Thursday is the Color of a Rice Krispies Treat
How synesthesia functions as a quiet and colorful superpower
Tammy Gilman would never wear red on a Thursday. It would feel wrong.
Monday is white, like fresh powdery snow. Tuesday is pale mint green. Wednesday is the color of barbecue sauce, a viscous brownish red. Thursday is the color of a Rice Krispies Treat. Friday is pale yellow, like a peeled banana. Saturday is dark pink. Sunday is black.
Thursday is the color of a Rice Krispies Treat. What does that even mean? How does one begin to process a reality where a day of the week is objectively the shade of a popular breakfast cereal? For Gilman, this is as logical a truth as the sky is blue and fire is hot.
Gilman has synesthesia, a neurological phenomenon that occurs when one’s senses are crossed. Her synesthesia causes her to associate things like the number three, January and Thursday, with colors. To her, it’s hard to fathom a reality where Thursday isn’t the color of a Rice Krispies Treat.
We often assume that our perceptions are similar to those around us, that our shared abilities to see, hear, taste, smell and touch create a blanket perception of the world. This conjecture makes it easier to endure the impossibility of experiencing another person’s reality. It’s why we don’t generally question whether someone else’s blue sky is the same as our own. But reality is in the eye of the beholder. Our individual perceptions of reality are illusions created by our brains, a synthesis of our sensory perception of external stimuli that make up the world. And reality is tenuous. A few molecules of LSD, an amount completely invisible under a microscope, can completely alter one’s perception of reality and turn a blue sky kaleidoscopic.
The more science delves into the nature of sensory perception and processing, the more it is understood that reality is an individual experience that may not be as uniform across humanity as we tend to assume.
Gilman was born on September 26, 1964, in the small town of Oakland, Maine. She was blind, a result of prenatal Rubella, only able to detect light and shadow. At two years old, a series of cataract surgeries granted Gilman partial sight in her right eye, but her amblyopic left eye, which points inward toward the bridge of her nose, has little function. She also gradually lost much of her hearing, a consequence of Rubella-induced nerve damage. By age six, she wore hearing aids.
In her thick-framed glasses, Gilman learned to navigate the world without depth perception or precise sound. But what she can grasp, better than anything else and, she is convinced, anyone else, is color. Color is everything to Gilman. It is what differentiates between objects that appear fuzzy, even through her glasses. And it is a tool she used to conquer school, independence and relationships. To her, everything is associated with a color: letters, numbers, days of the week, months, songs, voices. Synesthesia is her quiet superpower, invisible from the outside, that helps her manage her reality.
When we consider our five main senses, we tend to think of them as distinct experiences. We taste with our mouths, hear with our ears, see with our eyes. But what if you could taste something you see? Or hear something you smell? For synesthetes like Gilman, the senses aren’t so rigid.
Our brains are filled with neurons, tiny nerve cells that transmit information to our bodies. Sensory neurons are specialized neurons that detect sensory information like sight and sound. To simplify a complicated and almost instantaneous process, these neurons, when triggered by an external stimulus, send signals to different parts of our brain that are responsible for processing a specific sense. For example, the sound of a musical note triggers the transmission of sensory neurons to our auditory cortex, where the information is processed to create the sensation of hearing. The brain’s mechanism of organizing and processing sensory information is what constructs the experiences of sight, smell, taste, touch, temperature and pain that make up our reality.
Marcia Grabowecky, director of Brian, Behavior and Cognition studies at Northwestern University and a principal investigator at the Multisensory Lab, explains that synesthesia occurs when the input to one sensory modality triggers sensation in another sensory modality. The sound of snare drum might elicit the taste of metal, or Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” might feel like shimmery yellow. Some synesthetic experiences are projective and manifest like a hallucination. When one listens to the 1975 operatic-rock medley, they might actually see a streak of yellow appear in front of them, as if projected onto an invisible screen. Other synesthetic experiences are associative. So while one may not see anything, they know that “Bohemian Rhapsody” is yellow, and “Under Pressure” is blue, and “Another One Bites the Dust” is red. And regardless of form, synesthesia is consistent over time and instantaneous.
Gilman experiences the most common form of synesthesia called associative grapheme-color synesthesia which occurs when symbols, like letters and numbers, or concepts, like days of the week, have specific colors attached to them. Long before she knew that there was a scientific name for the way she perceives the world, Gilman relied on her color associations to get through school.
