Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:00:05
That song you're hearing, it's called The Turn. It's by musical artist Christen Lien. She's a classically trained viola player based in Los Angeles. And her songwriting process is a little unusual.
Christen Lien
00:00:20
The the little plucking notes that happened have a have a really teardrop shape. It's like circular but slightly teardrop.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:00:28
You see, as far back as she can remember, Christen has had a visual experience when she composes and plays music.
Christen Lien
00:00:37
There's like an orange in the background and there's like a blue-purple thing happening with the notes, when I'm doing those plucking notes and it's quite pretty. It's always this place that I want to go.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:00:50
Christen has synesthesia. What is that? Well, it's a trait that essentially causes a multi-sensory experience. Basically, one sense elicits another, and then they kind of intertwine. Some people like Christen, see colors and shapes when they hear music. Others might get a taste of flavor when they touch an object. You might be surprised by how many different ways the senses actually can blend together. But unfortunately, there are also times when the experience is not as pleasant.
Christen Lien
00:01:25
The producer I was working with, he would create these mixes and just experiment for fun. But sometimes he would send me files that just gave me immediate nausea, like it wasn't right, and it would give me immediate nausea or chills or just just instant headaches. And I don't even get headaches. I'm not one to get headaches.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:01:47
As we come to the end of our season on the senses, I wanted to take a look at synesthesia, this rare trait that melds some of the senses that we've covered in the last few months - smell and taste and sight and sound and touch. They're all more complex than we think. And the important point here is that they're not so siloed. All of the senses we have can cross connect in our brains. And in synesthetes, that connection is stronger than average. But why? Why is that? What does synesthesia tell us about the ways we perceive the world and about the power of the human brain? I'm Dr. Sanjay Gupta, CNN's chief medical correspondent. And it's time to start Chasing Life.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:02:38
It's no secret the brain is one of the most fascinating things to me, probably to all of us. And I love that I'm constantly learning new things about how it works.
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:02:48
There was this in a speech module. There was a, you know, a hearing module, a vision module. And there was, by definition, no crossing among the two, the modules remained separate. And that's one of the things synesthesia has caused - a paradigm shift in how we think about how the brain is organized.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:03:06
That's Dr. Richard Cytowic. He's an author and a neurologist who's been researching synesthesia for decades. In fact, he remembers the first time he encountered the term synesthesia.
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:03:18
You know, the word anesthesia means no sensation. So synesthesia means joint or coupled sensation. So I read about that in the subbasement at the library in an old book, and I thought, oh, that's great; file that away. A long time later, a new neighbor invited me to dinner and he wanted me to meet some new friends and all that. So he said, "oh, we'll be a few minutes. There aren't enough points on the chicken." Now his friends laughed and said, "oh, Michael, what you smoking now? And instead he turned to me, beet red, as if he had let out a horrible secret. And he said, "well, you're now a neurologist. Maybe you understand, when I taste something, I also feel it on my face and in my hands. A feeling sweeps down my arm and I feel weight, shape, texture, temperature, as if I'm actually grasping something.".
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:04:10
Wow.
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:04:10
And I said, "oh, you have synesthesia." And I was just trying to be polite. And Michael said, "you mean there's a name for what I do?" And I thought, how could he not know? And and that's when I thought this may be something rather strange. And is, to hammer the point home when I told my colleagues in neurology about this, they said, "well, what is this CAT scan show?" And it's like, No, no, you don't understand. He doesn't have a hole in his head. There's nothing missing. He's got something extra. And they looked at me and said, "oh, man, this is too weird, too new age. You better drop this or it's going to ruin your career.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:04:52
Wow.
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:04:52
What they wanted was an an objective third person, meaning technological verification of what is a first person experience. And that usually meant they wanted pictures of the brain. And so when we finally got into the higher quality scanners and we had pictures of the brain, I said, "well, there it is."
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:05:12
What was it that you saw on those brain scans? What was ultimately convincing to those naysayers?
