Almost everyone is familiar with the expression “1 see what you’re saying,” but for a few rare individuals—synaesthetes— this metaphor is quite literally true.

Synaesthesia. It’s the futique cognitive superfunction latent in us all. Literally it means “union of the senses.” Synaesthetes can smell colors, see sounds, taste shapes.

In fact, any sensory modality can translate into any other: sight, sound, hearing, taste, touch. There are bimodal, trimodal and polymodal synaesthetes. The perfect example would be a 5–point synaesthete, where all the senses converge simultaneously.

It’s a clinically rare phenomenon today, amounting to perhaps one in 25,000. But it goes back to the primordial ooze, to our most primary sensory wiring predating the late-stage evolutionary hypertrophy of the neo-cortex.

Until now it was known, to most of us, as one of the more treasured effects of the psychedelic experience. Few people realized that there were synaesthetes among us who tasted sunshine every day. But synaesthetes are now coming out of the closet.

And they’re in good company. Rimbaud, Messiaen, Nabokov, Kandinsky, Fischinger are just a few of the more spectacular synaesthetes. For over 200 years, synaesthesia has been one of the most enigmatic phenomena in medical psychology. Sir Isaac Newton attempted a mathematical correlation of sound and color. Scriabin mapped individual musical keys onto certain colors and his score for Prometheus: The Poem of Fire featured a staff for a clavier à lumières.

Messiaen, who likened his color composing to painting, is one of the supreme examples. Something of the ecstatic richness of his universe can be sensed from the following quotation:

“My secret desire of enchanted gorgeousness and harmony has pushed me toward those swords of fire, those sudden stars, those flows of blue-orange lavas, those planets of turquoise, those violet shades, those garnets of long-haired arborescence, those wheelings of sounds and colors in a jumble of rainbows of which I have spoken with love.., such a gushing out of chords.., the sacred instinct of the natural and true harmony...”

Scriabin’s ambitious masterwork Mysterium was never completed. It was planned as “a liturgical enactment in which music, poetry, dance, colored light and scent were to unite, inducing worshippers to a supreme, final ecstasy.” The “supreme final ecstasy” seems to be where we are heading with multimedia technology. Could our species drive toward multimedia come from an urge to achieve the unified perception of the synaesthete?

Cytowic speaks of synaesthetes as “cognitive fossils” and speculates that synaesthesia “is a very fundamental mammalian attribute” that is “actually a normal brain function in every one of us, but that its workings reach conscious awareness in only a handful”—or by an accident of physiology.

It is tempting to invoke neoteny at this point, the notion that we are evolving toward the point where the snake bites its tail, where the overdeveloped cortex meets primal synaesthetic awareness.

Richard E. Cytowic, M.D. is not uncomfortable with these questions, having long cultivated a taste for the unusual. He had orthodox training in neurology and ophthalmology before he came upon A.S. Luria’s book The Mind of a Mnemonist, the classic account of a Russian performer of memory feats who also exhibited a high degree of synaesthesia. This led to ten years of intermittent research and the publication of Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses (Springer-Verlag, 1989). His new book, from Tarcher/Putnam, is The Man Who Tasted Shapes, with the piquant subtitle of “A Bizarre Medical Mystery Offers Revolutionary Insights into Emotions, Reasoning and Consciousness.”

Still and all, I wasn’t prepared for the apparition that flowed into the North Beach Restaurant, hot off the podium from the AAAS. The black Mesmer cape, monocle, and handiness with menu Italian combined to suggest the true epicure of experience.

—Jas. Morgan

MONDO 2000: In general terms, what is synaesthesia?

RICHARD E. CYTOWIC: Well, you know the word anaesthesia? It means no sensation.” Synaesthesia shares the same root and means “joined sensation.” So synaesthetes experience things like “pointy tastes,” “blue smells,” and “green-wavy sounds.” This is involuntary. It’s not imagination—it’s an external sensation.

