Overview

PREFACEThe first thing that we ask, when someone sees something that the rest of us do not, is whether it is "true." Such subjective visions demand evaluation because they call into question our own perceptions about the nature of reality. If others do not dismiss the visions as mere hallucinations, then these frequently take on a certain numinous quality; they are thought to hold more truth than the pedestrian perceptions of nonvisionaries. Nearly every contemporary historian, whether sympathetic to it or not, is familiar with Max Weber's view that Western European history is characterized by die Entzaubuerung der Welt, the "disenchantment of the world." In opposition to the "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart"-Weber's oft-quoted assessment of modern humanity-the Western Romantic tradition has endeavored to rescue human beings from a deadening objectivism by celebrating the subjective, the invisible, the imaginary. As materialism established its final stranglehold on Western civilization, Romantics posited the existence of worlds other than the material one. From the visions of William Blake to Swedenborgian Spiritualism to contemporary parapsychology, many of the attempts to make contact with other worlds have been chronicled by historians. Historical treatments have not necessarily had to come to grips with whether the phenomena in question-whether paranormal psychological effects or visions of gods, angels, demons, and other discarnate beings-have any empirical validity, because their existence as cultural and intellectual artifacts alone gives them sufficient ontological weight for historical inquiry. In the eyes of contemporary historians, angels may not have had much effect on history, but the belief in them certainly has, and the same goes for the belief in spirits, elves, fairies, and pixies and the invisible realms in which they dwell. Whether seen as barometers of social change, protests against an increasing rationalist and materialist worldview, or attempts by traditionally disempowered social groups to gain some measure of influence, those Romantic ideas, along with the individuals and organizations devoted to them, have been thoroughly domesticated by historical scholarship, regardless of whether they have been interpreted by historians as successful or unsuccessful. Witches in seventeenth-century New England villages become ciphers in demographic dilemmas, and the disembodied spirits of nineteenth-century seances are turned into players in the gender wars. For most modern historians the force of the transcendent is mostly political, economic, and social, not spiritual.More than all the Romantic literary explorations of the imagination, the phenomena of Spiritualism introduced the disenchanted to the possibilities of an unseen realm. Westerners, no matter how "disenchanted," have exhibited a perennial curiosity about the invisible world. Latter-day Romantics argue that the positivist worldview is limiting to the human spirit and that human cognition needs to include engagement with nonvisible realms; the manifestations of that invisible world are marshaled in evidence. Synaesthesia-the manifestation of an unseen world examined in this book-is not, like paranormal phenomena, ignored or scoffed at by scientists but is thoroughly documented scientifically. Still, it has generated an enormous amount of what can only be described as religious sentiment. I argue that because Western culture has lacked a suitably inclusive model or description of human consciousness, synaesthesia has repeatedly been mistaken for a unique, desirable "higher" state, enjoyed only by exceptional individuals.Three years ago, I was in a bookstore in Tempe, Arizona. When I came up to the counter with two books to purchase-Robert Sardello's Facing the World with Soul (1991) and Daniel Cottom's Abyss of Reason (1991) the sales clerk exclaimed "What a dichotomy!" When I asked him what he meant, he said that soul, which he identified with emotion, and reason are antagonistic, polar opposites. I encouraged him to explain. He said that there was a way to reconcile the division between emotion and reason-"synaesthesia." How did he know this word? I asked. He explained that he was reading a new book on synaesthesia, and that it was one of the books he was featuring in that week's display window on psychology. (The bookstore's entire upper floor was devoted to psychology, New Age, and self-help literature.) I probed a bit more about what "synaesthesia" meant for him and why he had offered this obscure Greek word as a solution to the problem of modernity-call it the mind-body problem, the reason-emotion dichotomy, or the war between the head and the heart. In his response he kept pulling in other scientific terms-"synchronicity," "black holes," "chaos"-and used all metaphorically, extending their original meanings into new territory, just as he had done with the word "synaesthesia." He seemed to be performing some of the same imaginative leaps that had been executed for the past century, as Western science and art repeatedly came face to face with the rare psychological phenomenon known as synaesthesia. Once more I asked myself how so many hopes and desires had been pinned on something so idiosyncratic.As I left, he told me to look at his handiwork in the display window. There in the center of the window was the book on synaesthesia-Richard Cytowic's Man Who Tasted Shapes-surrounded by Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations, Stanislav Grof's Beyond the Brain, Howard Gardner's Creating Minds, and a host of other titles-Gateway to Inner Space: The Self-Aware Universe, a book about Milton Erickson's hypnosis techniques, another on neurolinguistic programming in psychotherapy, and many others. Though all were ostensibly about the mind, it struck me that the themes uniting the books were the celebration of unseen worlds, the capacity of some people to see extraordinary visions that not all of us can see, and the suggestion that the ability to perceive unseen worlds might represent the "next step" in human consciousness. Out of the many ideas contained in these books, the bookstore clerk had chosen synaesthesia as the path to liberation from the prisonhouse of the senses and their tyrannical overseer, reason. This liberation has been the continual theme in the Romantic fascination with synaesthesia. Synaesthesia has always been a magnet for Romantic ideas, because it seems to validate the belief in the primacy