Synesthesia and What It Has Taught Me | Melissa McCracken | TEDxUNC

I want to start off by telling you guys a little story when I was 16 years old I got myself this brand-new at navy blue slider phone and the first thing that you do in 2007 when you get a new phone as you customize your ringtone or at least that was the first thing that I always did so one night I was sitting with a friend and we were scrolling through my iTunes whenever I came across a song that I had heard before and that was cheater by Michael Jackson and as I was listening to it I thought yes this song is perfect so I turned to my friend and I said yes this song is perfect it's orange it matches my blue phone perfectly I'm confused he said wait what do you mean it matches and I honestly thought that he didn't understand complementary colors so I began explaining to him that blue was on the opposite side of the color wheel to orange meaning that they were complementary and that meant that they looked nice together and he instantly corrected me saying yeah no I get that but what do you mean the song is orange and in the moment I knew that something was off but I honestly had no idea it had anything to do with me how could someone not be seeing music as color so I turned to my friends and family saying hey you guys see music is color too right and literally no one else did everyone was confused I was super confused and I honestly felt very very alone but fortunately around that time I was getting interested in neuroscience and psychology and I happened to stumble into what was an explanation for what I was experiencing and that was a neurological condition called synesthesia so in synesthesia your brain is essentially cross-wired where one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to the automatic and involuntary response another sensory cognitive pathway and this can manifest itself in many forms from may be tasting words to assigning personalities to different letters and soon I found out that I actually had three variations so the first is one of the most common varieties and that is called grapheme-color synesthesia and in this form every letter and every number that I experience essentially has a color code so for example my M is always magenta which is great because my name is Melissa McCracken and I love magenta my a is always light blue and my 3 is always lime green and this happens every time I read a book every time I look at a sign and every time I calculate a math formula which is pretty much never any more my second form is called spatial sequence synesthesia and through this anything that is presented in a sequential format such as your numbers or your days of the week or your months of the year exist in a particular point in space around my body so if I were to count from 1 to 100 I might start right here with 1 and it'll trail its way up to a hundred over here or if I were to meet you on a Tuesday I might imagine that meeting happening about here because I always experience Tuesday here and lastly I have chroma Stasia or music 2 color synesthesia and this is the form that presented itself as I was trying to choose my ringtone and through this I experienced music as this flow of color and texture kind of shifting around as the song progresses or it might change completely as a new instrument is produced introduced or as a chord is produced and all of these variations are very clear and concise and automatic and completely involuntary and to be clear they are not hallucinations I can drive and listen to music which is a question that I'm asked fairly frequently it in no way inhibits my actual visual field and the best comparison I have for that is the way in which you might recall a memory so for example if you have a memory happening and you are envisioning it as you're driving your car you're not going to freak out thinking oh my gosh I can't think of this anymore I can't see the road I'm going to crash my car it might just exist in this filter that is sort of floating above your head or wherever you may normally visualize a memory so after learning how I how differently I was I also learned how frequently I had just had to describe these differences to everyone else and honestly it didn't really make sense for me to describe them after all I was visualizing I was verbalizing a visual so being an artist at heart I thought okay I'm going to paint this I'm gonna show these depictions to people so I'm going to show you these and we have one up here right now but before I get into it I need to explain to you how I actually show music in a tangible form and I do this by taking the three to four minutes that I see flowing along and bringing it into a concise two-dimensional image by incorporating the elements that I feel are most imperative and most important in representing the song as a whole so the first one here that I have up is called little winged by Jimi Hendrix and you guys might be familiar with this one and this one's very very near and dear to me because it's honestly one of my first memories of synesthesia and also one of my first paintings of synesthesia so when I was little my brother used to platt practice playing the guitar and I would sit and listen to him but as I was listening I didn't really pay attention to my environment but instead I would pay attention to the colors that I was seeing in the room and that was these swirls of white and pink and blue and they would all kind of develop together and move as a song progressed but alongside his guitar notes that added these strikes of gold and yellow so next I have a song called True Love Waits and this song is by Radiohead and if you guys are familiar with this song it's kind of a sombre tranquil song which creates these white and kind of blue backgrounds but it has this bouncing ball sound and I don't know if you guys are familiar with it I wish I could play it for you but it creates those clumps of blue and purple there but as they sit through the song they kind of dissipate out and white next this is a little bit different it's more focused on the verb of the singer and this is a Lauren Hill song called x-factor and her voice to me is very warm which creates these pink and brown kind of tones that swoop up to through to the right but she also has this attitude and this style and that creates that extra little flare of white on the side next this is a song called Lenny by Stevie Ray Vaughan and I was really wanting to focus on the first few notes of that song and it's just a few guitar notes and they play out in this reverberating way which is very full and dynamic which creates all the colors but as they reverberate out they kind of spin around in this circular motion which creates all the movement in the background there and last I have a song that I'm sure a lot of you are familiar with and that is Bach's cello suite number one and the cello to me can only be represented by these deep and saturated jewel tones this so this is mostly made of those tones but the first few notes of that song kind of sit in this crested and nested kind of way and that's what creates the curve dynamic dynamic in this picture so as I made these paintings they were kind of my babies and I was really protective over them and I didn't want to share them with the world but as I showed them to my friends and family they gave me the confidence to then move it to a more global scale and it's kind of crazy how we can do that so easily with the internet so I shared my work with sites like M ger and bored panda and as they gain more traction and circulation on those sites they made their way to places like CNN and MTV and O Magazine and not only did this allow me to turn my hobby in my condition into a full-time career but it also allowed me to see these unfiltered responses from people around the world and some of these responses were people saying oh this is exciting and this is something that I've never experienced before thank you for sharing or sometimes people were a little skeptic thinking that there was no way that synesthesia could exist but my favorite response is were the ones from people who also had synesthesia and a few of them would be excited because they thought yes these are the visuals that I've experienced before I finally get to see them in a somewhat tangible way but there were also these people who had synesthesia and they had no idea that this was somewhat of a normal occurrence they thought that they were completely alone and they almost thought that as being a defective sort of experience to go through that something was wrong with them so when they saw my paintings they thought oh my gosh I'm not alone and nothing is wrong with me and that was my favorite one of all so as I went through all of this from learning how I was different to sharing it with the world to turning it into a full-time career I realized a lot of things and one in particular is that from day one we live our lives through one perspective our own everything we encounter is filtered through this lens of our personal experiences our relationships are developed and adapted beliefs are natural skills and shortcomings and any other nuances that are specific to who we are as individuals and as these dynamics kind of embed themselves into our lives experiences it makes it difficult to imagine a world in ways that we have not directly experienced and of course this can be a huge problem not only does it affect our ability to empathize but it also removes us from an accurate assessment of who we are as unique individual individuals so I would like for you guys to take the time to please explore who you are and share that with the world because you 100% are way more unique than you imagine you have thoughts and ideas floating through your mind that although they seem very very normal to you because you experience them day in and day out they could be absolutely remarkable to the rest of the world and necessary for the rest of the world to hear so share this with the world because you have no idea if you might turn it into a career or use it as a tool for education or somewhere bring solace and relief to someone that feels alone thank you [Applause]

Channel: TEDx Talks

Views: 36,078

Rating: 4.9805446 out of 5

Keywords: TEDxTalks, English, Art, Music (topic), Senses

Id: kvPd3wH21z8

Length: 11min 8sec (668 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 26 2018