[HPFGU-OTChatter] Re: Synesthesia (Was: Oliver Sacks / Brain peculiarities )

[Horst or Rebecca J. Bohner]

> Amazing story -- I left you a little review there on Part 1.

I got it; thank you very much.  I've had a gratifying number of reviews on
TPMA, but my non-HP fic on FF.net has been awfully lonely by comparison.

> If I recall
> correctly, in the Sacks book there was mention that most people who have
> synesthesia learn to hide it because people think they are nuts.  Maybe
it's
> just that we who have "normal" sensations are all handicapped....

The interesting thing is, when I wrote "Touching Indigo" I had no idea that
synaesthesia was in fact a clinical condition.  I was introduced to the term
by Peter Himmelman's album SYNAESTHESIA, and later found a definition in a
dictionary of literature, where it was described as a type of figurative or
metaphorical speech (the example given was Rupert Graves:  "How hot the
scent of the summer rose!").

I found this fascinating:  what a vivid and unusual form of description!
Then I thought to myself, "What if it *wasn't* just a figure of speech, and
someone actually had the gift -- or curse -- of seeing the world in this
way?"  About 24 hours later, I hammered out the story in one sitting.

By the time I wrote the sequels, however, someone had tipped me off to the
medical angle on synaesthesia and I knew a good deal more about it --
including the little detail that people with synaesthesia are called
synaesthetes and not synaesthetics (oops).  I'm still fascinated by the
phenomenon some five years later:  my Yahoo identity and chat handle is
"synaesthete7".
--
Rebecca J. Bohner
rebeccaj at pobox.com
http://home.golden.net/~rebeccaj