How Synesthesia, a Unique Brain Condition, Inspires Work of Southern New England Artists

Imagine living in a world where music is not only heard but also seen. Words have flavors and colors have a smell. It’s not a hallucination or a metaphor. And it can’t be taught.

It is called synesthesia, a neurological condition where a person’s senses, including the sense of smell and sound, get mixed together. Those who have this crossover of the senses say it has changed how they perceive the world.

“I think that we’re all lucky that it exists because without it there would not be the magnificent art that we get to have all around us,” said artist and graphic designer Alyn Carlson, who has a studio in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

“I was probably 5 and I started seeing numbers in color,” she said. “Three was yellow. Five was red. Zero was white. Seven was sort of a purple-ly blue.”

Not only does Carlson see numbers in color but she also says she can hear them and smell them.

She admits she feels somewhat self-conscious even talking about it because “other people can’t really relate to it.”

Newport-based artist and musician Lennie Peterson certainly can.

“When I hear music, I see shapes,” he said. “They’re in my art and they’re anywhere from a straight line, depending on the note, to all kinds of atmosphere within squares and circles.”

Both Peterson and Carlson have synesthesia. Neurologist Dr. Richard Cytowic is a well-renowned expert on the topic.

“Everybody knows the word anesthesia, which means no sensation. So synesthesia means joined or coupled sensation,” he said. “And there are kids who are born with two, three, or all five of their senses hooked together. So that my voice, for example, is not only something that they hear, but something that they might also see or taste or feel as a physical touch.”

Cytowic is credited with bringing synesthesia back to mainstream science. He has written six books on the phenomenon. He said colleagues initially dismissed it as too weird and new age.

“What happened is that, you know, I caused a paradigm shift in how we think about how the brain is organized,” Cytowic said. “We don’t have five senses traveling down five tubes that never intermingle. There are huge numbers of cross connections in the brain all the time.”

Carlson says the artwork featured in her studio was created in large part thanks to her synesthesia.

“If I’m working and two colors seem to come together and I smell them, they kind of lead me into an area to continue,” she said. “And because my work is abstract very often what I’m doing is I’m reacting to a color combination.”

Carlson pointed to an abstract painting that she created by mixing colors that smelled like one of her favorite things — a low tide.

“I started to be able to pull in a whole family of those colors that smelled that way to me. It was like an undercurrent in the whole pallet,” Carlson said. “And so from that I painted an 80-inch wide abstract landscape just from the smell, those two colors that came together and that, that happened, boom, that was so fast.”

Synesthesia is more common than some might think. Cytowic says 4% of the population has this union of the senses, including Lady Gaga and Billy Joel. Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov, who wrote “Lolita,” also had it. So did composer and pianist Duke Ellington.

“We’re more familiar with famous artists who happen to be synesthetes than we are famous synesthetes who happen to be artists,” Cytowic said. “And it’s a chicken-and-egg question of are they artistic because they’re synesthetic or are they synesthetic because they’re artistic? But I think it’s the former and they’re used to unusual things going together.”

It’s those unusual things that inspire Peterson’s work. He listens to music as he works and draws the shapes that he sees.

“They are being created in front of me. They’re not like in the, they’re not in the room,” Peterson said. “They’re forming in front of me as I listen to music and the more I concentrate on it, the more they’re gonna form and the clearer they’re gonna form.”

Peterson was in his late 20s teaching at the Berklee College of Music when he realized the way he experiences the world is not like most people.

“I was producing a student’s project of music and we were tracking keyboards and I got on the, you know, the talk mic and I said, ‘Can you make that chord more round?’ And I just got this stunned silence, you know, like, ‘Wait, what?’ So I turned to the engineer and he said to me, ‘What?’ I said, ‘I want to make it more round?’ He said, ‘You must have synesthesia.’”

Peterson’s paintings are heavily influenced by the music he listens to. He described listening to Miles Davis’ “In A Silent Way” while painting a piece.

“It’s a very mystical kind of setting for this song … then the synesthesia kicks in here,” he said. “I start in the top left-hand corner in my hand, I let my hand go. And it’s just a free flow of while the music’s playing.”

At times, Peterson said it feels like an overload of the senses, which he says is not a bad thing.

“If I get extremely sick, like high fever, a lot of people have hallucinations when they get really super sick,” he said. “But ever since I was a little kid, I would hear these gigantic symphonies in my head that were just like crazy, huge, like Wagnerian, Mahler-type symphonies.”

When asked if he ever wished he did not have synesthesia, Peterson said no.

“It’s almost like saying you wish the sky wasn’t blue. There’s nothing I can do about it,” he said. “And it’s there, you know? And it’s just — it’s part of my life.”

Cytowic said synesthesia is hereditary. “It runs strongly in families. Either sex parent can pass it down to either sex child and you’ll see it in multiple generations. So the most I have is four living generations with synesthesia, but historically you’ve been able to trace it back even more so.”

According to the National Institutes of Health, some researchers believe people with synesthesia have extra connections between brain cells in some areas of the brain. Others think the direction that information can flow between brain cells might be different.

Cytowic said synesthesia is a left-brain phenomenon.

“There’s a difference between actually viewing colors and seeing synesthetic colors,” he said. “And it’s as if synesthesia has hijacked a normal brain function that is viewing colors by connecting it with other kinds, other senses in the left hemisphere.”

Colorful experiences can also evoke pleasant sounds. For Carlson, a combination of blue has a distinct pitch.

“Every time I started to put them together I would hear cello. I would hear cello music just a long note, just a long note, it’s not a complicated piece of music,” Carlson said. “As the paint is being mixed. When I would get still with it, I would just hear it.”

And sometimes — she can smell it, too.

Carlson showed a painting that she said captures the smell of her youngest granddaughter when she was a baby.

“I just wanted to replicate it somehow and these colors came to mind. It wasn’t hard at all,” she said. “They just popped in and that’s where this came from.”

For Carlson, synesthesia allows her to hold on to precious memories. She says if not for synesthesia, she probably would not be working as an artist.

“I’d be lost. I’d be really lost, I think,” she said.