of imagination in human cognition, as well as to ratify the original wholeness, continuity, and interfusion of immediate experience before its division into atomistic sensations. Most of those who have seized on synaesthesia for support have also maintained that the ultimate function of literature and the arts is to manifest this fusion of the senses. Believing in a primal unity of the senses, Romantics have naturally been fascinated by individuals who seem to be living examples of that unity-synaesthetes. Synaesthetes' senses lack the boundaries that for the rest of us segregate seeing from hearing or smelling or tasting or feeling at any given moment. Synaesthesia has been and continues to exercise a powerful attraction for those who want to "reenchant" the world. To the Romantic nonsynaesthete, synaesthetes seem to have escaped the full consequences of the fall into rational consciousness suffered by the rest of us.My own view is that this is a mistaken notion, that most of those who have championed synaesthesia have not understood what it really is, and that the continued appeal of synaesthesia and other apparently anomalous states of consciousness results from Romanticism's never having "come of age." The two-centuries-old Romantic call for new ways of seeing, and with them, new ways of being, has stagnated, often owing to insufficient understanding of how consciousness has evolved. In particular, liberatory Romanticism has routinely ascribed to synaesthetic percepts an absolute, transcendental value, as if these bizarre sensations contained esoteric truths that we needed only to learn how to decipher. Because of its persistence as a Romantic ideal over the last century, synaesthesia-a rare psychological anomaly and the arcane, apparently trivial fancy of a small group of artists and intellectuals-has become a lens through which it is possible to see the limits of modern and postmodern attempts to escape the fetters of the Enlightenment. Synaesthesia invites historical reflection unencumbered by deadening positivism and rationalism, but also by liberatory excess. While debunking a century of extravagant claims about synaesthesia and eideticism as transcendental knowledge, I welcome the possibility that these phenomena do point to a new development in human consciousness.It is difficult to set this study within the context of academic cultural history as it is currently practiced. The topics of synaesthesia and eideticism have no historiography. Even as an entry point for a critical study of modern Romantic ideas about the evolution of human consciousness, synaesthesia may seem an arcane choice. It is admittedly abstruse, but as demonstrated by the bookstore clerk's enthusiastic borrowing of synaesthesia as an explanatory principle and tool for cultural critique, synaesthesia is also a modern apparition with a certain irresistible quality that invites speculative thought. Through imaginative speculation, it seems possible to begin to see the unseen, any era's most fundamental Romantic desire. INTRODUCTION In 1922, Edgar Curtis, the three-and-a-half year old son of Professor O. F. Curtis of Cornell University, heard the report of guns from a nearby rifle range, and asked his mother, "What is that big, black noise?" A few days later, as he was being put to bed on the sleeping porch, Edgar heard a high, shrill chirp and asked "What is that little white noise?" When his mother told him it was a cricket, he protested while imitating a typical cricket call: "Not the brown one, but the little white noise," and then imitated this shriller, higher, unfamiliar insect sound. Listening to the resonating buzz of a more distant cricket, Edgar pronounced it to be red. For Edgar, the whirring of electric fans was orange, the humming of vacuum cleaners black, the rhythm of a moving street-car yellow. Alone in a room with a piano, he tentatively touched the keys, crying out with delight the different colors they produced--middle-C red, bass notes black, high notes white. One day, upon seeing a rainbow, Edgar exclaimed, "A song! A song!" "M," the seven-and-a-half year-old daughter of a Dartmouth professor during the 1930s, also saw colors whenever she heard music. Asked by psychologists to match the colors she saw to a chart of one hundred different hues, she would usually say that the color was not on the chart, and would point to two or three hues and suggest that the color she saw was a mixture of them. The blotches of color she saw sometimes seemed to be within her forehead (high tones), sometimes near her ears (low tones). The colors varied in size with the pitch of the tones: middle range tones were between one and three inches in diameter, the high tone of a whistle "as small as a pea." People were also different colors to her: "K. is grey, sort of silverish. A square would be greyish white or silverish; a circle would be gold. Sometimes shapes of objects give colours but mostly living people. K. is silverish, because his head is sort of square. E. is purplish blue, dark orchid, her head is sort of plump and bobbed haired. My mother is medium purple--sort of plump, her hair goes behind and makes her look that colour to me. S. is white, whitish brown, due to the shape of his face. P. is orange, due to the sharpness of his nose." Asked what color black people were, the girl answered: "I haven't known them well enough to know what colors they are." An audience was "very bright orange with a black outline. Allstrangers look like that. As I know them better they get mild blue or pinkish orchid." Asked what color Dartmouth students were, she said that they were mild orange, without the black outline, since they knew her better than professors, who were bright orange and outlined. People in motion pictures "move[d] so fast" that she could not make out any colors. In the 1960s, psychologist A. R. Luria described the case of a Russian man whom he called simply "S" (for the man's surname--Shereshevskii) who saw different colors for different voices: according to Shereshevskii, "there are people who seem to have many voices, whose voices seem to be an entire composition, a bouquet. The late S. M. Eisenstein had just such a voice: listening to him, it was as though a flame with fibers protruding from it was advancing right toward me. I got so interested in his voice, I couldn't follow what he was saying. . . To this day I can't escape from seeing colors when I hear sounds. What first strikes me is the color of someone's voice. Then it fades off. . . for