In 1970, the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) was passed, allowing children with disabilities to attend public schools instead of specialized institutions. Gilman was among the first children in her state to be “mainstreamed,” which meant she had to work a little harder than her peers to keep up. “The signal to the senses came a bit slower to me,” she tells me. Especially in math class. Gilman didn’t add and subtract the way most people do. In her mind, her colored numbers appeared like a game board, each number represented by a colored square. For her, the number three is red, four is Kelly green, five is cotton candy pink and six is dark blue. So to add three plus three, Gilman starts on her red square and moves three spaces to the right, landing on dark blue. To subtract, she moves in the opposite direction.
As we chatted on the phone, I tried to imagine what it would be like to break down complex math equations through a mental Monopoly board. I couldn’t, but neither could Gilman. Her synesthesia only took her as far as algebra, at which point she spent many long nights with her father who patiently helped her decode functions and variables.
Despite synesthesia being both a tool and a defining characteristic of Gilman’s worldview, she didn’t talk about it much growing up. Her mother is a common-sense kind of woman who doesn’t care much for anything outside of what she can see. “She likes to read a lot of biographies,” Gilman tells me. “I like science fiction.”
It is not uncommon for synesthetes to keep their experiences to themselves. Some people hesitate to talk about it out of fear of being judged or mocked. Others don’t know that their worldview is relatively unique, so they don’t think to mention it.
Chad Manning, musician and founder of Manning Music, a bluegrass music school in Berkeley, California, didn’t find out he was a synesthete until he was 49. Manning experiences a form of auditory-tactile synesthesia that causes him to feel shapes when he listens to music and to associate words with shapes. “I never thought it was actually full-on synesthesia,” he tells me. He had heard of the phenomenon, but until last year thought it only referred to cases where it manifests like a hallucination.
Conceptually, there is a connection between music and shapes. Music has structure and movement; a pitch goes up and down. This relationship is what made Manning doubt that he “qualified” as a synesthete. But his experience goes beyond conceptual understanding. It’s visceral. “It’s like I’m getting in the shapes and going for a ride,” he says. “They pull on me from my center, so it will kind of pull me into a curve or I can come to a stop and then drop.”
Manning began playing music at eight years old but became infatuated at 14. “When I heard these particular fiddlers shape things so beautifully, that’s when my love of music really kicked in,” he says. “One of the beautiful things about fiddle is that you have a bow, which is like a breath. It’s how I mold shape.”
About a year ago, Manning was at a dinner party with the teachers from his music school along with their spouses. He sat next to Colleen Silva, the wife of one of his colleagues, who is a synesthete and has known about her synesthesia for over three decades. He talked with his hands, as he usually does, his fingers like brushstrokes on an invisible canvas, transforming his words into dynamic shapes.
“Why did you make that shape when you said that?” Manning recalls Silva asking him.
“Oh, well because that’s the shape of the word,” he replied.
“Do you have synesthesia?” she asked.
Manning thought about it. “No,” he said. “I don’t.” He explained that he sort of feels shapes and colors when he listens to music, but he doesn’t actually see anything.
“Yeah, not everybody feels colors,” Silva said.
Silva has sequence-space synesthesia in which almost anything that can be organized chronologically, like counting numbers, days of the week, temperature, historical time-periods and even bra sizes, exist in three-dimensional space. At all times, Silva is surrounded by mental numerical “maps” that are fixed around her. Like Gilman and Manning, Silva’s synesthesia is associative. She doesn’t see the number ten floating in the air, but she knows that it lives about one foot away from her right shoulder and that the number one exists about a foot away from her left shoulder on the same dimensional plane. And the position of Silva’s maps is stagnant, meaning if she moves her head, the points on her maps stay fixed in space. “I can’t say or hear or read the word ‘three’ without my brain going to the place where three exists around my body,” she says. “My entire life, everything, has a place that goes all around my body.”
In elementary school, she had to take a special class to learn how to tell time. “I couldn’t understand a clock because I had my own system,” she tells me. “It starts below my feet, like 5 a.m., and then noon is around my waist. Then it goes up to midnight, which is maybe two or three feet above my head. And then all of the other numbers in the middle of the night go behind my back.”
When she was 19, Silva and a friend were watching an episode of “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” in which he brought on a woman who viewed the days of the week as being stacked vertically on top of each other. She turned to her friend and explained that she has the exact same thing. It was the first time she had vocalized her mental maps. “I couldn’t believe that (my friend) didn’t know what I was talking about,” she says. “But I knew it was something, and I was interested.”