It runs in families. It tends to be more common in women. There’s a high incidence of left-handedness among synaesthetes. Their cognitive skills are uneven, but generally they’re extremely bright people who have excellent memories.

Children learn to keep the experience hidden and private. They learn early on that any mention of it prompts ridicule and disbelief.

No matter what kind of synaesthesia the person has, the stories are remarkably the same. That they’ve had it as far back as they can remember. And pairings of the senses remain the same over a lifetime, so if a given sound is “blue” then it’s always “blue.”

M2: What’s the underlying neurological model?

REC: The common view of how the brain works is that our brain is something like a receiver of the energy flux that bombards us. The evolutionarily later part of the brain, the neo-cortex, is what was thought to be dominant. All experience was believed to have some sort of localization in the cortex. The problem is that something like synaesthesia cannot be explained by that model.

In its heyday, which was probably between 1860 and 1920, synaesthesia was written about and talked about in many different areas—in the arts, literature, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, Theosophy. It remains unexplained not for lack of trying, but because the sciences of psychology and

neurology were premature. And just as theories began to get interesting, that is recognizably modern, Behaviorism came along with its draconian restrictions against the unknowable, any kind of inner experience and, most of all, consciousness. These were taboo. So you ended up with things like B.F. Skinner’s stimulus response, saying: “A person is a black box. We don’t care what they think, what they feel. All we do is observe the external behavior.”

And he ended up, you know, putting his daughter in one of his Skinner boxes.

Well, now the pendulum has swung back When I stumbled across synaesthesia by accident, the standard model of the brain was insufficient to explain it because there is no area where all the five senses converge in the cortex. At most there’s only three faculties— sight, hearing, and touch—that come together in what’s called the parietal association area. And here I had a man whose sense of taste, smell, and touch joined.

M2: So what model do you favor at this point?

REC: Well, the hot-off-the-press one is what’s called the multiplex model. It really turns our common assumptions upside-down and inside-out. First of all, perception is not linear. Information is transferred not only in the brain but throughout the entire body in many more ways than just the “long wiring” of axon and synapse that is familiar from the traditional models.

M2: What are these ways?

REC: Well, they are generally called volume transmission. If you think of the hard-wiring axons and synapses as a train going down a track, then volume transmission is the train leaving the track. Most of these are hormonal and small-molecule messengers—the juices that surround the hard-wiring and modulate it. There are now over a hundred and fifty of these chemical messengers known and new ones are being discovered every year.

What this says is that information is transferred in the nervous system by more ways and at more speeds than we’d hitherto realized—slow being the diffusion of peptides in cerebrospinal fluid at millimeters per hour, whereas in axonal fluid you have transfer rates of a hundred and twenty meters a second—a phenomenal range for information transfer.

Part of the multiplex model revises our understanding of how information flows through traditionally recognized “structures” or “entities” of the brain. They’re by no means one-way streets as we had thought a while back. They’re reciprocal connections that go back and forth and branch out from one locale to many others— anywhere from ten to thirty.

You know, a fraditional pastime of neurologists is to localize where functions are—like, language is located in the left hemisphere of most right-handed people. Neurological real estate, if you will. Now, in the case of something like vision, we now know that there are nearly two dozen discrete areas for vision in humans. And each area has to do with a certain aspect of seeing. So, knowing that there is something to be seen at this one place, what it is you’re seeing goes elsewhere, its shape goes someplace else, and whatever it takes to determine the color is farmed out in yet a different part.

What this means is that perception is like a gem with many facets. And these facets can detach and take on lives of their own. So I guess the most important thing about the new model is the primacy of emotions and limbic processing.

The limbic brain is evolutionarily older. It’s the ring of tissue that circles the brainstem where the hemispheres come together and resides underneath the cortex. And it has to do with emotions, memory, and attention. And instead of being subservient to the cortex, it turns out that there are more connections going from the limbic system to the cortex than the other way around.

M2: What are the current mysteries? What aspects does the standard model fail to explain?

