[Wherein our hero stumbles upon the worlds very first Synesthete, and quiety wishes that he too had super powers...]

This is not the kind of post I normally make, but in doing some research for another subject I came across something that's quite fascinating.

But first, a preamble.

Every first year Psych students becomes familiar with a number of case studies. The most famous is probably Phinaes Gage. Gage (1823 - 1860) worked on a railroad early in his adult life - he was a responsible, sensible and dilligent man and was recognized so - he was the foreman of construction with his own rail crew. Then, one day, while tamping a hole full of explosives with an iron rod, the black powder ignited and - in what can only be described as a probability that is a single decimal place followed by many, many, zeros - the iron rod blasted up through his cheek, his frontal lobe, out the top of his head and sent Gage flying. Reported, he stood up and walked away. After the incident Gage was an impulsive, irrational, aggressive man. A changed man. Gage changed the course of our understanding of Neuroscience and Brain Function.

There is also HM - After suffering for many years of dibilitating siezures doctors decided in 1953 to cut out a sizeable portion of his Hippocampus and Amygdala. The poor bastard was never again able to form a new memory.

Then there's Little Albert - Little Albert had the unfortunate luck to be subjected to Watson's study of fear conditiong. The little guy was presented with a toy white rat and then someone would bang a couple of pots together behind his head and scare the crap out of him. The conditioning was so successful the little guy was terrified of anything white therafter, including Santa Clause.

In doing a bit of research (for something else entirely) I came across Georg Sachs - An Austrian Albino born in 1786 who appears to be the first documented case of Synesthesia.

Now if you don't know synesthesia it's like having super-powers (that's the way I see it, anyway). Synesthetes have this weird cross-modal sensory experience where they can experience words and letters or musical tones and timbres as colour; they may perceive time as distance; experience touch or colour as emotion; they might experience numbers as shapes (or colours, or anything, really), hell, some of them experience ideas and concepts as colours or emotions. Some of them claim they can do math by adding shapes and colours. Holy flip! (I understand it's a rough process, but it works by approximations...).

Anywho, besides me wanting to be able to layer my every day experience with cross-modal-sensory experiences (sans the LSD) I'd like to point out a few things this Sachs fellow said. I think it reflects something that might have been lost in today's more dry and academic process:

There is much which either never comes before the eyes, or which cannot be reckoned with usual sight, that either does not belong to the sense of vision, or which is not perceptible to the senses, which, in the mind of the brother, inspires dark ideas of different colors, so intimate and recurring, that cannot be conceived of, or only scarcely and with difficulty, without a certain attention. I cannot express it better than to say that a colored idea appears to him. For some, however, this seems due more to a certain coincidence than to regulated impressions, whereby the color and the article in which the idea is connected, which affects the mind, seem to stand in harmony. Some ideas convey the colors by themselves, even if the feelings move all in heaven to differ.

Particularly those things which form a simple series; e.g., numbers, the days of the week, the time periods of history and of human life, the letters of the alphabet, intervals of the musical scale, and other such similar things, adopt those colors. These introduce themselves to the mind as if a series of visible objects in dark space, formless and noticeably of different colors. With some, the idea of the color is so dark that one can scarcely differentiate between the colors; with others, it is much more clear.

He goes on to explain his experience with numbers (10, as if it were white glass; 11, milk-colored; 100, white, scarcely bright; 110 and 111, extremely shiny), days of the week (Sunday is white, sometimes yellowish; Monday grey, Tuesday has a dark and uncertain color; Wednesday yellow) and a few other examples.

I wonder, by his prose, how much has been lost in the battle between the lay-man and scientific establishment in the communication of ideas; I wonder what the state of education might be if all such descriptions were written so artfully.

At any rate it's just a discovery I wanted to share. Georg Sachs was the first described synesthete and, in the current era, is a forgotten figure. Not that it's necessary for such things to be associated with people to understand, but I think it does a lot to make such things accessible. Particularly when it's estimated that up toف/20 within the population have some form of trait synesthetic experience.

If you experience any kind of cross-modal stimulation you might have some degree of synesthesia. Take the test and find out. Though I must say, unless you suspect you have it, your probably wasting your time. In the mean time I await the day I can voluntarily re-wire my brain so I can trigger emotions by touch, do maths by colour, and paint concepts in my mind....

Jewanski, J., Day, S., & Ward, J. (2009). A Colorful Albino: The First Documented Case of Synaesthesia, by Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs in 1812 Journal of the History of the Neurosciences, 18 (3), 293-303 DOI: 10.1080/09647040802431946