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:05:19
It just showed on scans what we already knew in person. Is that so when somebody, let's say, sees colors, when they hear spoken words. So the auditory, the hearing cortex lights up on both sides, as you would expect. But then also the colored area, v4.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:05:38
At that, now it seems like it's pretty embraced, the idea of synesthesia.
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:05:42
Oh, right.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:05:43
But at the time, I mean, as you say, you were risking not just risking ridicule, enduring ridicule to introduce this or reintroduce it even to the modern scientific community. Is that, am I overstating that or is that...
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:05:55
No, no, no, no. It took it took 15 years till I got past all the naysayers. But, I mean, I would present at scientific meetings or posters and people would come by and said, oh, then all these great professors would say, you're wasting your time. You know, this is, you're all, you're wrong. This can't be true. You know, this is all bogus.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:06:15
But it wasn't bogus. There was something there; something that can even be seen on brain scans that allowed people like Michael to "taste the points on his chicken." And it has to do with the way that synesthesia form cross connections in the brain.
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:06:31
It's not a question of are there across connections in the brain, but rather how how much, how many cross connections there are and in whom? And so in synesthetes are a subset of human beings that have this increased level of cross connections going on. But we all have them. For example, we all lip read, even though we never know it. In cinema, sight and hearing are so tightly bound that we never really notice it.
Ingrid Bergman
00:06:58
Sing it, Sam.
Dooley Wilson
00:06:59
You must remember this, a kiss is just a kiss. A sigh is just a sigh.
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:07:09
Cinema is a great example of where we are lulled into the illusion that the sound- dialog is coming from the actor's mouth on the screen rather than the speakers that are surrounding us. Dance is another one where physical movement echoes the beat and rhythm of the music. And even bad ventriloquists can convince us that the dummy is talking.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:07:31
Haha, right. Is it, what is synesthesia in the sense that, is it a condition? Is it a trait?
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:07:37
I call it a trait like having perfect; it's a sensory trait - like having perfect pitch.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:07:43
Because you, when I ask...
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:07:44
It's all or nothing, you either have it or you don't have it. You cannot develop it by practicing, for example. And it appears in, it's strongly inherited. So it appears in multiple generations of a family. So as far as music, musical talent goes, the Bach family is a prime example but hardly unique. And so for synesthesia, it's an autosomal dominant trait, meaning that it's passed down from either sex parent to either sex child. And the most I've had is four living generations. But historically they've gone back even further.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:08:19
How prevalent? I don't know if this is a number you can project, but how prevalent do you think synesthesia is? Take take the United States, for example.
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:08:27
Well, I'll give you the world. One in 23 people in have have the genes for synesthesia, but they are not always expressed with 100% fidelity. So a smaller number have outwardly manifest, outwardly obvious synesthesia, and that's one in 90. The most common types, are sensing the days of the week as colored. Alphabets and letters and numbers, that is, even though they're printed in black ink, that people will see them as as colored.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:08:57
Were there any particular synesthesias that really jumped out at you? I mean, the ones that you would describe to people as part of you are your you know, you you know, understanding.
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:09:09
I suppose the strangest form of synesthesia I come across is called audio motor, and that really is rare. A young boy claimed that he could say that certain words demanded certain body poses, and so the psychiatrist gave him names and a list of words. And the boys, you know, assumed these postures, and the psychiatrist sketched them out. And then 15 years later, without warning, he did the same thing. And the kid just, well now he wasn't a kid anymore, assumed the same postures for the same things. So that was very strange. And I guess that relates to like think about music, but you sort of have to move and, you know, tap your feet and and and do the jig to the music because it's so infectious. It may be something like that. That the sounds related to a motor position.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:10:09
So with the story you give about this boy who assumes these postures in response to to some sensory stimuli, that seems pretty obvious. But how hard is it to verify someone has synesthesia otherwise?
