Unthinkable

by Helen Thomson

  Almost a century later, Gissurarson and his colleague Ásgeir Gunnarsson, lined up four large wooden panels in an empty room. Gunnarsson hid behind one of the panels—decided by a roll of dice—and waited for Gissurarson to bring each of their ten participants into the room, one by one. Standing at the doorway, each participant was asked to say behind which screen Gunnarsson was hidden. The researchers reasoned that the participants should be able to tell based on Gunnarsson’s aura, which would be streaming out from behind the screen. Each participant repeated the experiment over and over again. The pair then invited nine people who said they had no extrasensory ability to take part in the test.

  They tried hard to minimize any aspect that could potentially reveal Gunnarsson’s position: the walls were covered in opaque wallpaper to prevent any reflections giving the game away; the participants were given ear defenders and listened to music between each test to stop them hearing the researcher’s footsteps. Gunnarsson even took a shower just before the experiment to prevent any lingering musk from revealing his position.

  The results were conclusive: neither group was able to guess which panel Gunnarsson was standing behind any better than chance—and, ironically, the control group actually did slightly better than the group that claimed they could see auras.2

  Gissurarson wasn’t alone in giving paranormal activity a chance at scientific validation. In 1964, James Randi, a renowned magician and escape artist, now best known as a tireless investigator of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, offered $1,000 of his own money to the first person who could offer him proof of the paranormal under controlled conditions. Today, his prize lies untouched, and thanks to various donors, has grown to $1,000,000. Although hundreds of people have tried, all attempts at claiming the money have failed. Most notable was a live experiment on ABC’s prime-time program Nightline, where a psychic, a palm reader and a tarot-card reader all had their talents put to the test. All of them failed.

  “I have an open mind,” said Randi, after the show had aired. “But not so open my brains fall out.”

  * * *

  “And that,” says Rubén, “is why I don’t tell people I can see auras.”

  He and I are sitting under a large cream umbrella in a small square tucked away in Bilbao’s old town. I flag down a waiter. Rubén sits forward in his chair.

  “First of all,” he says, quite seriously, “I don’t want anybody to think that I see auras in the very conventional sense of the word, like I’m some kind of fortune-teller or that I can also read hands.”

  I nod.

  “What in fact happens is that I perceive colors when I see people. Everyone has a distinctive color, which changes with time depending on how I know that person, or the main attributes of the person.”

  “Attributes?”

  “Like their name, or voice, what they’re wearing, and the emotion that I am feeling toward them.”

  “Can you physically see the color in front of you?”

  “That’s the most difficult thing to explain. It’s not a hallucination, not something visually happening in front of you, but at the same time I’m aware that it’s there. I can’t avoid seeing it.”

  But Rubén does not have paranormal talents. He has a rare variant of synesthesia, the condition we came across in Bob’s chapter that causes a blending of the senses.

  FOR HUNDREDS OF YEARS, it was received wisdom that our senses travel along their own individual paths in the brain, never talking to one another directly. We see because of impulses that travel from the eye through the optic nerve to the visual cortex. We hear because air triggers electrical messages in the ear that are passed to the auditory cortex and perceived as sound. In 1812, that wisdom was challenged by Georg Tobias Ludwig Sachs, a young man born in the mountain village of St. Ruprecht in Austria, in a dissertation that he published describing his own albinism—a condition in which a lack of melanin causes a person’s hair and skin to become pale white. In his essay, he also remarks upon another phenomenon in which colors appeared when he listened to music, or when he thought about numbers, days, cities or letters. He says that these concepts “introduce themselves to the mind as if a series of visible objects in dark space, formless and noticeably of different colors.”3

  It wasn’t until the 1880s that Sir Francis Galton, a polymath from Birmingham in England, named Sachs’s condition synesthesia, a term that comes from the Greek, meaning “joined perception.” A synesthete, you remember, might experience the number five as having a pink hue, or taste strawberry at the sound of a horn. Music might be perceived as having a particular shape; months of the year might be seen as a ribbon in space. My favorite description of synesthesia comes from the Russian author Vladimir Nabokov. “The long a of the English alphabet . . . has for me the tint of weathered wood, but a French a evokes polished ebony,” he says in his autobiography. “I am puzzled by my French on which I see as the brimming tension-surface of alcohol in a small glass . . . In the brown group, there are the rich rubbery tone of soft g, paler j, and the drab shoelace of h.”4

  Synesthesia is by and large a completely harmless trait, and occurs in around 4 percent of the population. Many people are synesthetes without ever realizing. Undoubtedly, these strange perceptions would once have been regarded as witchcraft. Even in the last century, synesthetes were often diagnosed with schizophrenia, or taken as drug addicts. Thankfully, the landscape has changed radically in the last few decades. Scientists no longer ask whether the condition is real, but why it occurs and whether it is beneficial.