REC: A big problem is what’s called “binding.” Cognitive scientists who believe the mind is modular think binding is related to synaesthesia. It’s: how do we bind all of these facets together so that I have the linear shape of my pen, and its purple color here, and the metal of the clip and all that, stored with a memory and the semantic idea of what a pen is, what it’s for, and all that? And then if I move or the light changes, the problem needs to be recalculated moment to moment. That’s a problem that’s bothering a lot of cognitive scientists now because they’ve made a model of the mind that’s based on the idea of “chips” or modules of function, and now they are faced with the problem of assembling it all back together. If you go with the multiplex model, it’s not a problem because perception is holistic to begin with. And of course consciousness, the nature of consciousness, what is it? Everyone’s interested in that now.

M2: Are you familiar with McLuhan’s notions on the human sensorium and how phonetic language made a shift in what we now think of as consciousness?

REC: Well, yeah. These are ideas of ontological progression from primitive to more refined or more differentiated ways of receiving. But you see, the lesson, as far as synaesthesia is concerned, is that perception is holistic to begin with. Our brains are not passive receivers just sitting there saying “Oh, here comes a smell. Here come some wavelengths.” They are active explorers seeking out the stimuli that interest them. Perception does not come from the outside in. It comes from the inside out.

And this is a scientific or neurologic explanation for why some people see the world differently. We usually call such people artists, and poets, and maybe even politicians. When you think historically, artists—even those who have been abandoned and despised and ridiculed—persisted with their vision because that’s all they can do, their vision.

M2: Do you think it could be that certain “castes” of people are neurologically wired for specific cultural/evolutionary functions? Politicians, artists, philosophers...?

REC: Well, all brains are unique, and it wasn’t too long ago that we said dogmatically that they’re all alike, and not only are they all alike, but the right and left sides are mirror images of each other. In 1968 Norman Geschwind and Walter Levitsky showed that, yes, there are differences, and they’re not subtle. You can measure them with rulers. And it’s just that people hadn’t looked before.

These different talents and perceptual abilities have to do with deviations from the standard pattern of cerebral dominance. The standard pattern of cerebral dominance is that a female brain Well, we all start out as females, and then under the influence of testosterone, principally, some of us become males. Female brains develop faster than male brains, and the right hemisphere develops before the left hemisphere. And there’s a pattern of parcelation, or doling out, of intellectual talents—language and handedness in the left hemisphere in most people, and so forth

Anything that delays the maturation of the left hemisphere is going to cause a non-standard pattern of dominance. Again, certain talents segregate together. So, for example, you have left-handed men who excel in spatial abilities: architects, gymnasts, athletes who do things like shot-putting and the high bars... Many male architects, you’ll see, are left-handed. And this is, I think, how some brains get to be synaesthetic. It’s that it’s the same sort of process.

M2: Have you found a higher incidence of synaesthesia in the gay community?

REC: Why do you ask?

M2: Well, it seemed a reasonable inference.

REC: I don’t see the inference at all, but it is an empirical observation that over 10% of synaesthetes are gay or lesbian. We’ve heard a lot recently about the “gay gene” and anatomical differences in the brain between sexes. The concept of cerebral dominance and multiple specialization is just a scientific way of confirming the observation that each one of us is unique. Each brain is unique. In the elimination of superfluous neurons and their competition to claim synaptic targets—a process that begins in utero and continues well into childhood—both heredity and environment sculpt a brain that is uniquely configured and thus uniquely talented. In addition to fine-tuning the hard wiring of course are the modulating effect of the “juices” that I spoke of regarding volume transmission.

M2: Why is it that synaesthesia is more common in women?

REC: Well, that’s just an empirical observation, for starters. I’m somewhat hesitant to say that I don’t know. But any explanation I give you is going to be speculative.

M2: Well, how about a wild, speculative...