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:10:23
Well, the story I mean, again, you want a third person verification, a technological one, a third person verification for a first person experience. And so you can do that, but it's very difficult with scanners. They're expensive, time consuming and all that. And then once you have done that to me, I say, "so what? We already knew this, and now you're just showing it with the machine. Okay."
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:10:51
Synesthetes all tell the same story. It's remarkable. You say I've always had it since a child. I've never not had it. It's always the same, you know, 'B' is blue. When I was when I was a girl. I'm 65 now and it's still twinkling bl-blue, the same as always. My mother had it. My daughter has it. Synesthetes do not want to call attention to themselves because they've been ridiculed. I mean, one one woman I use in my talks, she said, as a seven-yearold, she told her best friend that the letter 'A' was the most beautiful pink she had ever seen. "What did your 'A' looked like," she asked, and her friend turned to her with this withering look and said, "you're nuts." And after that, Carol never talked to mention her colored letters again.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:11:41
Because synesthesia so individual it can be isolating. But for people like Christen Lien, this trait is what makes her art feel like a vibrant experience.
Christen Lien
00:11:52
Synesthesia to me is like a fraction of a bigger conversation about what it is to be human. Like the entire holistic human experience is, it's a it's like an it's like a great opening to something bigger.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:12:02
When we come back from the break, more on creativity and synesthesia, as well as some questions for Dr. Cytowic from Christen. But first, now that season is coming to an end, we are hard at work on our next one. It's going to be all about social media and phones and the way that technology is fundamentally changing how we communicate with our family, friends, colleagues...with each other. I think about this topic all the time, in my professional life, as well as my personal life, as the father of three teenage daughters. Do you have any questions or concerns about our ever evolving reliance on technology? What about the role it plays in our relationships? If so, record a voice memo and email it to asksanjay@cnn.com or give us a call at 470-396-0832 and leave a message.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:13:02
And now back to Chasing Life and my conversation with synesthesia expert Dr. Richard Cytowic.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:13:11
Do synesthetes, do they tend to gravitate toward a certain field? Is it more likely that they would be in a in a creative field?
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:13:19
No, people think, people will assume that they must be more creative. Yet again, another study done by a post-grad showed that there's a tendency for them to be just more creative in general, but not necessarily, you know, creative. We only I think we had this association because of the famous synesthetes that we've had. So Kandinsky, David Hockney, Billy Joel, John Lennon, I'm sorry, Paul McCartney not John Lennon. And so we say, oh, a famous person who had synesthesia, therefore all synesthetes are creative, you know. But that's not true. It doesn't work that way.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:13:58
Does the idea or concept dictate a certain color or vice versa?
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:14:03
Color is overwhelmingly the most common. Secondary attribute in synesthesia is the physical stimulus. So they're looking at something and it's the shape of the letter on the page that determines it. For others, it's the sound, but then the phoneme as opposed to the grapheme. And then for still others, just it's the concept is enough. They think of five and they see rosy pink.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:14:29
Where are we in our knowledge of synesthesia at this point then? Are there are mysteries? I'm sure there's always mysteries you'd still like to address.
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:14:38
Synesthesia appears early in childhood, okay. And Daphne Moore at McMaster University, she proposed that even young, young infants up until the age of three months all have synesthesia. And hers are very, very clever experiments because you're dealing with a non-verbal creature, right.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:14:56
Right.
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:14:57
So for me, it is, we know that that children go through developmental stages. They're they're at this age when they learn to to first say a few words and put together a phrase and the sentences when they learn how to, the names of the foods that they eat, the days of the week, how to tell time and all that. So those stages are very well known. So my question is, are there certain times when a certain are there certain ages when given a kind of synesthesia first appears? And I just, you know, even just to suspect that there might su- again, talks about the the longitudinal development of of the brain and the and the human being.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:15:42
Is that is that one of the the sort of examples of of a broader relevance to the study of synesthesia? I mean, this is it's fascinating in and of itself. But are there applications that you think about that may result from this work?