At the time the Johnny Carson episode aired, an American neurologist named Richard Cytowic was working to restore the scientific study of synesthesia, which had fallen under the radar for about 100 years. Between 1876 and 1895, there was a period of intense scientific interest in synesthesia. Julia Simner, a professor of neuropsychology at the University of Sussex, dubs this “the golden age of synesthesia research.” For the first time in recorded history, scientists were utilizing surveys to examine synesthetic experiences which led to the discovery of associative and projective crossovers between all of the senses. Silva’s sequence-space synesthesia was one of the first types to be studied by Sir Francis Galton, Charles Darwin’s half-cousin, who learned of it in a self-report written by an English engineer.
In the early 20th century, behaviorism struck the psychological community. Behaviorism is an approach that emphasizes the impact of the environment on human behavior. It rejects introspection and first-person accounts as a valid method of study, which not only discredits the study of synesthesia but also of subjects like memory and emotion.
It wasn’t until the early 1980s that synesthesia was pushed back under the microscope by Cytowic, despite a warning from his colleagues that this work would “ruin his career.” Silva’s father happened upon one of Cytowic’s early articles and sent it to his daughter. She reached out to Cytowic who conducted a preliminary interview with her over the phone and then recruited her as one of his first research participants. She has since been a subject in all of his books.
Because of her involvement in the study of synesthesia, Silva is able to recognize the signs of a synesthete, like she did with Manning. “It was a very exciting evening,” she tells me. “To see (Manning) have this sort of burst of information in his brain, that was really cool.”
For Gilman, being able to attach a label to her experience was a relief. In 2002, Gilman was in a relationship with a man named John (whose name has been changed per her request) who also had color-grapheme synesthesia. They were set up by Gilman’s roommate at the University of South Carolina Spartanburg. On their first date, they talked until three in the morning. The next day, it was raining, and John picked her up for class. They quickly became inseparable, and their synesthesia, though they didn’t know the word for it at the time, brought them closer together.
John’s mother watched Richard Cytowic’s 60 Minutes episode and immediately phoned her son. “Guess what?” she said. “I just found out what you guys have is actually real.” Gilman says the experience was validating. “We were absolutely tickled,” she tells me. “It was nice to share it with somebody who understood.” The couple began dressing in their respective colors for the days of the week, teasing each other about who was right and sometimes wearing each other’s colors.
In 2009, Gilman joined a Facebook group for synesthetes, which is how I connected with her. While she doesn’t post in the group often, it serves as a way for her to connect with and learn from the other 2,000 members.
Her desire to learn and understand is common among synesthetes. It’s the reason why I’m writing this story. I have associative chromesthesia which causes me to view every song as having a distinct color dependent on the key of the music. I first learned about synesthesia in fifth grade from a book titled “A Mango Shaped Space” by Wendy Mass. It tells the story of a little girl named Mia who has intense and sometimes debilitating projective chromesthesia, and her journey toward understanding and accepting her unique world view. I’ve since read the book twice and developed an acute interest in the perceptual phenomenon. I connected with Mass to ask why she chose to write about synesthesia for her debut novel, not being a synesthete herself. “I was keeping my eyes open for something I could write about a character where the people around her wouldn’t know that anything was different about her,” she told me. And while working as a librarian, she happened upon one of Cytowic’s books, “The Man Who Tasted Shapes.” It’s been 21 years since “Mango” was published, and Mass says she still hears from synesthetes and non-synesthetes alike who were moved by Mia’s story.
Manning was also curious about his synesthetic experiences years before his conversation with Silva. During his freshman year at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, he conducted an experiment on some of his friends to explore whether everyone has similar associations between shapes, colors, sounds and other sensory experiences. Manning had his friends lie on their backs as he guided them through breathing exercises and asked them free-association questions like, what color comes to mind when you hear the word “breakfast.”
Throughout his experiment, which continued when he transferred to Whitworth College in Spokane, some of his subjects fell into hypnotic states and irregular breathing patterns. One of the more intense sessions even prompted Manning to call a mental health hotline where he was told, unhelpfully, that he had tapped into some unknown area of consciousness and should attempt his experiment in an isolation tank. Eventually, students started coming to Manning to be hypnotized, resulting in the dean asking him to stop. “Honestly, I can’t even remember what the results were, but I guess it’s kind of a reminder to me that I had (synesthesia) then too,” he tells me. “I was trying to figure out if other people could get tapped into that same thing.”