REC: Well, I’m just coming to that! I think it has to do with anomalous patterns of cerebral dominance. That the sex differentials associated with difficulties in math and spatial ability suggest that there is something affecting women that—I hate to use the word “disrupt” because I don’t want this to sound like it’s pathological—but that alters the standard pattern of cerebral dominance. So that, for whatever reason that we don’t know yet, it happens in women more often than it does in men.

M2: Like Howard Gardner speaks of kinaesthesia as a form of intelligence, could you see synaesthesia as a form of intelligence?

REC: Well, it’s sort of the root from which all perception springs. It’s not a unique kind of intelligence. It is the seed from which all perception grows. The senses are bound like a five-layer cake, and we take a slice, each sense samples every event, if only just a little. And as perception unfolds from within our brains out into the world, it parcelates out into the individual senses. Just like the trunk that grows from the seed starts forming branches.

Maybe that’s too radical for most people. I think part of it has to do with the sheer number of psychologists and cognitive scientists without any biological background who believe that the mind and the brain are a computer. See, I don’t believe that. I think that’s a very bankrupt way of looking at life.

M2: I’d say many Mondoids subscribe to the computer model of the brain. How would you describe this bankruptcy?

REC: See, when you artificially isolate elements of a model which then become reified as real entities, hypothetical models of the mind seen as computer “chips”... With the computer metaphor you have the illusion of control over parameters of a behavior if you simulate it on a computer. And it gives you a false feeling that you’re doing science ‘cause you’ve got abstraction, prediction, you’ve got hard numbers, okay?

But even cognitive science itself is a misnomer, even if you call it cognitive psychology. The formal term suggests that there is a science of cognition. But there isn’t. So-called cognitive science makes box diagrams, connects them with arrows, and then calls this the process of cognition! I mean, you think that making a model of a process is a process model, but it isn’t. Heuristics, you know.

See this is the distinction between the deficit of the experimental approach of people who are studying deficits. Cognitive science says ‘What can’t the person do? And now we’re going to probe this.” Whereas the people who are clinically-based are interested in symptoms. And what is a symptom? Well, a symptom is a positive expression, whereas a deficit is a negative absence. A symptom or an error is a premature display of a normal process. And this is what synaesthesia is. It’s a premature glimpse of a normal cognitive process in which perception is holistic. And it may be that in the clinical approach, which is usually looked down on by the experimentalists, it may be that that itself is more hermeneutic that scientific.

The cognitive mind, which people think is the computer in the head that’s running things, is like the Wizard of Oz, the apparition out there, whereas your inner knowledge of the limbic system is what’s behind the curtain pulling the levers. And your inner knowledge behind-the-curtain knows you better than any external agent ever could. Which includes the doctor who says “There’s nothing wrong with you” and the politician who knows what’s best for you. You know, Hillary and all that... I mean, they’re going to make all of our choices for us, see? Because they’re the experts. And so, you know, spouses who think they know how you should live your life...

Reason is just the endless paperwork of the mind. It’s experience which first comes through the limbic system. And is what’s more valid. Now, allowing our experience to be what it is does not prohibit us from overlaying it with rational considerations. But it’s important to realize that it’s the emotional part that comes first. Then afterwards we can talk about it all we want.

M2: This talk reminds me of your tine that “Synaesthesia is the antidote for the overly intellectual.”

REC: [laughter] Well, I think that was Clark’s [Reverend Clark A. Thompson] comment about meditation— that sitting in front of a blank wall with your eyes open was the antidote to analysis. In a way, synaesthesia is because it’s an experience. Whereas the neo-cortex, the rational mind, is concerned about meaning. What is the meaning of a flower?

M2: People, because of the cultural taboos, hide their synaesthetic capabilities in the closet...

REC: Well, now they’re out of the closet!

M2: Tell me about this coming out.

REC: It’s a catharsis. Sometimes to the point of tears. “Ohmigod, I didn’t know there was a name for this. I thought I was the only one in the world.” The taboo has to do with “the Editor”—the external one that says “Oh, I can’t do this.” It’s the taboo against inner knowledge.

