The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science

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by Cretien van Campen
What does it mean to hear music in colors, to taste voices,
to see each letter of the alphabet as a different color?
These uncommon sensory experiences are examples of
synesthesia, when two or more senses cooperate in
perception. Once dismissed as imagination or delusion,
metaphor or drug-induced hallucination, the experience of
synesthesia has now been documented by scans of synesthetes'
brains that show "crosstalk" between areas of the brain that
do not normally communicate. In The Hidden Sense, Cretien
van Campen explores synesthesia from both artistic and
scientific perspectives, looking at accounts of individual
experiences, examples of synesthesia in visual art, music,
and literature, and recent neurological research.

Van Campen reports that some studies define synesthesia as a
brain impairment, a short circuit between two different
areas. But synesthetes cannot imagine perceiving in any
other way; many claim that synesthesia helps them in daily
life. Van Campen investigates just what the function of
synesthesia might be and what it might tell us about our own
sensory perceptions. He examines the experiences of
individual synesthetes--from Patrick, who sees music as
images and finds the most beautiful ones spring from the
music of Prince, to the schoolgirl Sylvia, who is surprised
to learn that not everyone sees the alphabet in colors as
she does. And he finds suggestions of synesthesia in the
work of Scriabin, Van Gogh, Kandinsky, Nabokov, Poe, and
Baudelaire.

What is synesthesia? It is not, van Campen concludes, an
audiovisual performance, a literary technique, an artistic
trend, or a metaphor. It is, perhaps, our hidden sense--a
way to think visually; a key to our own sensitivity.

Cretien van Campen is a social scientist at the Social and
Cultural Planning Office of the Netherlands. He is the
author of two books on perception and visual art.


October 2007
The MIT Press

http://leonardo.info/isast/leobooks/books/vancampen.html

A Leonardo Book
ISBN:0-262-22081-4
208 pp., 44 illus.