Smelling Color - Breaking the Silence on Synesthesia
February 21st, 2009
Unless you do your part and comment, this post will generate more heat than light. While waiting for the experts to show up, I shall attempt to compensate with intrigue for what I lack in knowledge.
I want to know: Why do so many people not look at you like you’re crazy when you say that something smells “green?” Galbanum, cut grass, vetiver, oakmoss, lavender and basil have fragrances we consider to be green.
Color and scent, what’s up with that?
Grass is green, but does that make its smell, when freshly cut, green indeed? Cool, fresh and airy, the sky, the sea, blue, of course. Dry wood, brown; moister, mossy varieties, add a touch of yellow.
Estée Lauder’s Cinnabar and Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium were packaged very effectively with touches of a warm brick red, evocative of an item you might find somewhere more exotic than New York.
Are we simply reinforcing sensory associations linguistically, or is there an intrinsic physical color to the smells?
Forgive me, the reference to synesthesia was a red herring; I am not above pandering to search engines. Richard E Cytowic, author of The Man Who Tasted Shapes, in his online article: Synesthesia: Phenomenology and Neuropsychology, admits: “It is rare for smell and taste to be either the trigger or the synesthetic response…I have found no other in which sight evokes smell; and…I have found none in which smell itself is the trigger.”
But maybe I will stumble onto some truth about scent and color by accident. In the worst case, the fiction is a pleasant diversion.
Robert Tisserand, in the classic tome, The Art of Aromatherapy, asks: “What are scents if not invisible colours? In Krippner and Rubin’s The Kirlian Aura it is suggested that if the sense of smell is connected with electromagnetic waves, one might expect the skin to be sensitive to odors. This is not as farfetched as it may sound. We know that the skin is especially responsive to essential oils, but much more impressive is the fact that some people can see with their skin.” He goes on to talk about Rosa Kleshova, whom the Soviet Academy of Science certified as capable of reading newsprint with her hands and elbows, and describes the ordinary Russians who are trained to distinguish colors by touch, with red being sticky and yellow, slippery.
How does this relate to our conversations about perfume? I covet your thoughts.
February 22nd, 2009 at 5:17 am
Rosa Kuleshova (not Kleshova) is a well-know fraud. See
http://www.randi.org/encyclopedia/Kuleshova,%20Rosa%20A..html
February 22nd, 2009 at 7:48 am
Thanks for keeping me honest, Luca!
February 25th, 2009 at 11:11 pm
Hey, Laura.
I like the redesign of your site!
As for smelling colors, my view is that most people can associate smells with colors, to a greater or lesser degree. I’ve published two papers about this in the American Journal of Psychology. In one method, we had people rate smells using a list of color names. In the other, we had them point to actual color samples. Either way, different smells produced different color profiles.
Is this “simply” an effect of linguistic association? I don’t think so—we used some fragrance materials that most people haven’t encountered before and still we found reliable color profiles.
We also found that as we increased the concentration of a given smell, the associated color became darker; in Munsell-system color jargon the hue stayed the same but the lightness changed. (Conversely, a weaker version of an odor produces a more pastel color impression.) So color-odor relationships are more than just color matches—odor intensity correlates with color lightness in a systematic way.
Clearly, this puts me at odds with Richard Cytowic. His perspective is clinical neurology, and there may well be few patients that experience involuntary colors when they smell things. Out in the world, lots of people can think synesthetically. As you’ve noticed, most folks don’t bat an eye when you ask them to describe the color of a smell.
I can’t believe I’m such a nerd-ball to include footnotes in a blog comment, but here goes:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8837406
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9100340
February 26th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
Laura,
First, I like the redesign. It’s bright and fresh. Now for my limerick about synesthesia:
> I think I have synesthesia
> As well as a touch of amnesia
> My perfume smells blue
> My sweat socks do, too
> And I still think Zimbabwe’s Rhodesia
February 26th, 2009 at 1:13 pm
And here’s another bit of synesthesia doggerel
Violets smell red
Roses smell blue
Sugar sounds loud
And, boy, I’m confu …
… sed
(Somebody stop me!!! If a criminal commits crimes, then I must be a rhyminal.)
February 26th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Peter, if the whole “Economics Editor at BusinessWeek” thing doesn’t work out for any reason, I’m sure that this gift of yours could be harnessed for fun and profit. For now, please consider yourself the permanent, non-resident limericist here at Perfume is Pleasure.
February 26th, 2009 at 1:41 pm
Avery - thank you!!!!!!!! Nerdier the better.