M2: For somebody reading this interview who recognizes synaesthetic capabilities in themselves—what would you say to them?

REC: Enjoy it! You’re very lucky to be in touch with a process that is so fundamental—and fundamental not just to what it means to be human, but to be mammalian. And above all, trust your experience. M2: What about the effects of drugs and synaesthesia? Let’s start with psychedelics. I’d say that a fair number of our readership... has tried ‘em out.

M2: Now, do you draw a distinction between drug-induced synaesthesia and idopathic synaesthesia?

REC: Of course it’s induced as opposed to just happening by itself, so they are different, but they’re qualitatively cut from the same cloth. Heinrich Klüver, going back to the thirties at the University of Chicago, showed that LSD, peyote, mescal, in particular those that seem to block the flow of serotonin, will sometimes induce synaesthesia. And then other things like temporal lobe epilepsy or sensory deprivation can do it. You know, if you’re in a tranquility tank...

M2: John Lilly’s invention?

REC: Right. John Lilly’s type of thing will do it. And so will going blind or deaf, but that’s an unpleasant way to have it. Those few synaesthetes I know who have taken LSD have an experience that is not the same as their own synaesthesia. Michael Watson seemed to be extremely sensitive to LSD, and he didn’t like it, frankly.

Physiologically, synaesthete’s brains are different. I mean, we’ve got the high-tech “objective” proof to show it. That work has been replicated recently by a group in London with PET scans. And they show the same thing I showed earlier—that the cortex turns off and the limbic brain lights up.

M2: What about the effects of other drugs?

REC: Well, anything that stimulates your cortex seems to dampen or reduce the experience of synaesthesia. So, caffeine, nicotine~ amphetamines, all the uppers will do that. Anti-epileptics tend to do that as well. And things that depress the cortex—alcohol being the obvious one—intensify synaesthesia. It’s kind of hard to find over-the-counter stuff that is helpful.

M2: What about under-the-counter?

REC: Well, aside from LSD and peyote, hashish is the one that leaps to mind. Particularly the more potent forms like the green paste in Le Club des Haschischins.

M2: Oh, I love that one. But they’re practically swinging from the chandeliers. Are there non-drug methods for those unwilling to sign a chemical contract?

REC: I think that for people who’d want to try to have such an experience, the first step would be some sort of meditative practice. Some practice that shuts up the inner dialogue, the yakety-yak of the analytical mind. And, as excited as people are about wanting to have a synaesthetic experience, once you’ve had one—well, you’ve had it. It’s really the implications of synaesthesia that are exciting.

M2: How would you describe your own experiences?

REC: Well, it occurs during meditation. When it does happen what I tend to see is a great blue-purple geode in front of me. Like an amethyst crystal that rotates and scintillates. And it comes and goes.

M2: Is there a specific method of meditation that you use?

REC: It’s called Söto Zen. North of you on Mount Shasta is Shasta Abbey, which is the American Headquarters for the Sötö Zen Church. The Abbess is a fabulous Englishwoman who was the first foreigner and the first woman to be ordained at the imperial Söji-ji Temple in Japan. Söto Zen means “serene reflection.” So unlike Renzai Zen that most people know involves these koans, these mental gymnastics, theirs is to “neither think nor try not to think.” You sit in front of a blank wall with your eyes open and stop deliberate thinking. So in a way it’s like sitting under a bridge letting the cars go over you. And those cars are like your thoughts and you just let them go.

All sorts of things happen during that stage, particularly for beginners. The Buddhists call that makyo, which basically means “distraction.” So you feel hot and cold, you feel like you’re falling over, you hear things, you see things, you get creepy sensations up your flesh, your vision goes in and out. People who take this as a sign of great spiritual progress get stuck there.

M2: I heard Kandinsky was a big influence on you...

REC: Oh yes! You have to read On the Spiritual In Art.

M2: Was he a synaesthete?

