My partner and I like to play the Spelling Bee game in the New York Times. We have a strategy; I try to solve the pangrams while he picks away at the other words on the list. It’s typical for us to learn an unfamiliar word every few puzzles, often from the field of ornithology. Various tits from the family of passerine birds show up in Spelling Bee, as do arcane terms such as tippet, a long black scarf worn by clergy, or ennead, a grouping of nine. Timothy and I are both word nerds, and it’s fun for us to research the definitions and etymologies of lexemes that are new to us.
I learned the word synesthesia fifteen years ago this month. It’s striking to me that I lived for decades with no term to describe my conflated sensory experiences. Like many synesthetes, I didn’t understand that my sensorium was unusual. I thought everyone knew Monday was a gorgeous sky blue, redolent with possibility. I assumed it was common knowledge that looking at toothpicks would send zingy shocks of electric pain down a person’s legs and across the backs of their arms. And it seemed so obvious that the numeral three was a bright grass green. Why wouldn’t it be?
I learned the word synesthesia from a manual therapy client who was a synesthete herself. I shared that narrative in my research paper Mirror-Sensory Synaesthesia and the Practice of Manual Therapy; it’s essentially my synesthete origin story. The short version is this:
It was November (burnt orange) of 2010 (grey with a hint of violet-blue), and while I don’t remember the exact date, it was a Thursday (silvery and clear, like water in a glass). I was working at The Mindful Body, a yoga studio that had names for all of the massage therapy rooms, hippie names like Peace, Serenity, and Harmony. I was working in Joy (a purple room), and my last massage client, whose name I don’t remember, had a shoulder injury. She told me about her symptoms, then asked, “Do you know what synesthesia is?” I told her no. She then shared her definition, noting that any one of our senses can be united with another. In her case, physical touch created a visual field of amorphous and ever shifting color.
I don’t remember anything else about that session. I sped home and immediately launched a Google search for this new-to-me word, synesthesia. I was on my computer until after midnight, awed by the discovery of a word that defined my sensory experiences.
I love the word synesthesia and the ways my understanding of this perceptual trait has amplified my understanding of my neurocognitive world. Also, synesthesia is a beautiful word to me, pure blue as a lexeme, mid-century marvelous when colored by its graphemes. Today, I’m reminiscing back to that uncanny Thursday and the ways learning a single word can become a personal theory of everything.