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:15:57
Not specifically. I think the broader the relevance is to appreciate that in the world abounds in individual subjective differences and that we all, we grow up, we're conditioned by our background, socioeconomics, the religion, our parents, and the kinds of things that we're exposed to as students, all the way throughout. And these, this conditioning makes us see things in a certain way. So there's nothing, there's no such thing as true objectivity. I think that's baloney. And what the really lovely thing for me is, is that these young people, when they realize that their playmate or their classmate has synesthesia, is like the curtain parts and it's like, oh, wow, people see things differently than I do. The whole world looks different to them. And so already they're introduced to the idea of individual uniqueness and differences. And so it makes it easier to tolerate or understand other differences that that they don't have themselves.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:17:11
So we, professor, we have a couple questions from a synesthete that we talked to, a musical artist named Christen Lien. And what she was driving at was her music based synesthesia - she's curious, could it have developed over years considering where the viola sits on her body, like where it's its relationship to her spine and her brain and her heart? Or was she likely born with it?
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:17:34
Oh, I'd say she was born with it.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:17:37
Christen also wants to know if you are a synesthete, are there behaviors or activities that you could be doing in this case, could she be doing to maintain that?
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:17:48
I don't think she needs to do anything to maintain it. It will maintain itself. Now, there are a few exceptions where it has either appeared or disappeared at around puberty. But of course, puberty is a time when there's enormous changes not only in the body, but in the brain. This is the second time it's undergoing a massive reconfiguration. The first being around birth. And after birth, there's a massive die off of neurons.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:18:17
Okay, so you either have synesthesia or you don't. But Christen wanted to know, is it a matter of focus? Meaning, could some of us have it and not even know?
Christen Lien
00:18:27
I wonder if we all focus a little harder on, like, our inner world, I, do some people have it and not realize it?
Dr. Richard Cytowic
00:18:35
There are cross connections in the brain for everybody. It's a question just then of how much. So synesthetes have a great deal. Most of us have very little. And so when we can, when we're able to quiet down the cortex, the chatter of the conscious mind, then that may allow these cross connections to then manifest themselves into consciousness.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:19:08
You know, I've got to tell you, working on this particular season has given me a newfound appreciation for all of my senses. I live my life differently now as I pay attention to the senses and really understand them. And I'm reflecting now on the advice from Dr. Cytowic and the experts we've heard from throughout these episodes, like quieting my mind. Really taking in all of the sights and the sounds and the smells and the textures around me. Hearing from Christen and Dr. Cytowic also reminds me that people do see the world differently - from tasting a favorite dish to smelling your mother's perfume or hearing the sound of your baby's laughter. Individuals experience each of these senses in unique ways. Remember that. None of us see the world, none of us feel the world or sense the world exactly the same. Your brain is likely to perceive the world differently than mine does. And because our senses are constantly working in the background, kind of like an invisible operating system, we do usually take them for granted, yet they're extremely important. They allow us to experience the richness of the world, and they definitively enhance our quality of life.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:20:28
On that note, I'm wishing everyone a wonderful holiday season. It's been a pleasure to hear the way certain episodes have impacted you and what you've learned about the senses. I want to let you know that we are going to take a short break, but we are working on something terrific for next year, so stay tuned. We'll be taking a hard look at our screens, you know, the ones that we constantly stare into day and night. And we're going to examine what all that technology and all that social media is really doing to our brains. What it's doing to our relationships. It is a topic that is very dear to me, as a father of three teenage girls. I often think about the world they are inheriting and how it's going to be so different than my own childhood. You're not going to want to miss this. Talk to you in the new year. And as always, thanks for listening.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta
00:21:24
Chasing Life is a production of CNN Audio. Our podcast is produced by Emily Liu, Grace Walker, Xavier Lopez, Eryn Mathewson and Andrea Kane. Our intern is Amber Alesawy. Haley Thomas is our senior producer and Abbie Fentress Swanson is our executive producer. Tommy Bazarian is our engineer. And a special thanks to Ben Tinker, Amanda Seeley and Nadia Kounang of CNN Health.
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