Reading in TechnicolorTM

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(1)Yapp is a magazine created by the 2012-2013 Book and Digital Media Studies master's students at Leiden University. The handle http://hdl.handle.net/1887/28849 holds the full collection of Yapp in the Leiden University Repository. Copyright information Text: copyright © 2014 (Anna Ntrouka). Licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Image: (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Andrea Reyes Elizondo. .

(2) Artist’s impression of how Ntrouka sees the words “reading” (above) and “technicolor” (below). Illustration: Andrea Reyes Elizondo.. 166.

(3) Reading in TechnicolorTM. anna ntrouka. You know how enhanced e-books are all the rage nowadays? How embedded interactive videos promise to transform your reading experience in a spectacular fashion? What if I were to tell you that for a lucky few, technology does not need to come to their aid when it comes to colourful reading? Ever since letters started making sense to me I became an avid reader, starting a book as soon as I had finished the previous one. I could never get enough and reading was magical, well beyond the beauty of a great story and clichés like “books are windows to other worlds”. I read everywhere and everything, including the label on my breakfast cereal. Alas, behind this intense, almost obsessive, fascination I harboured a deep, dark secret, one that I would not dare admit to anyone for fear that it sounded absolutely crazy. Doctor, I see numbers and letters in colour. Yes, in my head. No, I don’t hear any voices. Melodrama aside, there was never a doctor involved. After a long period of considering my colourful letters and numbers as the norm, one day I got suspicious and the inevitable questions finally came flooding in. Was this one of these things everyone experiences but never really talks about, or was I just plain strange? Was something wrong with me? What is this thing called anyway? It took me almost twenty-five years but in the end I did confess my secret. It started as a giddy conversation with a friend but soon I felt more adventurous and did some actual research on the subject. Making my way through scattered articles and conference proceedings—which for the most part were too full of neurological terms for me to really grasp—I was relieved to find out that not only was I not alone in my bizarre visualizations but that there was a name for them as well. Synaesthesia is medically defined as ‘a concomitant sensation and especially a subjective sensation or image of a sense (as of colour) other than the one (as of sound) being stimulated; as well as the condition marked by the experience of such sensations’. Stemming from the Greek words syn (συν, 167.

(4) together) and aisthēsis (αίσθηση, sensation) it can be loosely translated as “sensations working together”. According to neurologists, synaesthesia is the result of what is described as “cross-talk”—that is to say accidental communication signals caused by energy transference from another circuit—between regions of the brain that ordinarily do not communicate with each other. Keeping with the popular metaphor of the brain as a circuit, the proverbial wiring is faulty… or maybe new and improved? To make matters simpler: a synaesthete may visualize music, numbers or letters in colour or hear sounds when looking at images. Even rare cases of people experiencing specific tastes when listening to music have been documented. In other words, there is a great deal of variety in synaesthetic manifestations, some more common than others—grapheme to colour, for instance, which means visualizing numbers and letters in colour, is one of the most common variations. For a synaesthete, this process has two distinct characteristics: firstly it is automatic and as effortless as breathing, and secondly it is involuntary, since there is no control over the way stimulation is perceived. For a long period of time, people talking about their experiences as a synaesthete were simply cast off as overly imaginative or artistic and it is worth mentioning that the synaesthesia phenomenon is still rather uncharted territory. One of the great difficulties in mapping synaesthesia and its workings is the fact that it seems to be a highly individualistic affair. Even among family members who experience the same form of synaesthesia, for instance grapheme to colour, the colours they visualize specific letters in might vary significantly. To complicate the situation further, a synaesthete may experience some colours in a fixed manner, while others seem to be in flux and changing according to combinations of letters or numbers. One of the benefits of synaesthesia that has been observed so far is that it boosts memory function, as the connections synaesthetes make between stimuli are extremely powerful. Trying to describe how this wonderful “faulty” wiring changes one’s perception is nearly impossible without providing personal examples. Luckily, there is a record of said experiences by author Vladimir Nabokov who spoke of his ‘mild hallucinations’ in his autobiography Speak, Memory. Nabokov provides his readers with a detailed account of how the outlines of various letters form in his mind in various colors, like the a in the English alphabet ‘in the tint of weathered wood’ but ‘polished ebony’ in French. In my very own ‘mild hallucinations’ e is typically yellow and a red but the word reading comes off as bright orange. Then there is Tuesday which contains both e and a as well, but I regret to inform you that for some inexplicable reason Tuesday is as yellow as a canary. It’s true that synaesthesia is a peculiar, complex, and understudied subject, hard to put to words and quite possibly responsible for perplexed looks cast your way during social events. On the bright side, opening a book as a synaesthete means that the text jumps out in technicolorTM—as if books weren’t 168.

(5) fascinating enough already—and it also means that the content of the book is easier to remember. It looks like what neurologists frequently describe as a defect that also has its perks. And even though it is slightly awkward and intimidating, it needs to be said: I wouldn’t give up my faulty wiring for the world. My name is Anna and I’m a synaesthete. Further reading Campen, C. van. The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia In Art and Science. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2010. Cytowic, R. E. and D. Eagleman. Wednesday Is Indigo Blue: Discovering the Brain of Synesthesia. Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 2009. Nabokov, V. Speak, Memory. London: Penguin, 2000. Seaberg, M. Tasting the Universe: People Who See Colors in Words and Rainbows In Symphonies. Pompton Plains: New Page Books, 2011.. 169.

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