it does interfere. If, say, a person says something, I see the word; but should another person's voice break in, blurs appear. These creep into the syllables of the words and I can't make out what is being said." Shereshevskii had a similarly idiosyncratic response to letters. Here is how he described some of the letters of the Cyrillic alphabet: "A is something white and long; moves off somewhere ahead so that you just can't sketch it, whereas is pointed in form.is also pointed and sharper than e, whereasis big, so big that you can actually roll right over it. O is a sound that comes from your chest. . . It's broad, though the sound itself tends to fall.moves off somewhere to the side. I also experience a sense of taste from each sound. And when I see lines, some configuration that has been drawn, these produce sounds. Take the figure. This is somewhere in between e,andis a vowel sound, but it also resembles the sound r--not a pure r though . . . But one thing still isn't clear to me: if the line goes up, I experience a sound, but if it moves in the reverse direction, it no longer comes through as a sound but as some sort of wooden hook for a yoke. The configurationappears to be something dark, but if it had been drawn slower, it would have seemed different. Had you, say, drawn it like this, then it would have been the sound e." Shereshevskii had a strange relationship with numbers as well: "For me, 2, 4, 6, 5 are not just numbers. They have forms. 1 is a pointed number--which has nothing to do with the way it's written. It's because it's somehow firm and complete. 2 is flatter, rectangular, whitish in color, sometimes almost a gray. 3 is a pointed segment which rotates. 4 is also square and dull; it looks like 2 but has more substance to it, it's thicker. 5 is absolutely complete and takes the form of a cone or a tower--something substantial. 6, the first number after 5, has a whitish hue; 8 somehow has a nave quality, it's milky blue like lime. . ." Carol Steen, an artist, describes the colors she sees when receiving acupuncture treatments: "The first color I might see would be orange and then . . . I might see a purple or a magenta or a red or green. . . Most often, by the end of the treatment, when the acupuncturist took the needles out, the colors would come full force and they would just be utterly, completely brilliant. Moving colors, swirling around, one chasing the other and pushing the blackness all the way to the edge and sometimes just exploding out of there completely. . . When she has the needles all in place, often, as I am just lying there quietly, all of a sudden, it's like watching watercolors just moving across a black screen. The black dissolves the white, but the colors are far more brilliant, far more wonderful, these inside colors, than anything that I am able to do with paint." One might add to these statements the testimony of a person for whom a tin whistle sounded "a clear, sweet flavor like Christmas candy or sugar and water. The higher the note, the less pronounced the sweet," or another for whom the lowest tones of the piano sounded "like toast soaked in hot water; the middle regions sweet, like licorice, banana; the high tones thin, insipid." None of these people were speaking metaphorically; the colored piano notes, the sweet whistle tones, the explosions of color created by an acupuncturist's needles, were all actual images, as real as any other images formed in their minds. The voices of the children Edgar Curtis and "M" are completely candid, guilelessly reporting what lay before their eyes; it would have been a complete surprise to them that others did not perceive the world in the same manner that they did. The adult voices of Shereshevskii and Carol Steen are equally ingenuous, and if asked as to when they started to have these strange sensations, they and others like them would invariably answer that they began as far back as they could remember, back to Edgar or "M's" age. But they might also have told another story, one of how private this world came to be. Thomas D. Cutsforth described the case of a "Miss E.," who until she worked in Cutsforth's lab as a senior in college, had always thought of herself as abnormal. She told Cutsforth, himself synaesthetic, of how her efforts to avoid her own synaesthetic mental processes had only hindered her thinking. Carol Steen remembers how, beginning in the second grade, when she would speak of colored letters or numbers, her classmates would tell her she was "wierd." From then on, she kept her "colors" hidden, speaking of them to no one. Home on a semester break during her junior year of college, while having dinner with her family, she remembers turning to her father and declaring "The number 5 is yellow." "No, it's yellow-ochre," he replied. While her mother and brother looked at each other, stupified, Carol told her father that she was having trouble determining whether the number two was blue or green. "It's green," he assured her. But, according to Carol, after that conversation, her father "froze," never saying another word about it, and to this day he denies that the conversation ever took place (though Carol's mother and brother testify otherwise). It was almost thirty years before Carol met another person who saw colors in response to sounds, and when she did, she broke down in tears. Shereshevskii never met another person like himself, though he met with a sympathetic listener in Luria. In recent years, a neurologist studying this condition has received many letters like the following one from people who have read newpaper articles or heardradio reports about his research:I read the article . . . concerning your work . . . It's an affirmation that I am not nuts andwhatever my other problems may have been, being crazy was not one of them. . .You have no idea . . . how exciting it is to read someone else's description . . . of an experience that I have never been quite sure wasn't the result of my imagination or being insane. I have never met anyone else who saw sound. When enough people tell you that you are imagining things it's easy to doubt yourself. I've never been quite sure that I'm not crazy. .I love my colors, can't imagine being without them. One of the things I love about my husband are the colors of his voice and his laugh. It's a wonderful golden brown, with a flavor of crisp, buttery toast. . .Would it be possible to meet others? As I said, I have never met anyone else who does these things, and would very much like to, as