A Mutant-Like Trait

Chances are you’ve never heard of synesthesia, an odd neurological “phenomenon” in which sensory perception will trigger another sensory perception, forming a sort of sixth sense (or seventh or eighth, if you have more than one form).
To tell you the truth I was unaware that this ability, this thing I did, had a name until earlier this year (thank you Discovery Health Channel). I was massively excited that it had a appellation, and a cool one at that! Synesthesia. It sounds like a character from X-Men or something. I can easily picture that in my head,
“I can’t hold them off! Synesthesia! Use your powers to distract them, Jean and Wolverine will attack them from behind!”

Eh hem…

Perhaps I’d better try and explain synesthesia before continuing. For one, it isn’t a mutant gene, and it isn’t an evolutionary step (forwards or backwards). It doesn’t hurt, and it doesn’t interfere with brain function in any way. Synesthetes are just like everyone else, except they see things a little differently. Ok, a lot differently, but I promise you cannot look into a crowd of people and say “Ah ha! There’s a synesthete!” unless of course you happen to know the person you’ve just pointed to.

For me, music is color. Whenever I pop in a CD or lay witness to a concert performance each song has it’s own unique color, shape, movement, depth and sometimes texture. The colored constancies are almost always pleasant, and also entertaining to watch. It’s a colorful recital that only I can attend.
The show ends the moment the song dies, but I can always hit the replay button and watch the exact same thing again. That’s how synesthesia works. Whatever you see, you will see for the rest of your life.

This gift (I shun the doctor’s terminology of calling it a “condition”) is fairly rare, though it’s hard to accurately say how many people have it, since many don’t know the name and keep it secret. The stat 1 in 7,000 is in my head for some reason, but don’t hold me to that number. I myself only know two others who have it, each with different forms. My sister Richelle tells me that numbers and letters have gender. 1 and 2 are male, 6 and 8 are female, and so on. And my friend from church, we’ll call her E for now (until I ask her if I can use her name on here) can tell you the age and gender of any object in the room. When we first told each other about our abilities I asked her to tell me the gender of things around the church youth room.
She points to a saltshaker, “that’s a girl.”

We walk towards the chairs, “this one’s a woman, and that one’s a man.”

“What about my phone?” I ask, pulling it from my pocket.
“It’s an old man.”
I laugh at the realization that I’ve been carrying an old man around in my pocket all day.
Then it was my turn. She whipped out her cell phone and played various music ring tones. I call em’ as I see em’, “This one’s Red. That one’s dark blue. Pink on a white background, like a haze. Light blue wave. Yellow.”
Someone in the background is playing Guitar Hero to the song of Free Bird. “Uggh, it’s orange.” I don’t like orange. It fills up my head and makes it hard to think, and it will give me a headache if I listen to it for very long.
E also associates letters with numbers. She rapidly points to words, calling out the numbers they add up to, “43. This one and that one make 26” and so on. We got quite a few ‘what have they been smoking?’ looks from people as we went about, playing with our mutant-like abilities, but it’s way too much fun to stop.
For the rest of the night I try not to sit on female chairs, or use male napkins to wipe my face, thinking it a bit perverted. I’m wondering if I’m sitting on an old man right now, as I type this. What about the keyboard? or the computer? I have to get up and kick an old shoe, slam a file cabinet shut and slap the couch to remind myself that these things are not human, that they aren’t watching me and that they don’t feel anything when I hit them. I also have to remind myself (and you) that while this sounds completely and utterly bazaar, she has grown up with this, just as I have with my colors. It would be like saying, “wouldn’t it be weird if you had to hear things? Like, instead of reading people’s lips, you would hear a voice! That would be so creepy.”

Well, I think I’ve written enough this time around, I’m going to go watch DCTalk (and no, that’s not a movie, in case you were wondering).


_Nathanael