  Although the debate over the mechanisms that give rise to synesthesia is by no means settled, the increasing sophistication of imaging techniques has allowed us to compare the structure and patterns of the brain activation in synesthetes and non-synesthetes.

  At first glance, the synesthetic brain looks much like any other. It has the same tangled heap of neurons that we all possess. But upon closer inspection there may be subtle differences. As we discovered earlier, neurons in the infant brain form millions of connections that are not present in later life. As we grow and learn and experience the world, a huge amount of connections are pruned. Some small studies have suggested that people with synesthesia may have a genetic anomaly that prevents this pruning from happening in certain brain areas. As a result, synesthetes are left with pathways of communication between sensory regions of the brain that don’t normally exist.

  While these structural changes and coactivation of disparate regions of the brain may indeed increase a person’s propensity to link different senses, it doesn’t fully explain the mechanism behind synesthesia. It doesn’t explain how synesthesia can be induced temporarily, after taking hallucinogenic drugs, for instance, nor does it explain the handful of cases in which people have lost synesthetic experiences while taking antidepressants.

  In fact, it seems that anyone can become a synesthete. In 2014, Daniel Bor at the University of Sussex and his colleagues managed to turn thirty-three adults into temporary synesthetes in just over a month.5 Their volunteers took part in half-hour training sessions, five days a week, in which they learned thirteen letter and color associations. By week five, many of the volunteers were reporting that they saw colored letters when they read regular black text. “When reading a sign on campus I saw all the letter E’s coloured green,” said one participant.

  If you want to try it for yourself, you can download e-books in which certain letters always appear in specific colors. Before long, you should start seeing those letters appear in color elsewhere in the world. The effect doesn’t seem to last long if you don’t continue to practice. Three months after the trial finished, the volunteers’ synesthesia had disappeared.

  The fact that synesthesia can appear and disappear in these ways challenges the pruning theory: it’s not possible for new connections to sprout suddenly and then disappear in such short time frames. The Indian-born neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran poses a different theory: he and his colleagues at the University of Califo
rnia, San Diego, believe that synesthetes may actually have an enhancement of preexisting connections between their senses that everybody possesses.

  We know that there are several areas of the brain that inhibit each other; in this way neighboring areas of the brain can be insulated from one another. There’s some evidence to suggest that a chemical imbalance might reduce this inhibition, either by blocking chemicals that pass electrical messages across synapses, or by failing to produce them at all. This would not create any extra connections in the brain, but would prevent some connections from being inhibited, with the result that regions normally shut off from one another would start communicating.

  If this theory proves true, you might imagine that we all have some aspects of synesthesia within us. And when we look closer, it turns out we do. Imagine you have in front of you a rounded cloud-like shape and a shape that resembles a jagged piece of shattered glass. Which would you name Bouba and which would you name Kiki? Most people would name the rounded cloud Bouba and the jagged shape Kiki. This is the most likely answer no matter whether you are an English-speaking person or not. This intriguing experiment, developed by Ramachandran, shows that while we may not see colors when listening to music, or looking at numbers, when pressed we all tend to link certain senses—like pairing high-pitched sounds with bright colors, and low tones with deeper hues. Such experiments suggest there is a non-arbitrary, inbuilt relationship between all of our senses. It suggests that synesthetes do not have a completely different brain from the rest of us; they may simply have a more extreme manifestation of what we all possess to a greater or lesser degree.6

  IT’S NOT CLEAR how many kinds of synesthesia there are, and new types are being described all the time. In 2016, Jamie Ward at the University of Sussex discovered that some synesthetes who are fluent in sign language experience the same color they associate with written letters when the corresponding letter is signed.7 Then there are the more unusual kinds of synesthesia: the ticker-tape synesthete, for instance, who sees words flowing out of people’s mouths as they speak,8 or the orgasm-color synesthete, who senses bright colors at the point of climax.9

  Rubén’s synesthesia is thought to be one of the rarest, in that he experiences all sorts of crossed senses. He perceives colors when he sees or hears letters, numbers, names, music, shapes or heights, when he thinks about certain ideas, and also when he feels strong emotions. This emotion-color synesthesia is what leads to his most interesting perceptions—a world of colorful auras evoked by the people around him. Sometimes the color he associates with someone is completely arbitrary, at other times certain colors are associated with specific emotions that he has toward the person.

  “So does everyone have a color associated with them?” I ask Rubén, pointing at a random woman walking past our table. “Like her? What color is she?”

  “No, not everyone,” Rubén replies, giving her the briefest of glances. “The colors I see are primarily influenced by the sound of the person’s name, what they’re wearing, how I feel about them, or how attractive they are.”

  The colors Rubén sees often are blue, gray, red, yellow and orange.

  “For instance, if I like someone sexually they would be red,” he says. “It won’t matter about the voice, just the look, because that’s the first thing you think about a person. It’s not just people but also music, paintings and buildings. Things I like always tend to make me perceive some kind of red.”