much for reassurance as for anything else. Colored Sounds and Pointed Numbers: The Phenomenology of Synaesthesia All of these voices describe the same phenomenon, synaesthesia, which contemporary scientific thinking understands as "an involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense." As puzzling to the behavioral scientists who have studied this curious linkage of the senses as it is to the people who experience it, synaesthesia has been known to science for over a century and a half, and was for a decade or two at the turn of the century one of the most intensively investigated psychological anomalies. Some of Europe and North America's most prominent psychologists have done research on synaesthesia--Charles Fer and Alfred Binet (France); Theodore Flournoy (Switzerland); G. T. Fechner, Wilhelm Wundt, Moritz Benedict, Eugen Bleuler, E. R. Jaensch, Heinz Werner (Germany); Francis Galton, Charles S. Myers, MacDonald Critchley (England); Mary Calkins, R. H. Wheeler, A. H. Pierce, Herbert Sidney Langfeld, Theodore Karwoski, A. R. Luria (United States). After over a century of theorizing, there are still no widely accepted explanations of either the cause or mechanism of synaesthesia, but the extensive descriptive literature does suggest a set of diagnostic criteria: 1) Synaesthesia is involuntary and unsuppressable, but cannot be evoked at will. The colors, tastes and other sensations described by synaesthetes are always present, but are noticed only to the degree to which they are attended. In the words of Carol Steen: "Synaesthesia doesn't come to you full-blown, but develops over time in the same way that you could look at clouds and not truly see them until someone explained their basic taxonomy to you. When I started getting really aware of synaesthesia, I was struck by the sense that the first colors that I saw for numbers and letters were the brightest ones--the reds, orange, and yellows. Green and blue came later, and there was confusion about it. I remember thinking to myself, if some of these letters and numbers have colors, then they all ought to have color. Then I started to look, and the blacks came and the whites came and then finally, the very last colors that I saw were the ones that could be considered low value or subtle colors, dove-grey, for example, like the letter 'd' or the color of beer for the letter 'z.' I have to admit that I don't see purple, and I am being confused a little by the letter 'q.'" In Carol's case, fifty years of complete isolation kept her somewhat inattentive to her own synaesthetic percepts; once she became aware that others shared her form of perception, talked to researchers who understood it, and even discussed her synaesthesia with other synaesthetes, it became more elaborate, that is, she noticed entire ranges of perception that, though there all along, had been "invisible" to her. Along with becoming more acutely cognizant of the hues of her "photisms" (the term given to the patches of color that seem to swirl about in the synaesthete's visual field), she also detected geometric shapes, and she began to see color in response to music, which she had never done before. Calm, relaxed mental states make synaesthesia more vivid, while when distracted or keenly focused on a particular problem, synaesthetes may be totally unaware of their synaesthetic percepts. 2) Synaesthesia is projected externally. In visual forms the synaesthetic percept is felt to be close to the face, while in kinaesthetic forms it is felt as being in the space immediately surrounding the body. 3) Synaesthetic percepts are stable over the individual's lifetime, and they are both discrete (eg., a photism is not just a "bright" color, but a particular hue), and generic (the percepts are unelaborated, as in visual photisms being geometric shapes rather than actual objects, or gustatory percepts being salty or sweet rather than specific flavors). These percepts are invariably described by synaesthetes as having begun in early childhood, and they remain durable over their entire lifetime. Researchers studying synaesthesia have confirmed what synaesthetes themselves attest. In a recent study, when given a list of 130 words, phrases, and letters and asked to describe the color of the associated sensation, only 37% of non-synaesthetes' responses were identical to their original description a week before, while 92% of synaesthetes' responses were identical after a full year. Other studies conducted over ten, twenty, or more years yield the same results. There is some evidence that synaesthetic percepts may decline later in life. Recently, when the New York Times ran an article on absolute pitch perception, two readers who had absolute pitch wrote in to speak of their loss of this capacity as they aged. Amazingly, both individuals also mentioned that they had visual-auditory synesthesiae in response to music. Dr. Peter C. Lynn spoke of becoming conscious of both his absolute pitch perception and synaesthesia at age six, capacities which were a vital part of his mental and emotional life until his early sixties, when they began to decline. At age 71, he said, he had lost them altogether: "This process, apparently due to aging, is an incredibly painful sensory deprivation. The music I now hear does not match the one engraved in my retentive memory. What I hear no longer corresponds to what the ear 'knows.' . . . Absolute pitch may not matter to those who never had it or are comfortable with relative pitch, but to me it is like the loss of a vital organ, a kind of phantom brain that you reach for but can no longer find." Dr. Lynn's diminished synaesthesia may have been a result of diminished hearing acuity, however. 4) Synaesthesia is memorable, such that the synaesthetic percepts are often more easily and vividly remembered than the original stimulus. Synaesthetes with color hearing for numbers frequently memorize the color sequences rather than the digits themselves for telephone numbers, addresses and other numerical information. A number of synaesthetes who are also "lightning calculators" perform mathematical operations by mentally manipulating the colors, not the numbers. Synaesthetic singers and musicians who are also endowed with perfect pitch use their colored photisms to "tune," matching the color produced by a sung or sounded note to the remembered one. When a synaesthete forgets something, it is the color (or other associated synaesthetic percept) which is the last thing to fade from the mind. Although a great aid to memory, almost all synaesthetes occasionally experience episodes when the vividness and memorability of synaesthesia interferes with the process of logical thought. 