound triggers a feeling of physical touch. Which proves the point that the first person who said “shut up, you’re giving me a headache” was also a synesthete.
Symptom 4: A number galaxy and where things live
There are several other components of synesthesia as I experience it. Of which I won’t go into too much detail about because it is quite exhausting being so meta.
Are you familiar with the famous opening scene in Star Wars? Where a rolling script appears to move into a galaxy of stars. Erase the words, they mean nothing in this brain description. Imagine that sea, that galaxy of stars existing in your brain. Imagine the stars are numbers. Imagine that you can reach out and touch them. That is how numbers exist in my brain. In a field similar to that of a galaxy. I can feel where they are so when I need to do quick math I just reach for them, feel them and compute them. Two and three are within immediate grasp, then slightly between them further back is five, six is close by as well. Thirteen is over to the right, with eleven slightly below it. Twenty five, fifty two and forty nine are sort of bundle together over to the left. One is almost behind me, but ten is very close. Some numbers are closer and easier to hold on to while others are impossible to find. Math has always been extremely subjective in my opinion.
Time is a very strange thing in my brain. The calendar and years exist in a grid and the days of the week on a line. The months move like papers on a desk, rigid but shuffled. They live in that stacked space. When a year or month is referenced, my brain shuffles the papers to show that time. Weekdays exist almost on a number line, where time is consistent and straight and it cannot bend or skip.
Sometimes ideas or thoughts or memories exist in my physical space. Like you can feel them living there. Not in a hallucinogenic way but in a furniture way. But in your brain. If I’m contemplating several ideas they exist in my brain space like a couch, desk and coffee table might. I consider this my brain’s way of carrying information. It exists in space. I find this the hardest aspect of synesthesia to describe as many people have such varied taste in interior design.
When I reveal my synesthesia to people, which is not very often, I am generally met with two responses. 1.) that’s bullshit and 2.) what are you seeing right now. The first response is irrelevant. I’m not going to justify or elaborate on my clearly superior brain power to you, a simpleton. The second response feels like a challenge. But here is the real tea, I don’t know what I’m “seeing” right now. I believe this question is referring not to what images are my eyes collecting and sending to my brain but rather what are my ears hearing then sending to my brain which is turning it into color for me to “see.” However, that is not how it works and I want to make this very clear. We all receive messages from different stimuli and if we are healthy and our brains are working as they should those messages make meaning in our brain. Synesthesia is hard to study because it requires an intricate ability to think about, describe and track something that your brain does so seamlessly and quickly. My brain is working just like yours is, just in a significantly cooler way.