‘I can taste words, see sounds and hear colours’
A bizarre encounter in the Tate Modern led Lydia Ruffles to discover she had lateonset synaesthesia, she tells Peter Stanford
Lydia Ruffles was in London’s Tate Modern when she realised that something wasn’t altogether right with her. An art lover, the 36-year-old had gone into the room devoted to artist Mark Rothko, to sit in front of his distinctive red and black contemplative murals. “There was some sort of art ‘installation’ going on in a room next door,” she recalls of the day her world was turned upside down. “I thought I could hear it humming – but the sound was coming from the big rectangle canvas right in front of my eyes.”
She was, she explains, seeing as well as hearing the sound. “It didn’t obscure my vision of the murals, and it wasn’t a hallucination. It felt like an organic thing that was part of hearing the noise.”
Such a mixing-up of her senses had never happened to her before, so she was, she says, “absolutely terrified. It felt overwhelming and utterly chaotic. It probably only lasted a few minutes, but it seemed to go on forever. I was gripping the bench thinking: ‘What on earth is going on?’”
She eventually managed to make her way home, but it took her several months finally to put a name to what had happened that day – and then only because the neurologist who was testing her for a whole variety of other conditions mentioned, in passing, that what Lydia described of her trauma at the Tate bore all the hallmarks of synaesthesia.
She had never even heard the word before, but once back at her flat in south London, she looked it up and discovered it was not an illness at all, but rather a perceptual phenomenon, where the stimulation of one sense triggers others simultaneously. So, in Lydia’s case, something she heard with her ears also became visual before her eyes.
The descriptions she read of synaesthesia immediately struck a chord. “I knew that that was what I had,” she says. It tied in with other strange things that had begun happening to her. For example, the sounds of individual and very specific words had started to bring curious tastes into her mouth. “Bus” made her think she was chewing an eraser. And sitting under artificial lights in the office where she was then working in corporate communication began to leave her experiencing a “powdery, yellow” taste.
Synaesthesia is estimated to affect around 4 per cent of the population. How it impacts on each individual is often very different, which contributes to making it hard to spot, define or even explain. For some synaesthetes, for example, letters and numbers are inherently coloured in particular shades when they see them, but that wasn’t one of Lydia’s experiences. And for others – the musicians Billy Joel, Pharrell Williams and Duke Ellington among them – particular instrumental sounds are also experienced as colours. So a trumpet solo can make a synaesthete see orange, or green, or purple, or any other colour.
The causes of synaesthesia – sometimes described as the “union of the senses” – are much debated. Research has shown a genetic link, with 40 per cent of synaesthetes having a close relative with the condition. The focus of current investigations is on early development stages. One theory is that it is the result of “cross-wiring” in the brain, where synaesthetes have more neural connections than the average person, and so an increased capacity for the senses to develop and overlap. Another suggests that everyone in their early years has that capacity to double up or overlap on their senses, but it is only in a select few that it actually develops into something they experience for reasons that remain unknown.
What makes Lydia’s case particularly unusual is that most synaesthetes grow up thinking that the way they interact with the world is “normal”. “They don’t know anything different,” she explains, “and so don’t know that other people don’t experience it. But I obviously had 30 odd years without it, and then developed it over time. So I have a rare before-and-after view.”
For her, it all began with a trip to South America. After growing up in London, West Sussex and then the Isle of Wight, where her scientist mother ran a hotel after her parents had divorced, Lydia had gone off to do theatre studies at university, but was, she admits, quite a restless soul who was forever moving house, career and country.
“It was 2010 and I caught some sort of flu-like virus, probably while I was in Brazil. It felt like nothing dramatic at the time, but when I went back to Spain, where I was living at the time, I started getting really, really bad headaches, accompanied by crazy dizziness, vertigo, jumbled speech and weird sensations in my body.” Sensory confusion also started to develop at that point – sensitivity to light, sound, smell – but not as yet the mixing that characterises synaesthesia.
It eventually took doctors five years to put Lydia’s problem down to acute migraines. “At times, during those years, I was usually to be found in bed, or on my floor, or at hospital appointments. My migraine is vestibular, so the main symptom I have is vertigo. The dizziness and head pain can vary between manageable and so severe that I have to stay in a darkened room and put a cold press on my head for days and months on end.” It was also eventually decided that the migraines had triggered her rare late onset of synaesthesia. Confusion in individual senses grew into the overlapping of those senses.
The challenge for Lydia was to adapt. So, for instance, she has devised a whole series of what she calls “neutralisers”. The sound of running water, for example, can take away unpleasant tastes caused by particular words. “It makes me think of pulling a ribbon through my fingers. It is really soothing, and it makes me think of blue, which is a nice calming colour.”
Another standby is to carry a menthol stick at all times. “If I am on my own, I dab it on my nose, or if I am in a meeting, I rub it on my fingers, then sniff them, just to neutralise any sensations I am experiencing. It is like a clear-down of the senses.”
She lives alone, she says, and her migraines still floor her regularly – “though now it isn’t all year long, but probably once every two weeks”. Yet she refuses to regard synaesthesia as an illness or, worse, a disability.
“I would consider migraine a disability, but not synaesthesia. I don’t even like calling it a condition. That medicalises it. If I just had the synaesthesia, not the migraine, I’d be delighted because, now that I know what it is and I am no longer scared of it, I realise it is just a positive extension of my senses. It is like an unlocking of consciousness.
“The easiest way I have found to describe it is to liken it to when you have a cup of tea. You lift it up to your mouth and you taste the tea, but at the same time you smell the tea because the steam goes up your nose. Two senses react at once. In the case of tea, it feels natural and organic. Synaesthesia is more extreme but it is like that.”
Lydia’s attempts to demythologise synaesthesia have now gone much further. She has written a novel, The Taste of Blue Light – a coming-of-age tale aimed at late teens and adults
– in which the main character, Lux, has synaesthesia.
“I don’t think I fully acknowledged it as I was writing, but now I can see that a lot of the novel is drawn from my own experience. I’m on every page. I would not have written the book if I did not have synaesthesia. So I should be grateful for that.”