I'm not sure that I understand what this "condition" really is. Or perhaps I simply don't understand why it is identified as a condition at all.
Let's say a piece of music is played to me. How do we "expect" my brain to react? Certainly we expect it to do all sorts of mundane analysis, asking questions like "have I heard this music before?", "what are the lyrics for the refrain?", "doesn't this sound like a cross between Bach and Mozart - sort of like a Mach composition?" etc. And we expect there to be some sort of emotional response: "Listening to The Cure makes me depressed", "Listening to Kylie Minogue makes we want to destroy something," "listening to James Brown makes me feel good" etc.
But is this the extent of "normal" responses to music? Doesn't music usually evoke some other reactions? Doesn't it conjure images and memories at times? Doesn't it make us think about things? Doesn't it make us imagine things, explore ideas, clarify deep questions? If every time i listen to Miles playing Flemenco Sketches I involuntarily think of changing seasons, am I doing something out of the ordinary? Or am I just letting my mind wander the way a mind tends to wander when stimulated? If every time I hear the band Chicago on the radio I feel like I'm 13 years old and leafing through a soft core porn magazine, is my mind doing something worthy of note, or is it just doing what minds tend to do? If I listen to Jimi Hendrix and "see" splashes of color pulsing in my mind, as though the music were expressing those colors explicitly, am I doing anything fundamentally different? Sure, this whole "color" thing is more abstract than some other reactions - but we don't usually think that Jackson Pollock and Michelangelo were engaged in fundamentally different activities simply because one expressed himself with realistic images while the other used abstract ones.
So is this synaesthesia worthy of note because of the abstract nature of the response generated? I doubt it. Or is there something about the synesthetic response that makes it significantly different from some other product of a healthy imagination?
Of course, I have absolutely no expertise in psychology or neurology or anything like that, so my views are probably of little relevance to anybody. But for what it's worth, I tend to think that the human brain is inherently creative. Some people naturally create colorful images in their brains when they hear music, some create personalities for numbers and letters, some imagine numbers forming intricate patterns: these all seem very natural to me, even though these are not experiences that I usually have. The novelty isn't a surprise. I expect that the particular reactions that my brain has to music are probably novel to most other people as well. I would actually find it much more amazing to discover that some people simply don't have any comparable reaction when they hear music. I would wonder what had happened for such a person to suppress the inherent creativity of her mind.
As for all the visual or tactile adjectives that people use to describe sound: I suspect these have little or nothing to do with synaesthesia. When somebody presents us with a test question like: "Hat is to head just as _______ is to hand," most of us are going to guess that the blank is appropriately filled with "glove". This is not because we "feel" glove is the right answer, or because something deep inside our souls conjures the image of a glove when somebody says "hand", but because we infer the nature of the relationship from the statement linking hat and head. Similarly, we infer what is meant when someone pairs the words "bright" and "sound" by considering the relationship between word "bright" and the word "color". Our brains are able to distill the essence of "brightness" in such a way that it can be applied to sound. Amazingly, our brains seem to do this very consistently, so that almost everybody is going to come to the conclusion that a ride cymbal sounds "bright". Importantly, this conclusion is reached without relying on anybody actually seeing any bright color her mind's eye when hearing a ride cymbal played.
Chad
