How to Use Synesthesia in Your Writing

Synesthesia is a remarkable sensation: It involves experiencing one sensory stimulus through the prism of a different stimulus. In other words, different senses intersect such that one sense is associated with another—a sound, a shape, a color, a taste, or a smell. Hearing music and seeing colors in your mind is an example of synesthesia. So, too, is using colors to visualize specific numbers or letters of the alphabet.

Scientists do not fully understand synestesia. Some researchers believe it stems from a neurological condition, while others believe that the vast majority of synesthetic sensory perceptions come from learned behavior.

People who routinely experience a form of synesthesia are called synesthetes. Famous synesthetes include:

1. 1. Duke Ellington: The iconic jazz composer experienced chromesthesia, a type of synesthesia where musical notes evoke colors.
2. 2. Franz Liszt: Like Duke Ellington, the Romantic-era Hungarian composer experienced chromesthesia.
3. 3. Vincent Van Gogh: Van Gogh experienced chromesthesia, which is believed to have influenced his painting.
4. 4. Vladimir Nabokov: The great Russian-American novelist experienced grapheme-color synesthesia, where words—and particularly vowel sounds—evoke colors.
5. 5. Arthur Rimbaud: Rimbaud, a French poet in the nineteenth century, experienced grapheme-color synesthesia.
6. 6. Billie Eilish: Eilish is a contemporary pop star who experiences synesthesia when writing music with her brother Finneas, who is also a synesthete.

In literature, synesthesia refers to an author’s blending of human senses to describe an object. Phrases like a “loud dress” or a “chilly gaze” blend our sensory modalities. Novelists and poets who use synesthesia in literature include:

1. 1. Dante in The Divine Comedy (1472): “Back to the region where the sun is silent.”
2. 2. John Keats in "Ode to a Nightingale" (1819): “Tasting of Flora and the country green”
3. 3. Robert Frost in “Fire and Ice” (1920): “From what I've tasted of desire”
4. 4. William Shakespeare in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1605): “The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man's hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was.”
5. 5. Oscar Wilde in Salomé (1891): “Thy voice was a censer that scattered strange perfumes, and when I looked on thee I heard a strange music.”

You can incorporate the use of synesthesia as a rhetorical device in your own writing. If you can blend two of the five senses—sight, hearing, touch, taste, smell—together in a phrase or a sentence, then you’ll be able to describe common forms of synesthetic perceptions. Here are some ways to do that:

• Use colors to describe sounds. If you’re describing sad, sorrowful music, why not call it “blue”? If it’s perky, perhaps call it “pink.” If it’s dour, call it “black.” Or be like Oscar Wilde in An Ideal Husband and call it “mauve.”
• Use temperature to describe sounds or images. Temperature-based synesthesia examples include “a scorching guitar solo,” “an icy gaze,” and “lukewarm wallpaper.”
• Use sensory words to describe emotions. Take a cue from romantic poetry and use all five senses to describe the feelings of love and desire.
• Include synesthetic characters in your narrative. Write a character who experiences synesthesia as they consume art. Describe that person listening to music and synesthetic sensation of colors that swoops over them as each note is sounded. Or reverse the effect, and have a character experience synesthesia by hearing music as they take in the wonders of a large painting on a museum wall.
• Use synesthetic idioms already familiar to your audience. For instance, think about the phrase “bitter cold.” Bitterness is a taste sensation. Cold is, of course, a touch sensation. Combined, these two sensations form an idiomatic term that makes perfect sense to the English language ear.

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