Study of synesthesia helps to understand sensations – 08/05/2023 – Luciano Melo

The gut is NOT the second brain—but I might even agree with the opposite: the brain can be a second gut.

The Earth is not flat, the heart beats inside the chest, vaccines are good for humanity. It is convenient to bend to the facts, the evidence is not a matter of opinion. Those who disagree, I suppose, believe that they will fall off a ledge into the void if they sail towards the horizon.

And there’s more: The Brian Jonestown Massacre is the greatest rock band of all time. I continue, the Brazilian rock group Bike is an example that some people heroically hone the art —and still have fun. The lucky ones who attended the concerts of these two groups, and also that of Trio Mocotó, at Cine Joia, in São Paulo, on April 20th, understand what I am talking about.

If you, dear reader, know that if you travel continuously in one direction you will return to the starting point, you will agree with me.

The Brian Jonestown Massacre sound leaves its listeners light. This happens because music, in our brains, reaches channels beyond those intended for hearing or semantics. Its strength grows in this diversity and is expressed in a radical way, by synesthesia. Few of us are synesthetics. However, this rare aspect helps to explain how music impacts. Let’s get to know this mystery better, starting with some cases.

A blind man, who had long tried to understand colors, one day said that he finally discovered the meaning of scarlet: “it is like the sound of a trumpet”. The composer Franz Liszt (1811-1886) guided his orchestra to play more blue, not so pink. The mathematician Pythagoras (570-495 BC) considered music to be a subdivision of mathematics. For each tone there should be a harmonic interval, a number, a name, a color and a shape.

Synesthesia is that neurological condition that pairs the senses. For synesthetics, a stimulus provokes one more perception. Some of them will say that the letter B is blue, or that the name Sandra tastes like an apple. In others, sounds cause tactile, gustatory, or olfactory sensations. We don’t exactly know the reason for these complicated perceptions, nor do we know if an explanation for one modality of synesthesia works for another. However, we are not so ignorant, let’s risk understanding.

One theory suggests that synesthesia occurs because a given stimulus, when captured, causes a flow of information that will have as its destination not only the brain areas occupied in decoding that stimulus. In this way, ear structures activated by music excite not only groups of neurons that take care of the experience of sound but another that, for example, may be responsible for the emergence of vision into consciousness.

Another hypothesis says something different. When a part of the brain, as it should be, makes sense of reason from sensory information, it does something else. It also generates data traffic that will target another brain region in charge of elaborating another sensation.

Another argument treats synesthesia not as a sensation, but as an organized idea to solve a “semantic vacuum”. Synesthesia would arise because there is no preexisting cognitive repertoire to characterize an abstract concept. The brain forms a connection with a better known sense to define something it cannot characterize.

Intuitively we do something similar when we say that a singer has a velvety voice or the sound of the Brian Jonestown Massacre is enveloping. For synesthetics, this resource is more intense and real. Synesthesia would be a created idea, so consistent that it causes a certain experience, similar to a perception.

These theories are limited to the senses and cognition. However, they overlook the essential property of music to evoke emotions. There is evidence that feelings mediate cross-modal associations in non-synaesthetics, but much more so in synesthetics. Transmodal associations are features in sound perception, not musical at all, that make certain associations possible. We use this artifice when we relate higher tones to joy and lightness and lower tones to darkness and melancholy.

We commonly react to our perceptions, in any modality, with emotions. In the general population, euphoria or sadness, visceral sensations, trance, distortions in the perception of time, and even the illusion of floating, can be caused by melodies. However, people with music synesthesia have emotional responses more often and more intensely. It is assumed that in these people, the brain centers that process feelings, the limbic structures, are supplied by a greater number of connections. The limbic nuclei, then, intensely activated, influence brain areas of sensory association, causing synesthetic experiences.

Synesthetics open a window for us to analyze the awareness of sensations. One potential application of synesthesia research is the development of new therapies for individuals with sensory processing disorders, such as those suffering from misophonia. But, beyond this noble objective, I bend to the facts: the study of synesthesia helps me to understand some bodily sensations that you, a non-synaesthetic, will have when listening to Brian Jonestown Massacre’s guitar concert.

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