Translator: Rhonda Jacobs
Reviewer: Peter van de Ven Hello. I'm going to talk to you today about
a condition of mine and many other people that you may or may not
have experience with before. But, throughout this talk, I'm not just
going to expect you to listen, I want you to ask yourself
if any of this sounds familiar to you. Most people with this condition don't understand
that it is actually kind of unique. So synesthesia is just like
anesthesia, the word, so it is "without feeling,"
but instead, "joined feeling." Synesthesia is
when two senses are crossed. So, for instance, the stimulation
of one cognitive or sensory pathway leads to an immediate response in another. This is pretty common with a lot of people
on a spectrum, of sorts, and its most basic level
is this classic example of bouba and kiki. Ramachandran and Hubbard
re-did this experiment recently, and what they did is they asked subjects which one of these objects
is kiki and which one is bouba. So, the majority of people
say the spiky one is kiki and the rounded one is bouba. This suggests that the human brain attaches abstract meaning
to shapes and sounds, just naturally. More abstract forms of synesthesia
are grapheme-to-color synesthesia. So for me, S is always red. It always has been; it always will be. It's just what it is. And this is the same for every single
other letter of the alphabet. Although, if you have
this type of synesthesia, these aren't the "correct" colors,
you'll see different colors; it's cool, it's fine. Cool test for this -
or, this is a funny example - is because you can see different colors
with different letters and symbols, you'll see messages
that other people can't see, so hi mom. (Laughs) I think she's over there somewhere. Yeah. Another example of more abstract
forms of synesthesia are the auditory synesthesia. For me, I can physically see sounds
as pitches to colors. So this is my sort of scale, so C is red, D is blue, E is yellow. Always has been, always will be. And this is really awesome
when I jump in on jam sessions, if no one knows what key they're in,
I just see what color they're doing, and I just kind of mimic the shapes. It's pretty awesome. Or, I never studied ear training
because what I would do for intervals, they always ask you,
like, just remember different songs, and relay that interval to that song,
and you'll figure it out. I would figure out what the colors were, and then I would do the math in my head. It's kind of cheating. So, one of the more fascinating
types of synesthesia comes to us from the UK. It's an amazing man named James Wannerton. He tastes words. So logically, like everyone
would do in this situation, he mapped out the London Underground
based on what he tasted of each stop. And he was quoted as saying
he'd have to get off a stop early if he didn't like the taste
of where his destination was. So, that's kind of funny but ... (Laughter) kind of awesome. A lot of people think that synesthesia
is a sort of hallucinogenic experience. And it's really not. There's a genetic element to it,
and it's just everyday if you have it. So, there's actually two different
categories of synesthesia. So those that are the projectors,
those that experience their "photism," so, for instance,
if I hear a color as a shape in the outside world. Anything that happens in the outside world
to you, you are a projector. Things that you associate, "associators" -
more memory based, hippocampal, you're an associator. So that type of synesthesia would be, like, if I see a letter
and I know what color it is, I just know what it is. It's not out there in the outside world. Some cool questions
you can start asking yourself to see, "Is this me? Do I have synesthesia?" are, how do you remember someone's name? What does it mean to,
"You look like a Scott"? What does that mean? Do you use associations like, "I had a friend named Scott,
and you look kind of like him." For me, I might have a problem
remembering someone's name if the color that their name is, is different from the color
that I see with them as a person. So I apologize if that happens. Another thing is, does everyone
remember middle school, where you had those
crazy vocabulary [lessons], where you had to remember,
like, 20 words, really quickly? Or, obviously, you should
have studied over a week, (Laughter) but I would wait
until the very last minute, and what I would do is I would just, like,
"Okay, cool, red word means this, okay. And then blue word means this. Awesome." So I take the test and do pretty alright, except that I still
cannot spell to this day. Whatever. It worked. So ... Other questions you should ask yourself
is how do you experience a sense? What happens when you smell things? What happens when you hear things? How do you understand
how this is all coordinated in your mind? What happens when you
smell your favorite food? Is there a color associated with that? There's a reason you remember things. And it can be very abstract, and your brain likes to have
as many associations as possible in order to remember things. So, who are these people? Who has this? It's a big question, and, for instance,
you just never know about it, and you don't understand it's unusual. I was 20 years old before
I understood what was going on. I was in my final class
for my music degree, and our professor mentioned, "Hey, you know, it's kind of cool, some people physically
hear colors with sound." And I was like, "Duh." But I had no idea
that people didn't do this. So it was just like a movie,
everyone turned. It was like, no, that's not okay,
what's happening here? So, that led me
to get my neuroscience degree just to understand it a little better. So - Oh - I've been demoted to microphone. (Laughter) So the original projections for this
are about one in 25,000 people. That's pretty rare. Then they learned
a little bit more about it. We know that it has
a genetic element to it. So now some numbers
were one in 2,000 people had this. It's kind of cool; it's not as rare. And I've seen numbers as high
as one in 23 people have this. It's a pretty isolating experience when you find out
that you're unusual in some way. And I will tell, for myself,
I had this big experience of, oh, my gosh,
everything made sense. I am weird! All these years of being made fun of for coloring my mom
as pink and light blue, when you're coloring in elementary school, like, "Those aren't
the right colors for people." And all these things, it just made sense. So enter in The Synesthesia Network
I made with my husband. It's a Facebook for people who have it, and the idea is to get
as much data on us as possible. Because it's very important
to understand synesthesia, just to understand cognition
and to understand consciousness. And also, if you can
figure out the mechanism that has this lack of inhibition
in between the lobes with this extra connectivity,
even just genetically, it would be huge
for neurodegenerative diseases. It would be great,
and it's so understudied. So for instance, you can take
a grapheme-to-color test on the site, so you just use a little scrubby guy,
and you pick out what color it is. And you just go through them twice
and you get a sweet data page. So, what we know about this
is that as synesthesia research goes on and evolves just like
any sort of science study does, we are re-understanding
what the normal human experience is for cognition and for consciousness. Going from one in 25,000 people
to one in 23 for statistics, that's pretty great. And it makes you wonder,
yeah, maybe it's pretty normal, actually. So what is this normal? Our worlds are the same to us, but just because we see things
in different ways - I see colors with notes,
and numbers in letters, and you don't, and that's fine. Your world could look like this,
and my world could look like this, but it doesn't matter
as long as we can relate to each other. Never knew there was a difference in between me and someone
that did not have synesthesia until I was 20. So, at this time, what I'm going to do
is do something a little bit personal. My husband created
a synesthesia light show, where you can see the notes in the colors that I associate with my auditory
synesthesia in real time. So, I actually picked a song
by a fellow synesthete, Mr. Pharrell Williams,
and it's called "Happy," and I hope you enjoy. So real quick, you can actually see
the notes in the colors right now, just so you can see
that it's all in real time. So D is blue. A is like an orangish red. E is yellow. Just for the basics. (Music) (Applause) Thank you.