5) Synaesthesia is emotional, almost always being associated with a narrowly circumscribed set of strong emotions, particularly some form of pleasure or displeasure. Though few if any students of synaesthesia have pointed it out, it seems significant that the two realms of mental images which are most often linked--color and linguistic symbols--are the realms which have enchanted human beings for longer and more deeply perhaps than any others. During the stage of mental development when synaesthesia seems most ubiquitous (before age seven), nearly all objects of thought have an explicit affective dimension, but colors, letters, numbers, and words are particularly salient emotionally. Children savor letters and numbers, playing with them like they are the most esteemed objects in all creation. 6) Synaesthesia is nonlinguistic, that is, it is exceedingly difficult to describe with words. This tends to give synaesthesia a quality of ineffability, both for the synaesthetes themselves and for non-synaesthetic observers. 7) Synaesthesia occurs in people with normal, non-injured, non-diseased brains. Because of its rarity (recent estimates range from 1 per 25,000 to 1 per million adults), synaesthesia has frequently been considered either to be pathological/dysfunctional, or conversely, to be indicative of exceptional mental ability. Synaesthetes are usually of average or above average intelligence, and quite often are highly creative. Synaesthesia seems to be much more common among women than men. False Starts: Assumed Historical Origins of Interest in Synaesthesia Many of the sources reviewing the history of interest in synaesthesia fix the origin of this interest in the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, interpreting certain philosophical speculation about human sensation and the possible analogies between sound and color as discussions of synaesthesia. Ironically, the two individuals most frequently cited in these reviews as "studying" synaesthesia--Isaac Newton and John Locke--are the very thinkers who initiated the philosophical crisis to which Symbolism, and its interest in synaesthesia, were a calculated response. When William Blake surveyed the materialism spreading from England over all of Europe, he saw "the Loom of Locke, whose Woof rages dire, wash'd by the Water-wheels of Newton: black the cloth in heavy wreathes folds over every Nation." Newtonian physics rationalized the cosmos by reducing its properties to laws of motion and the structure of the atom. Those arenas of human experience which remained unquantifiable were dismissed as illusion, and Locke's philosophy helped to expunge human cognition from coparticipation with the cosmos, paving the way for nineteenth century positivism. In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke had noted "a studious blind man" who declared that the color scarlet was like the sound of a trumpet. Although Locke's comments are frequently cited as an early example of scientific interest in synaesthesia, the passage in question is really Locke's reformulation of the eighteenth century philosophical conundrum known as the "Molyneux problem": if a man born blind were to gain his sight in later life, would he be able to identify the objects around him, by sight alone? Locke, whose philosophy was formulated as an alternative to the "innate ideas" of authoritarian and anti-experimental scholastic philosophy, answered Molyneux with an emphatic "No!" Locke interpreted the blind man's analogy as proof that it is impossible to try to understand a particular sensory experience without the requisite sensing ability, which was consistent with his view that there were no innate ideas, and that all knowledge derived from (sensory) experience of the external world. By advancing empiricism over idealism Locke emphasized the importance of sensation, but his answer to the Molyneux problem also served to split the senses into discrete channels, one alien from the other. More importantly, Locke's empiricism devalued any perceptions which did not issue from the "primary" and "secondary" qualities of material objects. Part of the late nineteenth century fascination with synaesthesia was constellated around the fact that it seemed to overthrow both Locke's separation of the senses from each other and from creative interaction with the external world. Synaesthesia connected what had been split asunder; scientific study of individual synaesthetes yielded positive proof that the two highest senses in particular--hearing and vision--could at least in some individuals be intertwined, and the artistic exploitation of this possibility suggested that perhaps the unity of the senses could be extended to all. Isaac Newton's (1718) thought that the spaces occupied by the seven colors of the spectrum were analogous to the relative intervals between notes in the octave is frequently cited as an example of early research into synaesthesia, as is Father Louis Bertrand Castel's (1740) attempt to apply Newton's observations by experimenting with an instrument that was designed to produce colored light to accompany musical notes, a technology that Erasmus Darwin tried to revive at century's end. None of these speculations were concerned with synaesthesia; they only became interpreted as such in the last decade of the nineteenth century, after it became widely known that many synaesthetes saw colored photisms in response to music as well as language. Newton's color spectrum-musical scale analogy was actually a classic expression of his mechanistic approach to the universe, the exact contrary of Romantic and Symbolist conceptions. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is also routinely cited as having studied synaesthesia; advocates of such a view cite Goethe's discussion of the relation between sound and color in Zur Farbenlehre . Goethe denied the sort of relation that would later be looked for by those interested in synaesthesia, declaring that sound and color are "general, elementary effects acting according to the general laws of separation and tendency to union . . . yet acting thus in wholly different provinces, in different modes, on different elementary mediums, for different senses." Though Goethe did cite a pamphlet by J. L. Hoffman which compared the setting of the colors of the artist's palette to the tuning of the idividual instruments in the orchestra (yellow suggested the clarinets, bright red the trumpets, ultramarine the violas, etc.), he did so fully aware that Hoffman's example was a simple analogy, not a description of an actual perception. Believing that the eye owed its existence to light, Goethe held that "a dormant light resides in the eye," citing as proof the "brightest images" of the imagination, the appearance of objects in dreams as if in daylight, and the so-called "pathological colors," a wide range of subjectively produced visual sensations, from "Acyanoblepsia" (the inability to perceive blue hues) to shock- or fever-induced phosphenes, the mental menagerie seen by "hypochondriacs," and afterimages of the sun and other objects. The entire purpose of Goethe's theory of color was to bridge the chasm between Newton's emphasis on "objective," physical color and the obvious participation of the individual subject in the experience of color. Should Goethe have been familiar with the phenomenon of synaesthesia, he certainly would have mentioned it in Zur Farbenlehre . Chromaesthesia, with its spectacular colored visions, would have furnished additional evidence of the "light-making" ability of the eye. One final common error made by those attempting to construct a history of investigation of synaesthesia is to equate speculation about sound symbolism--the use of speech to symbolize other sensory domains--with synaesthesia. Among chromaesthetes, the most common stimulus that produces a sensation of color in the visual field is the human voice, particularly its sounding of vowels. However, among non-synaesthetic individuals, vowels are almost universally sensed along a bright-dark continuum (the "front" vowels--i, e-- seen as relatively bright, the "back" vowels--o, u--as dark), and in the nineteenth century the two very distinct phenomena began to be confused. In historical reviews of the subject, investigators cited such sources as an 1821 article in the Literary Gazette referring to an author who used Virgil to show the colors and instrumental sounds of the vowels, M. Brs's 1822 Lettres sur L'harmonie du langage , which included one letter devoted to the sound symbolism of vowels, E. Castiliano's 1850 treatise on vowel sound symbolism, or Georg Brandes' 1854 poem entitled "The Color of the Vowels." None of these works described true vocalic chromaesthesia, but were concerned with the feeling-tones associated with the most expressive of human sounds. They do foreshadow the search for a universal language that later helped to generate so much interest in synaesthesia. Though none of these questions--the analogy between sound and color, the independence or interdependence of the senses, the ability of vocalic sounds to represent nonacoustic dimensions of sense experience--involves synaesthesia, they all share with synaesthesia the sense of being "about" a set of transcendental properties of human sensory capacity. The entry for "synaesthesia" in the Oxford English Dictionary reflects the word's semantic migration from its home in psychology through a number of disciplines. In 1901 it began to be used in literary scholarship to refer to cross-sensory metaphor, and by the 1940s linguistics had extended its meaning to the relationship between speech sounds and the sensory experiences they are meant to represent. Though some of these semantic extensions are irrelevant to the themes of this book, others reveal the persistent Romantic interpretation of synaesthesia as a coveted visionary faculty. Psychologists frequently distinguish authentic cases of synaesthesia (as identified based on the criteria listed above) from the many other uses of the word by calling it "idiopathic synaesthesia," a term which I will also use. Synaesthesia and the Search for Unity and a Universal Language If one accepts the division of the senses into five modes, there are twenty possible combinations that may result from pairing them. Theoretically, a tactile stimulus could evoke a color, a sound, a smell, or a taste; a visual stimulus might evoke a sound, smell, taste or touch sensation; an odor, taste, or sound could similarly create sensations in the other four modes. Yet most of these combinations never occur; other than visual synaesthesias, only tactile-visual (sight-induced sensations of touch), tactile-auditory (sound-induced sensations of touch), and kinaesthetic-olfactory (smell-induced bodily sensations) have been recorded as occurring naturally, and only three others (tactile-olfactory, thermal-visual, and algesic-auditory) have been produced experimentally. By far the most common sense in which synaesthetes experience a "secondary sensation" is vision, all four other senses as well as a number of somaesthetic sensations (pain, temperature, and kinaesthesis) having been recorded as producing, either naturally or via experiment, visual synaesthesiae. Since its discovery in the nineteenth century, scientific interest in intersensory relations has focused on the peculiar phenomenon of l'audition colore, or "color[ed] hearing" (Farbenhren in German), the rare condition in which certain individuals see within their visual field distinct, vivid patches of color that always appear when certain sounds are heard. In these individuals, a variety of auditory stimuli--from vowels and/or consonants to entire words, musical notes, and other sounds--call forth what seem to non-synaesthetes fantastic visual displays. A particular voice might be heard as "brownish yellow, the color of a ripe English walnut," another as "yellowish, poorly saturated, like old beeswax"; the sound of an organ might evoke a photism which is "very rich deep black, [of] bluish cast, [with] spots and streaks of brown, with irradiating flames"; the single consonant "b" might produce "a dark, bluish, thick amorphous patch of color, about the size of one's hand." As the most common form of synaesthesia, color hearing is commonly called by the generic word "synaesthesia." All of these forms of synaesthesia, visual or non-visual, are mental images. As images, they are most closely related to another rare, poorly understood, yet exhaustively studied type of mental imagery--eidetic imagery. The psychological literature has used a variety of characteristics to define the eidetic image, but most contemporary work accepts the following criteria as diagnostic: a normal, subjective visual image experienced with particular vividness; although not dependent on the experience of an actual external