Are YOU a Synesthete? Can YOU Connect the Dots?

By Shlomo Maital

 The recent special issue of National Geographic is titled “Brain”.  It is a fascinating tour through our brains, and shows how much we have learned through massive research on brain mapping.

  I found an interesting piece on ‘synesthesia’ – “a merging of information that is otherwise unrelated and comes to a synesthete automatically…these aren’t memorized connections…Synesthesis isn’t something you can train your brain on.”

  Synesthesia is ‘connecting the dots’ – when the dots seemingly are in no way connected. I call this X + Y —  creating value by combining things that do not seem to go together.  I’ve studied creativity for decades and it still remains to me a highly mysterious process.  But synesthesia is definitely at the core of idea people.

    Here is where I disagree.  Synesthesia  is DEFINITELY something you can train your brain to have.  Let’s take some examples. Steve Jobs once noticed how small children touch computer screens, as if to manipulate objects on them.  Many parents saw the same thing.  But did not make connections.  Jobs did – inventing the touch screen and innovating smartphones.  Jobs was a synesthete.

     Akio Morita, Sony CEO, pioneered the Walkman…  a tape recorder that did not record, with weird earphones to listen to music.  X + Y. 

      I practice synesthesia with students.  We take a favorite product and take essential parts away.  X MINUS Y.   what do you get?  How can it create value?  Separate the dots.   And remove some. 

       True, some people are much better at synesthesia than others.  But the rest of us?  We can improve and practice.  We can train our brains to create new and unusual neuron pathways. 

       Try it. It’s a lot of fun.

  Incidentally – some synesthetes have the quality of using graphemes – attaching personalities to figures and numbers.  For many, the number 13, or the number 7,  have deep meaning, almost as human personalities. 

    The brain scientists say that about one person in 25 is a synesthete.  That makes over 300 million in the world.  So – there are many people walking around who, like Jourdain in Moliere’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, who ‘speak prose without knowint it’ – who connect the dots regularly without realizing how unique and valuable this is.

       So – are YOU a synesthete?  Want to be one?   Practice.