At the World Science Festival, neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran
talked about synesthetes—people who experience one sense as another (in other
words, they can hear colors, or visualize sounds).
Writers use this to create metaphors and he said that synesthesia is eight times more
common among poets, artists and novelists than the general population.
In a blog post on Wired Science, Brandon Keim wrote briefly about the lecture, saying that Ramachandran showed two shapes and asked the audience which one they’d name Kiki and which one Booba. Most people identified the first name with the spikey shape and the latter with the smoother rounded shape. The article says, “To most of us, the jaggedness of the shape on the right corresponds to the abruptness of the phonemes in kiki, while the shape on the left resonates with the rolling vowels of booba.”
I must be low on this scale because I don’t find it so easy to come up with synesthetic metaphors—or maybe it’s just that years of writing scripts (a genre in which such description is discouraged) has trained me not to do it. I’m trying to change that in the novel I’m working on at the moment. One trick I’m finding useful is a simple child’s game—asking if this (whatever I want to describe) were a color, what would it be? What animal? What sound? What emotion? What physical action? The first answer usually isn’t ready to use but sometimes it starts a train of thought that leads to a metaphor that isn’t to extreme or corny. If this is a challenge for you as well, you might want to try it.