object, the eidetic image is "seen" inside the mind and is accompanied by bodily engagement with the image (including a sense of its "felt meaning"); the eidetic image is experienced as a healthful, not pathological, structure. Like the photisms of color hearing and other synaesthetic percepts, the eidetic image is noteworthy in its vividness and memorability, and in its subjective sense of being projected. Like synaesthetes, eidetikers believe their images to be real, despite the fact that they share their perception of such images with very few others. A significant number of eidetikers (approximately half) are also synaesthetic, while a lesser proportion of synaesthetes possess eidetic perception. Similarities between eideticism and synaesthesia have been pointed out since Francis Galton's pioneering work on mental imagery, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (1883), and in the 1930s, as part of his organismic-developmental theory, psychologist Heinz Werner (1934; 1978) grouped them together as "syncretic" experiences entailing a dedifferentiation (or fusion) of perceptual qualities in subjective experience. Recently (Tellegen and Atkinson, 1974; Rader and Tellegen, 1987), psychologists have considered these two forms of mental imagery in terms of the capacity for "absorption, "the ability to engage one's diverse representational resources, including one's imagination and feelings, in perceiving the world. Absorbed states are those which involve a release from the active, volitional, and problem-solving mode of consciousness--the rational, instrumental mind so lamented by the Romantic sensibility--for a more passive, less reality-bound, imaginative mode. The contemporary scientific definitions of both synaesthesia and eideticism contrast the "actual" or "real" external world with the "subjective" internal world. The apparent release from reality that accompanies synaesthetic and eidetic perception has attracted the attention of a variety of thinkers over the last century, all of whom might be considered as "Romantic" in the sense of aspiring to a theory of knowledge which gives primacy to the human imagination. In choosing "Romantic" as a category to help organize the diverse personalities encountered here, I am following along the lines of D. G. James's conception of Romanticism: To possess a mind open to the envisagement of the strange and different, to contemplate unknown modes of being, divine and otherwise, whether God or genii, or demons or angels or a metamorphosed humanity, to refuse to be buckled down to the evidence of the senses, this is essential Romanticism which is no mere phenomenon that appeared towards the end of the eighteenth century and died out after fifty years. In some sense, the predominance of so-called "synaesthesia"in the poetry of the core English and German Romantic poets--William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Percy Bysse Shelley, Friedrich Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, Novalis--foreshadows later Romanticism's--from French Symbolism to Haight-Ashbury psychedelic culture--infatuation with an apotheosis of sensory experience. In their frequent attempts to poetically express sublime moments of expanded consciousness, these and other Romantics often employed intersensory metaphor. When Coleridge (in "The Eolian Harp") spoke of "A light in sound, a sound-like power in light," or when Shelley used poetic metaphors linking light and music (in "Alastor," "The Revolt of Islam," "To a Skylark," and other poems), they were not, as seven decades of literary criticism has assumed, experiencing synaesthesia, but were reaching beyond the bounds of the five senses for language to express the ineffable. All language is ultimately rooted in sensory experience, so after the senses are transcended, there is no language left but that of inventive combination of the senses. If the fundamental impulse of the high Romantic period was one of expanded consciousness, then it is easy to see why so much of its poetic language employed intersensory metaphor. When French Symbolists of the late nineteenth century took their own aim at expanded consciousness, coincident with the scientific discovery of synaesthesia, it was inevitable that they turned to the surprising juxtapositions of the senses experienced by actual synaesthetes for inspiration. M. H. Abrams has shown how for eighteenth century English Romantics protesting "single vision and Newton's sleep," the "correspondent breeze" was the perfect metaphor, its invisibility overthrowing the tyranny of the eye and the obsession with material substance, at the same time as providing an image derived from nature, from which post-Cartesian mechanism and dualism had radically severed human consciousness. "Invisibles"--drawn first from the language of Mesmerism, later from physics and other sciences--have continued to be favorite Romantic metaphors, but while these metaphors ebb and flow with scientific knowledge (such invisible entities as cosmic rays, magnetic and morphogenetic fields, the Van Allen radiation belts and holograms all having had their day), synaesthesia has remained a potent metaphorical vehicle, since in addition to its aura of "invisibility," it adds the important Romantic elements of unity (the uniting of subjectivity and objectivity as well as the uniting of the senses) and liberation (from the physical world). Abrams accurately described Romanticism as the secularization of the Biblical narrative of Eden-Fall-Redemption into innocence-alienation-regeneration; synaesthesia, as a new and expanded form of wholeness, fits neatly into the last term of this triad and so has been seized upon repeatedly by Romantic writers seeking to regenerate what they have seen as the the dying culture of Cartesian dualism. Though I will treat a number of Romantic interpretations of eidetic imagery, eideticism has never generated the exaggerated claims concerning its power that synaesthesia has, which suggests that even more than the dimension of "seeing the unseen," synaesthesia's seemingly inherent affirmation of unity and wholeness is what primarily lends it its mystique for the Romantic sensibility. Despite overwhelming evidence from the beginning of scientific study of synaesthesia that the colors reported for linguistic sounds (and musical tones) were highly idiosyncratic, there continues to be research which attempts to prove that there are certain "absolute" cross-sensory values. French Symbolism's long argument