It’s hard to pinpoint when synesthesia, the rare neurological condition where a stimulus that affects one sense prompts a response in a different sense, was first documented. Scientific literature marks its beginning in 1812, when it appeared as an aside in a Bavarian medical student’s dissertation. Toward the end, there’s a small section where he detailed how he associated musical tones and letters with colors.
“He enumerates the colors he sees in connection with the letters of the alphabet. A and E: vermilion, I: white, O:orange and so forth,” says UC Berkeley French Professor Liesl Yamaguchi, author of the new book, On the Colors of Vowels: Thinking Through Synesthesia.
Yamaguchi’s book, which she’ll be discussing in a Berkeley Book Chat event on April 9, investigates how the concept of synesthesia emerged in the 19th century, despite the fact that everything we know about this way of sensing suggests that it’s likely “an age-old phenomenon.”
In fact, the word “synesthesia” was used in ancient Greece, but to describe a simultaneous feeling felt by two different people at once. The modern use of the term dates only to the late 19th century, and inquiry into its relation to ordinary sensing has only begun to be investigated in the last decade or so.
In this UC Berkeley News Q&A, Yamaguchi discusses the history of synesthesia, and the unique ability of scholars in the humanities to investigate the phenomenon in ways that are methodologically impossible in the hard sciences.