  People who look dirty or sick, on the other hand, will normally be perceived by Rubén as having a green aura, whereas those who are optimistic and happy are purple.

  “If I don’t like someone, their color will probably be yellow. Yellow is the color I associate with acidic flavors and it’s also the color of people with bad manners, who are rude or have a kind of attitude. So if a person acts like that, he or she becomes yellow.”

  Rubén doesn’t always have an explanation for why certain colors are associated with certain people. One of his brothers is pale orange, the other is gray, and his mother is gray-blue. He has no idea why. Likewise, his father is brown. Brown is the color Rubén normally associates with the elderly and people who are uninteresting to him, yet his father is neither of those things.

  “In their case, it doesn’t have anything to do with emotions. It’s more to do with their identity and how their voice sounds.”

  Sometimes people’s color changes, he says, sipping his coffee. “I had a boyfriend up until a few years ago and the first time we met, I remember thinking he was this bright red. But he had this amazing voice and these blue, almost green, eyes—and those two things, the color of his voice and the color of his eyes, were so distinctive that they mixed and that became his color. It was this pale gray. No one else had that color.”

  THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN COLOR and emotion is well established in the animal kingdom. Female animals often use the color red to signal hormonal changes in their body associated with fertility, for example. Certain male primates show red following a surge of testosterone in their bloodstream, due to aggression or as a show of dominance. Testosterone suppresses the immune system, so the flush of red tells any females that the male must be in good health to cope with such deficits.

  There’s plenty of research suggesting that color affects us, too. Consider this simple yet remarkable social experiment, conducted in 2010 by Daniela Kayser, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, New York. Kayser wondered whether a lady in red really was more alluring, so she and her colleagues asked several men to have a conversation with a woman who was wearing either a red or green shirt. Men who spoke to the woman while she was wearing a red shirt asked her more intimate questions than those who spoke to her while she was wearing green. In another experiment, men sat closer to a woman and classed her as more attractive when she was wearing a red shirt than when she was wearing an identical shirt in other colors.10

  The results certainly fit with our mainstream ideals of red being linked to a woman’s allure, passion and fertility. But men, take note. Over a series of seven experiments, Kayser’s colleague Andrew Elliot demonstrated that women also perceive men to be more attractive, more desirable and considerably more likable when they are wearing red clothing.

  Colors also influence other aspects of our behavior. In humans, aggression and dominance are associated with reddening of the face due to increased blood flow—perhaps that is why we refer to “seeing red” when angered. Evolutionary anthropologists at Durham University and the University of Plymouth wondered whether wearing a red shirt might exploit our innate response to the color red and so influence the outcomes of sporting contests. They studied fifty-five years’ worth of English football league results, and found that teams whose home colors were red won 2 percent more often than teams who wore blue or white, and 3 percent more often than those who wore yellow or orange.11

  In fact, across a range of sports, wearing red is consistently associated with a higher probability of winning. Robert Barton, who worked on the football study, also analyzed the results from four combat sports in the 2004 Olympic Games. Despite the athletes having been randomly assigned red or blue outfits in which to compete, those who wore red won 55 percent of fights.12

  Barton says it’s not completely clear why this happens—whether the color red affects the wearer, the perceiver or the referee. “There is some evidence that wearing red increases feelings of confidence and hormone levels,” he says. There’s also evidence that the color red can affect the judgments of referees, and that people associate the color with dominance, aggression and anger, which might have subtle effects on an opponent’s performance.

  “It’s an interesting question as to why in so many cultures red becomes associated with the same kind of things,” says Barton. “It suggests there is some universality about it—whether that is a direct reflection of an evolutionary heritage or something else that makes red so salient.”

  Despite this uncertainty, it seems that colors do unwittingly affect all of us da
y by day. If Ramachandran’s theory that we have a nonarbitrary, inbuilt relationship between the senses is correct, we might all have the anatomical connections in place to link emotions and colors; it’s just that for most of the time we inhibit these pathways to varying degrees. Perhaps this is why the color red influences our behavior in subtle but provocative ways. At the very least, it might give you a few ideas for what to wear on a first date.13

  * * *

  An accordion player edges nearer to our table, so we decide to make a move. I pay for our coffees as Rubén resumes his tale, recollecting some of the things that happened to him as a child, that in retrospect seem relevant to his synesthesia.

  “I’ve always hated my hands,” he says, holding them up to my face. “They’re like giant baby hands.”

  I suppress a smile. They are very much like giant baby hands—thick stubby fingers on squishy circular palms.

  “The weird thing is that I used my right hand to draw and I was quite good at drawing so I started to like my right hand, but I still hated my left. Whenever I would imagine my hands, I would see the right one as this beefy Conan character and the other one as a little evil character. I’m pretty sure that had something to do with my brain making strong visual representations based on my emotions.”