synesthesia

In another post recently, I mentioned an article on Kandinsky in a Swedish newspaper. The article concluded by saying that modern research on synesthesia could help explain how and why artists, musicians and painters experience an overlap between different sensory impressions/experiences, i e, music with colours. I’ve long suspected that Steiner was a synesthete; his descriptions are full of indications on colours and shapes (see, i e, how he describes spiritual experience in such a basic work as Knowledge of Higher Worlds). In my previous post (scroll down past the Swedish stuff) I quoted from Ahern’s book, and linked to another interesting blog post on synesthesia, Are we all synesthetes?

Now Stephen Sagarin writes a post worth readin, on Steiner and synesthesia. The question of whether or not synesthesia is inherent in all humans is adressed by Steven Novella in the blog post I referred to above. Novella wants to distinguish between synesthesia and multimodal thinking, but writes that this is still an open question. In an article in Scientific American, When Senses Intersect, a researcher of synesthesia states

We’ve learned that the normal brain is already highly cross–wired. We think synesthesia occurs due to increased activity in existing wiring rather than the result of extra wiring.

[...]

Far from being a mere curiosity, synesthesia is a consciously elevated form of the perception that everyone already has. Minds that function differently are not so strange after all, and everyone can learn from them.

On synesthesia and creativity he notes that

[t]here is more to creativity than a capacity for metaphor, of course. Nonetheless, begin with the assumption that the gene for synesthesia lashes together normally unconnected brain areas, thus linking seemingly unrelated qualities such as sound and color.[...] One would have a generalized talent for cross connecting apparently unrelated concepts, which is the definition of metaphor: seeing the similar in the dissimilar.

He also touches upon a similar idea as Sagarin’s; that intersecting sense perceptions could be cause by not “losing” something that is really there from the beginning, so to speak:

My first idea that the emotional brain served as the link gave way, based on observations in neonatal synesthesia, to the possibility of faulty pruning. That is, the gene in synesthesia might fail to prune the extra synapses that are normally made in great excess in all newborns. We thought their persistence might plausibly explain why some people are synesthetes.