Synesthesia 

by Amy Baik Lee

At this precise minute, they are a visual symphony: a fresh, grassy green; a deep and regal blue; a piquant shade of yellow-orange. But like a window-facing desk worker who has grown accustomed to the view, through the years I have been dulled to the vibrancy that presents itself to me at nearly every turn. 

I see colors in numbers, you see. And it is 2:07pm. 

I see colors in numbers, but not physically. I’m aware that the clock on my computer is a no-nonsense black — and somehow, at the same time, I am equally aware that the digits have hues.

This is a quirk that goes by the name of “synesthesia,” a phenomenon in which stimulation along one cognitive pathway causes an involuntary impression in another. For some people, music triggers physical sensations upon the skin or tastes in the mouth. Some see units of time, like days of the week or months of the year, as items arranged at a particular distance from their bodies. The number of possible intertwined combinations between the senses, in my opinion, is as astonishing as the fact that they can commingle at all.

In my case, a fairly common version called grapheme-color synesthesia, numbers or letters or words have a distinct but consistent color. For me, 2 and 8 are different shades of green, and 5 is a rich red. 4 and 7 are distinguishable variations of orange. The colors themselves don’t change, but I’ve noticed a number can appear highlighted or faded next to another, the way a blue sweater brings out the color of someone’s eyes. 

I don’t mind having this condition, and I rarely think about it unless prompted by specific situations. Recently, as my daughter and I read through an American History lesson together, I almost mentioned that an easy way to remember 1865 would be to recall that it is “white-green-purple-red.” I caught myself in time. 

Neurologists don’t yet know the causes and mechanisms of synesthesia. Some scientists have believed that childhood activities might “pair” one stimulus with another; others think we’re all born with a multitude of connections between our senses, and that some people have a mutation that preserves some of these connections as they grow. 

For my part, this neural spaghetti has given me a deeper appreciation for other associations the brain can make. I find, for instance, that the overall voice of an essay or story or chapter carries a musical effect for me. The correlation isn’t as direct as the synesthesia — not as if I hear notes upon the air — but I wait for it when I read the closing paragraphs of a work. Sometimes the sound lingers: sometimes it hangs like a suspended or unresolved chord, and sometimes it reverberates in one sweet, echoing, whole note. 

And then — in the works that I love most — there is something more. 

A quality that struck C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien long ago, which they referred to as “northernness,” at times hovers just beyond the circle of my senses. For these two authors, the tang of a certain high, bracingly clear atmosphere stirred them so deeply that for decades they sought to celebrate and pass it on. It awoke a yearning in them that could not be sated here. 

Inklings scholar Sørina Higgins notes that “Lewis loved any work that could provoke this longing, and he strove to evoke it in his own readers, too. J. R. R. Tolkien also packed his writings with longing, with the romantic note, with a wild, sweet, painful yearning for something located off in the west, beyond the seas, beyond the world, that is inaccessible and infinitely desirable.” 

Finding these allusions in their works has given me deep joy; to me, they are confirmation that I am not dealing with a mere figment of the imagination. In the same way that scientists can see the color-perceiving part of the brain light up in synesthetes, the “inconsolable longing,” as Lewis phrased it, has a function and an effect in the soul. More lies before and around and behind me than I can capture in a word, a glance, or a photograph; there is more that draws me to Christ and His humanity and His glory than a doctrinal outline. The unseen influences, battles, and work of our present lives are etching the shape of eternity even now (2 Cor. 4:18). Sometimes I am wholly aware of it; other times, the beauty and the breadth of this wide Story pierce through with startling suddenness. 

Having this “joined perception” of the immediate and the eternal, I’ve found, is both the strangest and most natural thing in the world. Our senses are quickened by the Holy Spirit, even before we know who He is. As we follow our King, we begin to come alive to connections between truths and beauties that have been there all along, but are only just coming into clarity.

Even so, it is far too easy to abandon the things we glimpse for strictly corporeal things. It is easier for me to read the exhortations and commands in Scripture as dry words — easier to believe that disease and disaster and ashes are the endgame rather than valleys of shadow on the way Home. I am more practiced at using my senses to detect symptoms than to observe the wind of the Holy Spirit moving.

But the lesson of using all of our senses in accord with Christ’s truth — even while accepting their jarring fragmentation — is one that I must learn now. Eugene Peterson notes in Reversed Thunder that we are always in danger of reducing the Word of God to ink on a page:

“Marks on paper, via the imagination, make pictures and sounds that involve us as living persons who hear and see and touch in our encounter with reality. In the Revelation [John] exercises all five senses, plus his mind and emotions, prodding the imagination to experience afresh, personally and wholly, what is in danger of being only acknowledged intellectually.” (13-15)

The Word of God became flesh, and dwelt among us. Our senses are not a spiritual encumbrance or defect, filling us with empirical data to be ignored. They are to be used as we perceive that reality is far greater and higher and deeper than we once thought: sight, sound, taste, smell, touch and more meeting in the Kingdom of God. 

Umami, one of the five basic tastes, was only named in the 20th century; the color blue has historically been one of the last colors named in languages across the world. These make me wonder what other beautiful sensations lie before us that we have not yet corporately experienced or acknowledged. 

Meanwhile, the way the golden-hour light cuts through my room in the spring and summer quiets me into waiting before the throne of grace like nothing else can. The grandeur of Holst’s “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” and the plaintive second movement of Dvorak’s Symphony No. 9 — even Thomas Newman’s brief “Valley of the Shadow” — break open and flood through inward gates. These and similar things reopen an ache that helps me continually to hear the Spirit echoing the Word — to see the Kingdom of God encroaching on my doorstep, even as the practicalities and principalities of the world scramble to drown it out. 

The resolution between the things we see and the things that are hidden from our eyes is coming. The day is approaching when at last all things will make sense to our senses, and we who have tasted the goodness of God will have no more bitter gall to mar our delight; we will hear His voice, and not have to beg it to cease; we will touch His wounds, and trace them with the glad wonder born of a long faith; we will see Him without perishing as He wipes tears from our eyes; we will be the aroma of Christ, no longer repelled as the stench of death. 

Then we shall know a mystery that no pathway in my mind can fathom now: the joy of dwelling fully in His presence, and the exhilaration of finding that space to be wilder and wider than we could ever have guessed — when, at long last, the joined perceptions of the Body of Christ come together to grasp the scope of glory.