Dear Readers,
I am sorry to inform you that this issue of the Tea and Crumpets includes sequels to all your favorite silly Tea and Crumpets stories and comics, as well as inspirational quotes and other things that are too unpleasant to discuss.
It is not too late to put this magazine down and pick up a gameboy or TV remote so you do not have to complete the unpleasant task of reading the Tea and Crumpets.
Mary Moberly
Senior Editor of the
Tea and Crumpets
Synesthesia
This article is about synesthesia, a rare mental condition where a person will experience two different sensations when normally they would only experience one. For example, people with synesthesia might associate a certain letter of the alphabet or a specific taste with a certain color. In the article, Shabana Tajwar, a synesthete, is quoted as saying, "I don't see the actual letter (T) as colored. I see the color flash, sort of in my mind's eye". And also, "I see the most brilliant blue after I eat a salty pretzel."
I had heard about synesthesia before reading this article, but I had forgotten what the condition was called. I had learned of it by way of an article about a musician who "saw" colors associated with each note. I thought it was really interesting.
After reading this article "For Some People, Pain is Orange," I showed it to my sister Mary, just because I thought she might find it interesting. But after reading it she said, "Isn't everyone a synesthete?" Eventually we discovered that she was slightly synesthetic, as well as our younger sister. They both associates colors with words and letters of the alphabet, although they do not agree on the colors for specific letters. Mary said that for a long time she thought the word "amber" meant "lavender", because that was the color she associated with the word. In her early teens, she was surprised to learn that amber is a gold color. I asked her if this was because the letter "A" was lavender, but she immediately replied that the letter "A" was associated with a shade of green. Since she had never heard of synesthesia, she assumed that everyone saw letters and words the same way she did.
Whether or not the following story may be related to synesthesia, my sister Mary also mentioned a time when she went to the eye doctor. To begin with, my sister is afraid of things touching her eyes. She gets anxious just thinking about putting in contact lenses, for example. At her appointment, the doctor put some sticky eye drops in her eyes to test for glaucoma. She
says that everything became tinted yellow, and then she fainted.
Ever since that experience, my sister has grown even more afraid of things touching her eyes. I have had the same eye drops put in my eyes several times, and I wear contact lenses, but although both of these ordeals can be uncomfortable, I have never experienced any of the things that my sister did. Her description of what happened to her reminds me of one listed in the article. Carol Steen, a synesthete, "...also feels pain in color. When on vacation in British Columbia two years ago, she jumped down from a rock and tore a ligament. 'All I saw was orange,' she says. 'It was like wearing orange sunglasses.'" Perhaps, instead of associating pain with the color orange, as Steen did, my sister associated the intense fear of having something touch her eye with the color yellow.
I think that the history of synesthesia is very interesting. It shows in a small way how our culture regards those who are different from us, based on how much we know about their way of perceiving. In the article, Richard Cytowic says of synesthesia, "It's gone from complete disbelief to less of a disbelief." For the longest time synesthetes were either regarded as complete liars, or as mentally ill. In the late 19th century, synesthesia became very popular, as famous poets, artists, and composers began to admit that they had it, and that they used it to help them create. Several articles were written on the subject, and scientists attempted to study it. Eventually they gave up because it was difficult to think of a way to test something so subjective. For many years synesthesia was associated, as the article puts it, with "decadent swooning artists, turbaned Spiritualists and, more recently, with LSD-enhanced psychedelic love-ins". Now that scientists have created some ways to test and experiment with synesthetes, people are beginning to think of it as a rare but perfectly normal condition, such as colorblindness. I do not know for sure, but I am almost certain that before colorblindness was discovered and regarded as an actual genetic trait, many colorblind people were seen as idiots who could not distinguish red from green. My brother is colorblind, and when I was little, my dad would have the two of us look at colorblind tests, the kind with the colored dots that show a number. I was really frustrated with the fact that my brother could not see the perfectly obvious number! I also made fun of him for not being able to see the differences between his black, navy, and charcoal suits. He says there is no difference between the three. He had to have my mom write the color of the pants and jacket on each tag so he would match. As we've grown up together I've learned more about they way he sees things, and I think it is interesting, instead of frustrating. Sometimes I wish that I could see what he sees, just so I would know what it's like.