Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Put more simply and personally, for me, synesthesia is the association of colors with sounds, letters, numbers, smells, and sensations. It's what makes my obsessiveness so complicated: not only do things have to "match" in size and shape, but they also have to "match" in the color my brain assigns them. I'm currently struggling with pinpointing baby names for our future children because a) my brain is convinced that this is a pattern that needs to be solved RIGHT NOW, KATHRYN and b) the current canon of available names did not develop with synesthesia in mind.

My name is a forest fire: Kathryn is dark red (k, r), dark green (t), black (a) and brown (h, n). My husband's name is a child's playground sign: Jack is purple (j), yellow (c) and red (k). Our names match in shape at the (a) and the (k), in sound (ah), and in "color" at red (k), black (a), and yellow-white (y, c).

Name-matching is actually a serious issue in my life. It frustrates me that the names around me -- friends, characters in books, siblings, politicians, you name it -- don't match a set pattern. There's no way around this frustration: I know it's not a concern to the rest of the populace, I know it's finicky and weird, but it's unavoidably there in my head, jumping up and down and shouting, "IT DOESN'T MATCH. WHY DOESN'T IT MATCH?"

I once tried dating someone whose name didn't match mine. It was so frustrating on such an instinctive level that I actually brought up, as a serious topic, the possibility of him changing his name to match mine.

I know, right? Yikes. But it made perfect sense to me at the time, and it still does.

I'm trying to overcome it. My psychologist and I are using exposure therapy where I make up lists of non-matching names and sit there and shriek to myself for a few moments. I'm trying to find a "pattern" in the lack of patterns, some appreciation of chaos. I want to be able to name my children names I like rather than names that fit the narrow parameters of my naming pattern.

It's a process.

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Cytowic, Richard E. (2002). Synesthesia: A Union of the Senses (2nd edition). Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-03296-1.OCLC 49395033. Quoted by Wikipedia.

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