over the color of the vowels, Wasilly Kandinsky's color theory, and the variety of attempts to create "color music" have all been motivated by a desire to discover a transcendental form of representation, free of the subjective limits of conventional language. Both art theorists and experimental psychologists had already been searching for universal values for color and line, but synaesthetic photisms, because of their apparent objective reality as projected images and their linkage to other sensory attributes, were seen as uniquely and persuasively indicative of some yet to be elaborated transcendental schema. Eideticism, again, because of its visually projected nature lending it an elevated status as a reality "out there" denied typical mental images, and with its suggestion of overcoming the subjective limits of ordinary memory, has also been interpreted as an absolute form of knowledge. For some Romantic thinkers, it seemed to offer conclusive proof that Keats was right when he declared that he was certain "of nothing, but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination." When synaesthesia and eideticism combined with an extraordinary literary gift in Vladimir Nabokov, a writer whose work demands that the reader give perhaps more than the usual credence to the objective reality of imagined worlds, the effect has often been to move readers to ascribe to Nabokov an ability to actually see the "otherworld," not just to persuasively imagine one. To many nonsynaesthetic and noneidetic observers, synaesthetes and eidetics are endowed with a mysterious faculty that permits them a view of something that seems to hold more truth than their own shifting thoughts. For over a century now, this has led to their being viewed by many as a "next step" in human cognitive evolution. The apparent liberatory promise of synaesthesia has been reinforced by the fact that along with being a cognitive condition for a few "gifted" individuals, synaesthesia can occasionally be experienced by non-synaesthetes during altered states of consciousness. Though the most notorious of these states is the LSD trip, synaesthetic perception is a common associate of other forms of hallucinogenic intoxication, including mescaline, hashish, and dimethyltryptamine (DMT). As soon as the public became widely familiar with the fact that there were people who saw color in response to sound, they recalled the writings of artists, poets, and other seekers of expanded consciousness which described similar experiences. In 1857, Union College undergraduate FitzHugh Ludlow had published his account of the visions induced by eating cannabis jelly: "Thus the haseesh-eater knows what it is . . . to smell colors, to see sounds, and much more frequently, to see feelings." French poet Thophile Gautier had described something similar in 1843: "my hearing was inordinately developed; I heard the sound of colors. Green, red, blue, yellow sounds came to me perfectly distinctly." Though much less frequently invoked by those who see it as a state of expanded consciousness, synaesthesia also occurs occasionally during a variety of disparate episodic states of consciousness, including the hypnotic state, schizophrenia, and temporal lobe epilepsy. The emancipation felt by nonsynaesthetes within all of these states is essentially freedom from rationality and a defined self-sense. In most cases, synaesthetes themselves rarely if ever experience such a feeling of ego loss while they are perceiving synaesthetically, and yet this distinction is never made by Romantic champions of synaesthetic perception, who have almost invariably assumed that synaesthetes are permanently within the Redemption or "regeneration" mode of Abrams's triad. Along with those who have been equally enthusiastic about the "expansion" of consciousness in both synaesthesia and hallucinogens, there has been a surprisingly eclectic group of more sober twentieth century intellectuals--including A. R. Luria, Charles Hartshorne, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Roman Jacobson, and Sergei Eisenstein--who have given synaesthesia a central place in their theoretical approaches. The attractiveness of synaesthesia as an explanatory idea has only increased in recent years. In a 1990 collection of essays attempting to rescue subjective visual phenomena from the realm of the strictly irrational and idiosyncratic, Yale University psychologist Lawrence Marks reiterated his twenty-year-old hypothesis that synaesthesia is the mechanism underlying all metaphor construction. In 1991, cognitive anthropologist Bradd Shore published a major theoretical article in Current Anthropology in which he proposed that all cultural meaning has a "double birth," once through the evolution of spatial and temporal analogies in particular social and historical settings, and once through idiosyncratic schematization in individuals, via the mechanism of synaesthesia. In 1993, New Age publisher J. P. Tarcher published a book about synaesthesia by neurologist Richard Cytowic, in which synaesthesia functions as a sort of "antidote" to rationality. Despite, or perhaps because of, this continued widely interdisciplinary interest and its impact on a variety of modern cultural expressions, from the visual arts and literary criticism to contemporary popular occultism, synaesthesia has never been investigated by cultural or intellectual historians other than incidentally as a part of larger studies. In Stephen Kern's The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918 (1983), synaesthesia is briefly mentioned as a conspicuous ingredient in turn-of-the-century artistic attempts to go beyond existing genre boundaries, but Kern's treatment gives no sense of the philosophical issues brought into focus by both scientific and artistic interest in synaesthesia. The "genealogy" of synaesthesia--Baudelaire and Wagner to Symbolism to Futurism--given by Kern and assumed by so many other historians obscures the fact that the faddish fin de sicle atmosphere surrounding synaesthesia survived in a variety of twentieth century Romantic projects, continuing up to the most recent incarnation of liberatory Romanticism--"cyberculture." As evidenced by the current "cyberpunk" infatuation with synaesthesia, neurologist Cytowic's use of synaesthesia to announce that we really are primarily "emotional" beings rather than rational machines, or Marks's theory of metaphor, the Romantic/Symbolist aspiration to transcend the senses has not diminished in our day.