Object synaesthesia

I’d forgotten Petula Clark. Until, that is, a couple of nights ago when I watched a superb BBC4 documentary about Cindy Sherman. There she was, Petula, that is, in a suitably noir-ish 1965 video, performing Tony Hatch’s “Downtown”, with its wonderful piano intro.

Back in the previous decade, in 1953, Petula had recorded a version of “Poppa Piccolino”, which was a Number 2 UK hit for Diana Decker in the December of that year. Yes, it's easy to mock, though part of the melody presages "Being for the benefit of Mr Kite". I was three years old at the time, and that song was a major component of my mental life for a significant part of my early childhood. Initially a favourite, as self-consciousness grew "Poppa Piccolino" became an embarrassment. In part, that was because it was far more important to me than just a song, and I shall return to this point in a moment.

A few weeks ago I posted a blog called “Implausible boundaries of association”, in which I considered how, when viewing a certain local thoroughfare, I always thought of Bournemouth, for no very good reason. Though peculiar, this is a kind of mental activity that has been reported by others, for example, by John Cowper Powys (who could be a little strange at times) who commented that he “thought with” the Nothe fort in Weymouth and other features along the Dorset coast, and also by the very sane Jonathan Meades in his “Encyclopaedia of Myself”, when he refers to a particular T-junction in Salisbury where he always used to think of the Duke of Edinburgh. In my earlier blog, I suggested that these sort of odd associations could be described (though not explained) by Douglas Hofstadter’s concept of the implicosphere. There are, it seems, few limits to analogy and association, although convention denies respectability, meaningfulness or even sanity to the more unlikely ones.

One species of analogy which has become fashionable in recent years, even to the extent of being claimed as a neuro-atypical conceit by some who don’t actually enjoy / suffer from it, is synaesthesia, the condition in which an input in one sensory modality is experienced, fully or in part, in another, hence “coloured hearing” or experiencing the letter M as pea green. An enormous number of such oddities have been reported in the literature, to the extent that synaesthesia must be considered “normal”. However, confusion arises because of the quasi-synaesthetic terminology  implicit in everyday language – so that we speak of a loud shirt, a warm relationship, a sharp cheese, a brittle voice, or bright prospects. There is a blur between genuine (physiological) synaesthesia and the dead metaphors of linguistic commonplace.

In the same way that senses merge or transpose in proper synaesthesia, it has been suggested that other cognitive or affective fusions or crossovers could take place, possibly leading to exceptional abilities or creativity – for instance the (unproven) idea that Einstein might have experienced some commonality, some blurring, of spatial and mathematical skills, to his advantage. We should also recall that many words attract private, subtle emotional auras, which probably help us to remember them, and motivate us to action. Association is normal. More or less. It’s what we do when we think.

Quite where the dividing line lies between clinical synaesthesia and the normal associational nature of thought itself, is unclear. A fascinating zone exists, a mental melting pot, where we encounter, for instance, the schizotypal thought processes of some creative people (as well as those with mania, autism or schizophrenia), and the (usually unexamined) associations that lead to phobias and sexual fetishes. Mental association lies at the rich and unpredictable core of what it means to be a human being.

The American psychologist and philosopher William James (1842-1910) famously referred to the “blooming, buzzing confusion” of babyhood, a time when nothing made sense, when there was no understanding of what was important or of what “went with what”; a time before thought as adults know it. While “normal” in infancy, unless we escape from this kind of proto-thought we will soon be in trouble, yet if we still retain traces of this ability into adult life, enhanced creativity may be a consequence. So often we need to break the mould, we need unexpected strategies that apparently lack rationality. Though without any evident  personal creative benefits, here we must return to “Poppa Piccolino”, and to the most ridiculous implicosphere and proto-thought complex that I can recall from my early childhood.

Near my grandparents’ home in Flintshire was, and is, the Queensferry Bridge. Back in the day it was heavily used by vehicles travelling between Manchester or Merseyside and the North Wales coast and was painted a serious “engineering” grey; today it is coloured a ludicrous bright blue, as befits the banality of our times, and is by-passed by an uninteresting structure carrying the A494 dual carriageway. The Ferry Bridge, as I and the locals called it, or what is now formally known as the Old Queensferry, Jubilee or Blue Bridge, has been granted Grade II listed building status since 2005 – and I should think so too. Designed by Mott, Hay and Anderson and built by Sir William Arrol and Company  between 1925 and 1927, it is a double bascule bridge of unique design, although a few fairly similar structures exist elsewhere, in Chicago, for instance.

For a considerable portion of my childhood much of my thinking was “with this” bridge, and “Poppa Piccolino” – the tune and lyrics, which start with “All over Italy ...” - were fused intimately with it. Along with, er, the colour grey, hair clippers, plasticine, fears of fish and thunderstorms, empty low loaders, and much else, now unfortunately (or mercifully) forgotten. A “blooming, buzzing confusion” it certainly was. As implicospheres go it was impressive and insane; it was in my brain – perhaps it was my brain. I was in it; it was me. If anyone ever posthumously dismantles my neuronal architecture someone will need to go out and stop the traffic, otherwise who knows what might happen. Cars might plunge into the tidal River Dee. Meanwhile I propose the term “object synaesthesia” for this kind of thought process.

