“Pray continue.”
“Soon after the accident someone found your book Phantoms in the Brain lying on my client’s coffee table. He admitted to reading it, which is when he realized he might have the Capgras syndrome. But this bit of self-diagnosis didn’t help him in any way. The symptoms remained just the same. So he and I want to sue the other party for a million dollars for having produced this permanent neurological symptom. He fears he may even end up divorcing his wife.
“The trouble is, Dr. Ramachandran, the other attorney is claiming that my client has simply fabricated the whole thing after reading your book. Because if you think about it, it’s very easy to fake the Capgras syndrome. Mr. Dobbs and I would like to fly you out to London so you can administer the GSR test and prove to the court that he does indeed have the Capgras syndrome, that he isn’t malingering. I understand you cannot fake this test.”
The attorney had done his homework. But I had no intention of flying to London just to administer this test.
“Mr. Watson, what’s the problem? If Mr. Dobbs finds that his wife looks like a new woman every time he sees her, he should find her perpetually attractive. This is a good thing—not bad at all. We should all be so lucky!” My only excuse for this tasteless joke is that I was still only barely awake.
There was a long pause at the other end and a click as he hung up on me. I never heard from him again. My sense of humor is not always well received.
Even though my remark may have sounded frivolous, it wasn’t entirely off the mark. There’s a well-known psychological phenomenon called the Coolidge effect, named after President Calvin Coolidge. It’s based on a little-known experiment performed by rat psychologists decades ago. Start with a sex-deprived male rat in a cage. Put a female rat in the cage. The male mounts the female, consummating the relationship several times until he collapses from sheer sexual exhaustion. Or so it would seem. The fun begins if you now introduce a new female into the cage. He gets going again and performs several times until he is once again thoroughly exhausted. Now introduce a third new female rat, and our apparently exhausted male rat starts all over again. This voyeuristic experiment is a striking demonstration of the potent effect of novelty on sexual attraction and performance. I have often wondered whether the effect is also true for female rats courting males, but to my knowledge that hasn’t been tried—probably because for many years most psychologists were men.
The story is told that President Coolidge and his wife were on a state visit to Oklahoma, and they were invited to a chicken coop—apparently one of their major tourist attractions. The president had to first give a speech, but since Mrs. Coolidge had already heard the speech many times she decided to go to the coop an hour earlier. She was being shown around by the farmer. She was surprised to see that the coop had dozens of hens but only one majestic rooster. When she asked the guide about this, he replied, “Well, he is a fine rooster. He goes on and on all night and day servicing the hens.”
“All night?” said Mrs. Coolidge. “Will you do me a big favor? When the president gets here, tell him in exactly the same words—what you just told me.”
An hour later when the president showed up, the farmer repeated the story.
The president asked, “Tell me something: Does the rooster go on all night with the same hen or different hens?”
“Why, different hens of course,” replied the farmer.
“Well, do me a favor,” said the president. “Tell the First Lady what you just told me.”
This story may be apocryphal, but it does raise a fascinating question. Would a patient with Capgras syndrome never get bored with his wife? Would she remain perpetually novel and attractive? If the syndrome could somehow be evoked temporarily with transcranial magnetic stimulation…one could make a fortune.
CHAPTER 3
Loud Colors and Hot Babes: Synesthesia
“My life is spent in one long effort to escape from the commonplaces of existence. These little problems help me to do so.”
—SHERLOCK HOLMES
WHENEVER FRANCESCA CLOSES HER EYES AND TOUCHES A PARTICULAR texture, she experiences a vivid emotion: Denim, extreme sadness. Silk, peace and calm. Orange peel, shock. Wax, embarrassment. She sometimes feels subtle nuances of emotions. Grade 60 sandpaper produces guilt, and grade 120 evokes “the feeling of telling a white lie.”
Mirabelle, on the other hand, experiences colors every time she sees numbers, even though they are typed in black ink. When recalling a phone number she conjures up a spectrum of the colors corresponding to the numbers in her mind’s eye and proceeds to read off the numbers one by one, deducing them from the colors. This makes it easy to memorize phone numbers.
When Esmeralda hears a C-sharp played on the piano, she sees blue. Other notes evoke other distinct colors—so much so that different piano keys are actually color coded for her, making it easier to remember and play musical scales.
These women are not crazy, nor are they suffering from a neurological disorder. They and millions of otherwise normal people have synesthesia, a surreal blending of sensation, perception, and emotion. Synesthetes (as such people are called) experience the ordinary world in extraordinary ways, seeming to inhabit a strange no-man’s-land between reality and fantasy. They taste colors, see sounds, hear shapes, or touch emotions in myriad combinations.
When my lab colleagues and I first came across synesthesia in 1997, we didn’t know what to make of it. But in the years since, it has proven to be an unexpected key for unlocking the mysteries of what makes us distinctly human. It turns out this little quirky phenomenon not only sheds light on normal sensory processing, but it takes us on a meandering path to confront some of the most intriguing aspects of our minds—such as abstract thinking and metaphor. It may illuminate attributes of human brain architecture and genetics that might underlie important aspects of creativity and imagination.
When I embarked on this journey nearly twelve years ago, I had four goals in mind. First, to show that synesthesia is reaclass="underline" These people aren’t just making it up. Second, to propose a theory of exactly what is going on in their brains that sets them apart from nonsynesthetes. Third, to explore the genetics of the condition. And fourth, and most important, to explore the possibility that, far from being a mere curiosity, synesthesia may give us valuable clues to understanding some of the most mysterious aspects of the human mind—abilities such as language, creativity, and abstract thought that come to us so effortlessly that we take them for granted. Finally, as an additional bonus, synesthesia may also shed light on age-old philosophical questions of qualia—the ineffable raw qualities of experience—and consciousness.
Overall I am happy with the way our research has proceeded since then. We have come up with partial answers to all four questions. More important, we have galvanized an unprecedented interest in this phenomenon; there is now virtually a synesthesia industry, with over a dozen books published on the topic.
WE DON’T KNOW when synesthesia was first recognized as a human trait, but there are hints that Isaac Newton could have experienced it. Aware that the pitch of a sound depends on its wavelength, Newton invented a toy—a musical keyboard—that flashed up different colors on a screen for different notes. Thus every song was accompanied by a kaleidoscopic display of colors. One wonders if sound-color synesthesia inspired his invention. Could a mixing of senses in his brain have provided the original impetus for his wavelength theory of color? (Newton proved that white light is composed of a mixture of colors which can be separated by a prism, with each color corresponding to a particular wavelength of light.)