A Witches’ Bible states that “the sensitive is psychically aware of character qualities, or emotional or spiritual states, in the subject, and this awareness presents itself to him or her as visual phenomena.” It’s easy to dismiss such claims as pseudoscientific claptrap, yet there exist humans who, when presented with nonvisual stimuli such as tastes or smells, perceive visual imagery. I’m talking about the scientifically recognized condition, synesthesia. Synesthetes are people who perceive stimuli presented in one mode (often corresponding to one of the five senses) with a different mode. For example, musical tones might also be perceived as colors, or a friend might appear to have blue lips (as rendered in the photo of my son Jim at left).
Might it also be possible for a synesthete to associate emotions with visual images? British psychologist Jamie Ward believes he has found an individual (a nineteen-year-old woman whose initials are GW) with just such a condition. GW says she perceives “auras” around the faces of certain people, and when she sees or hears some words, she perceives colors (the same color always associated with the same word), which occupy her entire field of vision.
But how does Ward know GW isn’t just fabricating the entire story?
GW was given a list of 83 words and asked to indicate any colors she associated with them. One week later, she was given the same list; her associated colors were 87 percent consistent. A group of (non-synesthete) volunteers performing the same task achieved an accuracy of only 47 percent. Even four months later, GW was still 76 percent consistent.
Even more remarkable were GW’s results on the Stroop task. In the classic Stroop experiment, we are shown a word, such as GREEN, and asked to indicate the color it is printed in. When the meaning of the word itself conflicts with the word’s color, the task is more difficult. There’s a good demo of the effect here. For GW, the task was modified: in pre-testing, she had identified fifteen names of friends which were associated with particular colors. Now these names were presented back to her on a computer monitor. Her task was to name the color the names were displayed in. Half the time, the text was displayed in the color she associated with the name, and half the time, the text was displayed in a different color. In a second task, she was asked to identify the color which the name induced for her. Here are the results:
When the color of the text matched the induced color, she was significantly faster in naming the color. When there was a mismatch, naming the color, whether of the text itself or the induced color, was significantly slower. In non-synesthetes, there was no significant difference when they performed a similar task.
Unlike many other synesthetes, most words do not induce a color at all for GW. Ward found that the words which most frequently induced colors were names of people she knew, with almost 80 percent of well-known friends’ names inducing a color, but even common names like Anne or Edward, which didn’t happen to correspond to someone GW knew, inducing almost no colors. Ward speculated that an emotional connection, rather than the names themselves, was possibly what induced the colors for GW. When tested on ordinary words, the incidence of synesthetic responses was considerably lower, around 15 percent. But words which rated highly on a scale of emotionality induced colors for GW nearly 40 percent of the time. Moreover, different emotions tended to elicit different colors, with negative emotions trending towards dark, less saturated colors like black and grey, while positive emotions trended towards brighter, more saturated colors like yellow, pink, and green.
Ward points out that several other studies have shown a similar correspondence between color and emotion — people tend to associate lighter and more saturated colors like yellow, green, and red with positive emotions, and darker and less saturated colors with negative emotions. GW, he argues, may be merely experiencing an exaggerated version of this effect. Neuroscientists have suggested that the cause of synesthesia may be related to hyperconnectivity between brain regions; the particular regions that are connected then explain the particular instantiation of synesthesia.
Synesthesia may also explain why so many folkloric traditions involve special people being able to see “auras” or other mystical features in others. These individuals might then be imbued by association with other “magical” abilities. Though GW doesn’t claim to have any additional special abilities, Ward argues that it’s not difficult to imagine people in a different time and culture attributing supernatural powers as a way to explain why rare individuals seemed to possess additional sensory capabilities.
Ward, J. (2004). Emotionally mediated synaesthesia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21, 761-772.