In my Week 9 Context Research Presentation, I wanted to take a deep dive into the neurological condition Synesthesia to give you a better understanding for relation to The Leavers. Knowing more about this will hopefully increase your understanding to make better connections while you read.
So first off, what is Synesthesia? Well Synesthesia has the broad based definition of a neurological condition in which information meant to stimulate one of your senses stimulates several of your senses. There are many different types of Synesthesia, the most popular being grapheme–color synesthesia. This is when someone associates letters with colors. For example you may see the letter “R” and associate it with the color orange. With it being the most popular, you can expect this type of synesthesia to be found in more than one percent of the population. This was surprising to me as if you are attending a 100 person lecture at Ohio State, you can expect there to be one person around you with this on average. Although that is the most popular type, Deming has something different called chromesthesia which is the association of sounds to colors. For example, someone may associate the color pink with the sound of a doorbell. But as you could expect, sometimes an extensive amount of sounds can cause overstimulation which could be found in noisy dance clubs, or sports arenas. An interesting thing I read is that oftentimes people who were born with chromesthesia “grow up assuming that everyone has the same visual responses to sounds as they do, and are shocked when they discover this is not so” (Palmer). With the odds of having this being 1 in 3,000, I could make an assumption that likely no one or only one person reading this associates sounds with colors so it’s interesting to think that we would be viewed as the odd ones out.
First of all, I don’t believe that understanding Synesthesia is very crucial to the plot of the story however it’s important because it’s a way Ko subtly provides the readers with more description of who Deming is. He comes across as weird to others, so the idea of him associating sounds with colors makes him even more of an outlier. An experience Deming had with chromesthesia was shown in Chapter 3 when Ko wrote, “He heard melodies in everything, and with them saw colors, his body gravitating to rhythm the way a plant arched up to the light”. It is so interesting reading this because normally a writer would write this to show expression in a character however we would know that the character can’t actually see colors. However with Deming, Ko is able to write about this experience for Deming, and he is actually experiencing what only 1 in 3,000 people experience.
Sources:
Audicus on Oct 8, 2014. “Hearing Colors and Seeing Sound.” Audicus, 5 May 2020, www.audicus.com/hearing-colors-and-seeing-sound/.
“Chromesthesia: Feeling Music in Colours.” VICE, www.vice.com/en/article/rjqwzg/youneedtohearthis-chromesthesia-feeling-music-in-colours.
Palmer, Stephen E. “What Color Is This Song? – Issue 26: Color.” Nautilus, 16 July 2015, nautil.us/issue/26/color/what-color-is-this-song.
“Synesthesia.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 10 Oct. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia.
Within the Leavers, I think Ko does any excellent job at subtly establishing this condition that Deming has and after hearing about and reading about I was super excited to see this deep dive into it. Great work!
I agree that Deming’s synesthesia makes him even more of an other than he already believes himself to be. I knew a fellow student who had the same variation of synesthesia as Deming and, as strange as the condition seemed to me, I did recognize how it provided her a unique way to understand the world and enhanced her abilities as an already extremely talented musician. I did not realize that only 1 in 3000 had this condition; it is rare and special, in deed.
I really like the way you explain this disease. You gave us a very intuitive understanding of this disease through vivid examples. Especially your example about our school. At the same time, you also sort out the relationship between the disease and the novel at the end of the article. Let us have a clearer and deeper understanding of the character image.