ABSTRACT
The process of transferring information from one mode to another, as in transduction, or the “cross-activation of brain regions” involved in synesthesia (Ramachandran 2011), happens so seamlessly in our everyday communications that our brains often do it without our conscious awareness. This is what makes the experience of synesthesia so difficult to articulate, much less to teach. Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, whom I quoted in an earlier chapter, writes, “there is a sense in which at some level we are all ‘synesthetes’” (2011, 108), and this has been dramatically demonstrated for me on more than one occasion. Once, when I was driving to Newark Liberty International airport in the middle of the night, surrounded on all sides by big-rig trailer trucks, a vivid scene of the nightmarish, futuristic traffic from the film version of Ray Bradbury’s (1953) novel Fahrenheit 451 flashed through my mind. I was trying to remember when I had seen that film, and it finally occurred to me that I never had. Although I have since learned that this book has been adapted as a film, video game, and graphic novel, the scene in my mind that night was one that I had visualized while listening to an audiotaped recording of the novel, again while driving at night some years before. Writing like Bradbury’s that makes the reader feel as though they are actually a part of the scene depicted in words draws upon unconscious and fluid synesthetic responses, and no doubt the richly modulating tones in the voice of the actor reading the text enhanced this effect.
