The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist's Quest for What Makes Us Human

To add to the mystery, Robert also had Asperger syndrome, a high-functioning form of autism. This made it difficult for him to understand and “read” people’s emotions. He could do so through intellectual deduction from the context, but not with the intuitive ease most of us enjoy. Yet for Robert, every emotion also evoked a specific color. For example, anger was blue and pride was red. So his parents taught him very early in life to use his colors to develop a taxonomy of emotions to compensate for his deficit. Interestingly, when we showed him an arrogant face, he said it was “purple and therefore arrogant.” (It later dawned on all three of us that purple is a blend or red and blue, evoked by pride and aggression, and the latter two, if combined, would yield arrogance. Robert hadn’t made this connection before.) Could it be that Robert’s whole subjective color spectrum was being mapped in some systematic manner onto his “spectrum” of social emotions? If so, could we potentially use him as a subject to understand how emotions—and complex blends of them—are represented in the brain? For example, are pride and arrogance differentiated solely on the basis of the surrounding social context, or are they inherently distinct subjective qualities? Is a deep-seated insecurity also an ingredient of arrogance? Are the whole spectrum of subtle emotions based on various combinations, in different ratios, of a small number of basic emotions?

Recall from Chapter 2 that color vision in primates has an intrinsically rewarding aspect that most other components of visual experience do not elicit. As we saw, the evolutionary rationale for neurally linking color with emotion was probably initially to attract us to ripe fruits and/or tender new shoots and leaves, and later to attract males to swollen female rumps. I suspect that these effects arise through interactions between the insula and higher brain regions devoted to color. If the same connections are abnormally strengthened—and perhaps slightly scrambled—in Robert, this would explain why he saw many colors as strongly tinged with arbitrary emotional associations.

BY NOW I was intrigued by another question. What’s the connection—if any—between synesthesia and creativity? The only thing they seem to have in common is that both are equally mysterious. Is there truth to the folklore that synesthesia is more common in artists, poets, and novelists, and perhaps in creative people in general? Could synesthesia explain creativity? Wassily Kandinsky and Jackson Pollock were synesthetes, and so was Vladimir Nabokov. Perhaps the higher incidence of synesthesia in artists is rooted deep in the architecture of their brains.

Nabokov was very curious about his synesthesia and wrote about it in some of his books. For example:

…In the green group, there are alder-leaf f, the unripe apple of p, and pistachio t. Dull green, combined somehow with violet, is the best I can do for w. The yellows comprise various e’s and i’s, creamy d, bright-golden y, and u, whose alphabetical value I can express only by “brassy with an olive sheen.” In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h. Finally, among the reds, b has the tone called burnt sienna by painters, m is a fold of pink flannel, and today I have at last perfectly matched v with “Rose Quartz” in Maerz and Paul’s Dictionary of Color. (From Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited, 1966)

He also pointed out that both his parents were synesthetes and seemed intrigued that his father saw K as yellow, his mother saw it as red, and he saw it as orange—a blend of the two! It isn’t clear from his writings whether he regarded this blending as a coincidence (which it almost certainly is) or thought of it as a genuine hybridization of synesthesia.

Poets and musicians also seem to enjoy a higher incidence of synesthesia. On his website the psychologist Sean Day provides his translation of a passage from an 1895 German article that quotes the great musician Franz Liszt:

When Liszt first began as Kapellmeister in Weimar (1842), it astonished the orchestra that he said: “O please, gentlemen, a little bluer, if you please! This tone type requires it!” Or: “That is a deep violet, please, depend on it! Not so rose!” First the orchestra believed Liszt just joked;…later they got accustomed to the fact that the great musician seemed to see colors there, where there were only tones.

The French poet and synesthete Arthur Rimbaud wrote the poem, “Vowels,” which begins:

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels,

I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:

A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies

which buzz around cruel smells,…