REC: I don’t know. He doesn’t come out and say it point-blank. But he did step off the path of representational art. And it wasn’t for him some “Gee, well let’s try this!” It was a response to feelings that he had. This union, this sensory fusion. For Kandinsky, I think, it was phenomenal rather than an idea of that Zeitgeist. And he talked about his paintings as compositions, and he also referred to them in musical terms. He wrote that one-act opera, Der Gelbe Klang, (“The Yellow Sound”).

So Kandinsky, I think, is probably one of the grandfathers of this movement. He and I are saying similar things. Stop this neocortical computer, this reasoning machine from cranking out this endless paperwork. Reason has nothing to do with painting.

Now, what is unfortunate is when you confuse synaesthesia with a deliberate contrivance of sensory fusion that’s based on the abstract idea of sensory fusion. Because they’re two different things.

Now the other painters—I really don’t know any from Kandinsky until you get to Hockney, whom I know personally.

M2: Tell me how you met.

REC: Well, David, he is so sweet. He’s brilliant. He was big news because he was painting the opera sets at the Met. And everybody was saying how totally fabulous they were, and how totally different from his painting style that everybody had been familiar with. And in these interviews I’d read, he was talking about the fact that the music had certain shape and color. So I wrote to him.

Five or six months went by, and I finally got back a hand-written letter on a yellow legal pad in red ink which said: “I’ve been carrying your letter around with me for months wondering whether to answer or not. Would it tell me anything that I really want to know or would it be better not to know? I’ve never heard of synaesthesia. At first I thought you were just trying to scientifically analyze what I always thought of as artistic. But, anyway, curiosity has the better of me so let’s get together and talk about this.” So we did. I went to Los Angeles and spent two days with him, a highlight of which, for me, was swimming nude in his pool. His famous pool painted with those blue marks. So I thought “Oh, boy! I’m in David Hockney’s wavey pool.”

So that’s how we met. We did some experiments there, and sure enough he was genuine. And for him it’s the melody, it is the sequence of things that gives him the impression of size, shape, color, and form as well. I often like to contrast Olivier Messiaen with David Hockney because of their approaches. The way synaesthesia influences their art is almost polar.

M2: How is that?

REC: Olivier Messiaen, who just died a couple years ago, is world famous. His music is instantly recognizable. The gongs, tom toms, bells with their harmonic halos. His synaesthesia, actually, works both ways. When he hears music he sees colors and when he sees interesting colors he hears music. So when he went to Bryce Canyon, Utah for a commission to do Aux Canyons Aux Etoiles. He said he went to Bryce Canyon and “My eyes just went up the canyon wall looking at all those fantastic shapes of the wind-carved rocks and the ochres and the oranges and the orange-reds in the rocks... And the music just wrote itself.”

Anyway, back in the 40’s, Messiaen was trying very much to convey in music these colors and found out that the usual ways of composing and representing sounds were not adequate. So he invented a system called the “Modes of Limited Transposition” which is all explained in his book Technique demon Language Musicale. And this is why his music sounds so weird but everybody likes it. It was a way to directly translate what these colors were, for him.

Now Hockney. When I met with Hockney in 1981 he said “You know, I never thought there was anything unusual about this.” Of course he’d never been asked to paint to music before, you see? It was the first time that anybody asked him to paint to something that was going to be shown to music. So he would say things like—you know, the Stravinsky opera Rossignol—he says “The first thing that hits you is that it’s all blue. And it’s infinite varieties of blue, but it’s all blue. And it’s also transparent.” So he gets images like moonlight and water and all that. So he ended up, basically using a motif of those blue porcelain china plates. The very early Chinese ones.

So becoming more aware of his own synaesthesia led him, I think, to explore the nature of space—what is it that we see when look at something? And so you get the photo collages.

After he began being aware of the nuance of color and shape, he went on to insist on and invented that miniature stage where he could control all the lighting while he painted his sketches. Because the way you lit them made a difference as well. And then I guess he did the Los Angeles Tristan und Isolde where he experimented with three dimensional scenery. He said he was interested in “space that you walk around the corners of.” Rather than the single, one-point perspective of the Renaissance, where Canaletto is the main example.