Domestic synaesthesia

For several years now, chilli con carne with a jacket potato has been a regular Thursday evening meal of ours. It’s within my extremely modest range of culinary capabilities, it’s tasty, and it permits me to experience – and thus to report on - a peculiar subjective phenomenon. At the stage in production where I shave a slice of butter from the butter dish and place it between the two halves of potato, I have an indefinable sense of Oxford. Not the city itself, or its colleges or even its name, but just a feeling of … Oxford. There’s nothing in our kitchen to cause such an association, apart from a jar of Frank Cooper’s Oxford marmalade, hidden away in a cupboard. And no, I’ve never attempted anything as disgusting as jacket potato with marmalade. I doubt that even Paddington Bear has ever been that gross. It’s nothing to do with that, but purely an odd and presumably inappropriate mental link between a specific buttery manoeuvre and the concept of Oxford.

As you probably fear, that isn’t the end of the matter. In a drawer close to where the butter dish resides is the key to our garden shed. This, in analogous fashion, causes me to think, not of Oxford, but of Hull. It’s a simple lever-type key, and I have wondered if its teeth spell out an art deco version of the word HULL, but I’ve checked and, no, they don’t. Another explanation is called for. Perhaps it’s because the shed is a bit out of the way and in the top right corner of the garden. Certainly there’s no way one could mistake our shed for a city of culture, or even an ex-one.  

Upstairs, in the bathroom, are my interdental toothbrushes, made by TePe of Malmö. I would like to say that they are specially made for me and flown in by courier every morning, but the truth is that my dentist keeps them in a big box in reception. They’re in two sizes, one yellow, one blue, representing – IKEA-like - the colours of the Swedish flag. The yellow brushes I think of as the Swedish brushes, which is odd though slightly sensible. The blue ones as … the Russian ones, with slight hints of “ruthenium”, the chemical element named after an old Latin word which coincidentally is also the root of the word “Russia”.

Thus I slide down a Pyeongchang-sized slippery slope towards madness. One comfort is that I’m not alone, and that someone who has always been very sane, and often very amusing, has been known to experience something similar, though more related to feelings of personality than to inappropriate intrusions of language. Playwright and national treasure Alan Bennett, on page 284 of his volume of diary entries called “Untold Stories”, recounts that on 8th January 2001 he noticed “how personalised and peopled the material world is at a level almost beneath scrutiny”. The “material world” in question was the contents of his cutlery drawer, which included some “friendly” wooden spoons, while others were “impersonal or without character”. There was “a friendly fork” and “a bad knife”. He acknowledged that setting down these observations in this way seemed close to insanity but that “it goes back to childhood when the entire household was populated with friends and not-friends and few objects were altogether inanimate, particularly knives and forks”. He concluded that, despite sixty years having passed and his kitchen having relocated from Leeds to Camden Town, “more traces of this animistic world persist” than he would like, “making a mockery of reason and sense”.

This is reassuring, because as well as the feelings about the butter, the shed key and the toothbrushes, I also have some peculiar feelings about items of cutlery, in particular half a dozen bone handled knives I inherited from my Welsh grandmother. Some of these have rectangular cross-sectioned handles, and others have handles with a curved profile. I avoid using the curved ones. I’m not sure what would happen if I did use them.

This isn’t madness - although just don’t get me started on spoons. It isn’t a phobia or a superstition as such, it isn’t even obsessive compulsive neurosis. It’s very slightly autistic, I suspect, with a large helping of our good friend the pathetic fallacy too, but mostly, I think, it’s a mild variety of synaesthesia. Neuroscientist Vilanayur Ramachandran, based at the University of California at San Diego, has commented that there is now virtually a synaesthesia industry. So be it, and  perhaps there should be. People who exhibit coloured hearing, “see” Tuesday as pink or the number 4 as blue, experience Tottenham Court Road station as sausage and eggs, or exhibit other explicit forms of sensory blending or crossover or mix-up, have become popular media fodder in recent years. I don’t enjoy anything as spectacular as that myself, although sometimes when listening to music I spontaneously generate geometric patterns or architectural fantasies in my mind’s eye. I do, however, believe that my ruminations around the house, and likewise those of Alan Bennett, as described above, are very much in the same territory as more blatant forms of synaesthesia.

 
Moreover, on the basis of absolutely no reliable evidence, I believe that, to a degree, we’re all synaesthetic, at least some of the time. While we use superficially synaesthetic metaphors constantly in everyday language – loud shirts, cool responses, heated arguments, pointed remarks, feeling down, sharp disagreements, real heavy man – and while in a small percentage of people synaesthesia takes its newsworthy forms, I suspect something more basic and pervasive, and that synaesthesia plays a fundamental role in the way we think.