Sarah Smith, 33, a fitness instructor and multimedia artist with chromesthesia from New York City, frequently attends events for artists and musicians where “synesthete” is as normal of an introductory characteristic as a job title or hometown. “It felt so cool and exciting and freeing to be able to talk in terms of shapes and colors and (talk about) these experiences of being able to travel into worlds through songs,” she tells me.
Annie Oliver, 43, an elementary English as a Second Language teacher from Knoxville, Tennessee, joined Facebook groups like Gilman in hopes of finding someone with her same type of synesthesia. She sees projections of shapes when she listens to music. Different sounds elicit different visuals and certain sounds produce clearer visuals than others. For instance, a percussion sound is easy to see and appears like a circle, varying in size and location in space based on volume and tone. Oliver’s most vivid projection is the sound of a rotary telephone ring, which appears like two small vertically stacked dots that zigzag in opposite directions. While it’s already difficult to process what this looks and feels like, Oliver’s projections also have no color. “I can’t explain it,” she tells me. “Because everything has to have a color, but there’s just not. It's just like this absence of color or something.” Oliver only recently found out there is such a thing as synesthesia, though her mom remembers her talking about her ability to see music as a child. “It’s something that’s always been in my own head since I was a kid,” she says. “I’m dying to talk to somebody else that has the same thing.”
It is unknown how common synesthesia is. Cytowic estimates that 1 in 30 people have a common form of synesthesia. Sean A. Day, president of the International Association of Synesthetes, Artists and Scientists, surmises that rarer forms of synesthesia occur in approximately 1 in 15,000 people. While research is not yet comprehensive enough to conclude exact statistics, experts agree that, based on data from the past two centuries, synesthesia is likely more common than we think it is. In fact, many famous artists and musicians have been open about their synesthesia, like Wassily Kandinsky, a Russian abstract painter who saw projections of colors when he listened to music, and singer Billie Eilish whose associative color synesthesia inspires her art.
Neurologists don’t know what causes synesthesia, though multiple theories exist. Grabowecky, who specializes in multisensory integration, explains one theory that synesthesia is a result of incomplete synaptic pruning. Essentially, when our early brains are developing, they form millions of rapid and simultaneous neural connections, many of which are unnecessary. As our brains mature, these connections, or synapses, are pruned. Our brains get rid of the connections we don’t need or use to prioritize a neural network that aids our survival. According to this theory, synesthesia occurs due to unpruned multisensory connections.
Cytowic, however, questions whether synesthetic connections are unnecessary. In a 2009 interview with Scientific American, he asks why, if synesthesia is useless, it hasn’t been discarded by evolution over time? Perhaps there is something evolutionarily beneficial about humans’ ability to make connections, to see “the similar in the dissimilar.” With the exception of rare and debilitating cases, synesthesia ranges from serving as a crutch for navigating life to a quirk that makes for an interesting and animated reality.
Manning says he can’t imagine life without synesthesia. “What would music be without shape?” he asks me. “I can’t even comprehend it, to be honest.”
Gilman feels the same way about color. “When people tell me they’re colorblind, to me, that sounds so much worse than being totally blind,” she says. “I can’t imagine a world without color. I just can’t.”
Gilman and John broke up in 2012. They lived together in the countryside, near Inman, South Carolina, but being isolated in a rural area was poor for Gilman’s mental health. After a period of extreme depression, she moved to Columbia to be near her mother and step-father. She and John tried to do long-distance, but it didn’t work. And until I messaged Gilman on Facebook, she hadn’t spoken to anyone about her synesthesia since their breakup.
She lived on her own for 12 years, with a guide dog named Gossamer Lafayette, Gossie for short. After he passed away, she moved in with her mother and step-father, but she hopes to move back to Maine soon. She is now training a new puppy, a cross between a Brussels Griffon and a shiatsu with an impressive underbite, named Jack. “The terror,” as she calls him, caused her to reschedule our last interview multiple times.
“Does 2morro work ok 4 u?” she texted me, along with a photo of Jack and a GIF of a sparkling pink bubble-lettered “thank you!”
“Of course, good luck with your puppy training,” I responded. “And thank you so much, I really appreciate it!”
“Hey, so do I,” she replied. “It’s not often people ask about it, ya kno?”
this piece made me understand my own experience with synesthesia in a completely different way. so thoughtful and informative. thanks julia!