So, Hockney did not try to reproduce or codify his synaesthesia. It was just another building block for him that stimulated his mind. Another way to convey something. And he speaks in visual terms whereas Messiaen says it in musical terms. And both of them are emotional. I mean, you can’t stand in front of his “Pear Blossom Highway” photomontage and not just be all “Wow!” So there are two very different approaches.

M2: What about Alexander Scriabin?

REC: Scriabin is often cites as a main example, but digging down, you realize he isn’t synesthetic at all. He plagiarized the note–color associations from Madame Blavatzky. His music is an example of contrived colored music. Scriabin was very much taken with mysticism and Theosophy, and the whole idea of sensory fusion. That was the zeitgeist of the time, I think. Scriabin provided his own little correspondence code. Have you ever looked at the original score for Prometheus: The Poem of Fire?

M2: Isn’t that in the Springer book?

REC: Then you know that the first line of the staff of the score is a part for a claviere a luniières, the light organ. He had a light organ built by the General Electric Company for Carnegie Hall. The purpose was to project beams and clouds of light above the orchestra to go in time with the music. Its part was notated in the score. And all of this was to culminate in a white light that was so intense as to actually be “painful to the eyes.

M2: Have you seen the journal Experimental Musical Instruments? They feature all sorts of things from historical pieces on the genesis of synthesizers to people who make lyres out of toilet seats.

REC: They talk about the Theremin and the Ondes Martenot?

M2: Of course! And occasionally they’ll be a feature on something like a color organ, or a smell organ... Do you know of any other interesting attempts at synaesthetic musical instruments?

REC: Oh yes, yes. And they go way back. Most of them are built around the theme of the color organ or the color keyboard. Now the clavecin oculaire goes back to the mid-seventeen hundreds. Monks built this thing—the idea where you would push the key and it would open up a shutter and you had these color candles with glass that project a colored light.

Charles Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, built one about 1810—in his case he used a harpsichord. And then by the time that Scriabin came around in 1905 or so, you had these electric apparatuses that just “played the light.” Rather than the light and the sound, they had an orchestra for the sound. This whole post-Wagnerian idea of sensory fusion... You know, we had “The Yellow Sound” by Kandinsky and Thomas De Hartmann in which the music was to parallel the emotions of the singers who were telling the story. And then other pieces would have incense and smell. I mean we did the same thing back in the sixties with Odorama movies... Remember that John Waters film with Divine and Tab Hunter?

M2: Polyester.

REC: They would give out special scratch-and-sniff cards in the lobby!

M2: That makes me think of the original attempt at virtual reality back in the very early sixties. There was a guy named Morton Heilig who invented an arcade game-like machine, the Sensorama Simulator, that you would step into. Big molded plastic...

REC: And become part of it.

M2: Right. You would look through a stereoscopic viewer that would put you in the position of being a motorcyclist riding through Manhattan, and as you would “ride” you’d get binaural sound, breezes, odor, vibrating knobs and seat...

REC: Like those early IMAX films from the World’s Fair in 1962 or 1963.

M2: I have a theory that the integration of electronic technologies is creating a change in people’s nervous systems. The way they cognize, the way they think about things. The word processor is a good example. Do you think these trends might encourage the synaesthetic faculty?

REC: What an interesting question. The technology, the tools that we have, change our concept of the world. And eventually we come to see tools as prosthetic extensions of ourselves. Any tool is turning nature into your service, okay? If you reject your own direct experience and believe that all the answers come from the machine, then I think you might as well be dead. Because you’ve just abdicated your own psyche.

But, if you repaint your experience, and say, “I am the center, the technology is the surround... I am the huh of the wheel.” Technology is, like cool!—they are my sorcerers, and my apprentices. Then who knows? We cannot predict where technology will take us.