Sciences Participating with Arts & Culture in Education

Hearing Green

You are walking and arrive at the address number 28. The color chartreuse green comes to mind. You step into your room and you see the calendar on the wall. A giant three-dimensional cube appears in your head. Finally, you put in your earphones and you listen to your favorite song. You start to taste lemons. Then you start tasting rich, sweet chocolate.

You may have never experienced the situation described above, but people with the condition called synesthesia have. Synesthesia is a hereditary, involuntary interaction between different senses. The senses are not distinct in synesthetes. For some people, sound and vision can be associated. So, when they, for example, hear a sound, they may also see a letter.  This is just one type of synesthesia but there are numerous forms. (Ramachadran, Ted Talk)

What causes synesthesia? The general consensus among scientists is that it results from excess cross wiring of certain regions in the brain. The brain is naturally wired so that some parts connect and not others. When there is accidental cross wiring of say, the number and color region, synesthesia occurs. This makes sense, as the number and color area are right next to each other in the Fusiform Gyrus, which is a part of the brain. Since they are next to each other, accidental cross wiring is most likely more common. (Ramachandran, Ted Talk)

How might accidental cross wiring occur? To give us a clue on how this happens, we can look to the concept of the development of the brain.  According to science author Ann MacDonald:

The brain adds comparatively few cells after birth. Instead, the existing neurons grow larger and more powerful... [and] by the time your child turns 3, each neuron has formed as many as 10,000 connections, making a total of about a quadrillion (1,000,000,000,000,000) throughout the brain. (That’s double the number of connections in your own brain.) -MacDonald

Now, how does the brain choose which connections are important? Since there are so many connections some of them must be removed.

But the first few years of life are a time of selection. The neural networks that are used grow stronger. Those that are not wither away, just as unused brain cells started dying in the last weeks before birth. This process is known as pruning. The death and removal of excess brain cells and connections truly sculpts a person’s brain. Until your baby is 3, growth far outpaces pruning. From then until the age of 10, the formation of new connections is balanced by the elimination of unused ones. When your child reaches puberty, the balance finally shifts and the pruning of connections exceeds the formation of new ones. (MacDonald)

So babies have all sorts of wiring when they are young, and as time goes on these connections wither away. It is very plausible that in individuals with synesthesia, pruning did not occur because of a mutated gene. (Ramachandran). Therefore, they may still have some of their infantile wiring. Since there is an abundance of cross wiring in babies, some scientists believe that they must have synesthesia and there have been some experiments and research trying to prove it.

How common is synesthesia? Scientists are not entirely sure but neuroscientist and director of the center for brain and cognition at the University of California, V.S. Ramachandran, has pointed out one of the most shocking facts about synesthesia: that it is approximately 8 times more common in artists such as poets, novelists and painters. He has an incredible hypothesis for why this is. Think about it: artists have a way of intertwining all of our distinct senses. They twist and connect images, language, and metaphorical meanings and find a way to put the abstract into a concrete form. This kind of thought process gives insight into their brains. Since thoughts and senses flow and interconnect so fluidly in artists, it makes sense that they could have some excess cross wiring between the senses in their brains. These traits and characteristics of artists reveal that they are more prone to synesthesia, due to their patterns of thought and the depth and diversity of their creations.

Now consider the fact that the Angular Gyrus is eight times bigger in the humans than in lower primates. This area of the brain is “the crossroads between hearing, vision and touch” (Ramachandran). The fact that it is so much bigger in humans has a special significance, Ramachadran postulates. With a bigger surface area for the interaction of these senses, there is a greater possibility of having accidental cross wiring. If these areas become cross-wired, these senses become intermingled. He suggests that it is possible that all humans have some degree of cross wiring and this gives rise to one of humanity’s most unique and treasured attributes: creativity.

Just think about it. Our creativity can possibly be a result of accidental cross wiring in the brain. A flaw in the brain’s natural wiring system could have led to all of the most cherished and valued pieces of art created. Consider Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Picasso, Degas, Monet, Shakespeare, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, and those are just some creative people that come to mind. Every single person has a their own variation of inventiveness and imagination and each person’s traits help to shape the creativity of the human race.

What we humans have done with this gift is utterly astonishing. One could very strongly argue that creativity is what separates us from lower primates. One could argue even more strongly that without our creativity, civilization itself wouldn’t exist. Humanity would not even resemble what it does today without this exceptional trait. In fact, one might not even consider humans to be humans without their creativity. Luckily, some accidents are meant to be.

You can watch Ramachandran’s amazing Ted Talk here

Works Cited

MacDonald, Ann. "Brain Development in Childhood — The Dana Guide." The Dana Foundation. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013.<https://www.dana.org/news/brainhealth/detail.aspx?id=10054>.

Ramachandran, V.S., and E.M. Hubbard. "Synaesthesia — A Window Into Perception, Thought and

     Language." The Chinese University of Hong Kong. N.p., n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013. <http://ww2.psy.cuhk.edu.hk/~mael/papers/RamachandranHubbard_Synaesthesia.pdf>.

VS Ramachandran: 3 Clues to Understanding Your Brain. TED. TED, n.d. Web. 11 Nov. 2013. <http://www.ted.com/talks/vilayanur_ramachandran_on_your_mind.html>.