Synesthesia

At a graduate seminar many years ago, a fellow student named David Stoltenberg proposed a theory that said that the simple act of reading is a “cross-sensory” event in the brain ..he even had a name for it ..“sensory synesthesia” ..which he described as “perceiving the sound of a color ..or the light of a sigh.” He was giving a multi-media presentation to demonstrate this idea ..but it didn’t turn out the way he planned ..the projectors malfunctioned ..the main point got lost ..and what I was able to get out of it left me feeling unconvinced ..it sounded too much like science fiction. When I think back, I realize I owe Dave a big apology ..and a pound of red Lebanese ..he was right ..you have to be able to “hear” what you “see” in order “understand” what you “read” ..because reading is such a recent invention – it’s only been around for 6,000 years – it never got a chance to really establish a place of it’s own in the brain ..unlike speech recognition which has evolved it’s own specialized center. Consequently, the written word has to be translated into the way it sounds first ..and then transfered to the speech recognition center in order to get the meaning ..because, in memory, word meaning is stored by the way it sounds ..not by the way it looks. That’s the reason why we teach dyslexics how to read by exercising their auditory system.