In the phenomenon that modern psychology studies as "synesthesia", there are reports of people whose five senses convert into one another: hearing a sound and seeing a color or an image, seeing certain words and smelling different scents, and so on. Brain scientists generally believe this comes from an overlap in the limbic system, where the five senses are handled.
The unusual talents synesthesia brings
(1) Words turning into pictures
I have met several people with synesthesia in my life. Two of them were quite remarkable, and they showed me the extraordinary things someone with this ability can do.
The first is the science fiction writer Ni Kuang.
In August 2002 I stepped down as Dean of Academic Affairs at National Taiwan University. Six years of administrative work had left me ready for a break, and I decided to spend the second half of the year on sabbatical at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, California. Ni Kuang was living in San Francisco at the time, not far from Stanford, and through an introduction from Dr. Yeh Li-Hua — a younger alumnus of my department at NTU and himself a science fiction writer — I had the chance to visit him at home. His house looks out over San Francisco Bay near the Golden Gate Bridge, and the design is wonderful: at night the roof opens so you can see the bay and the stars above it.
He is said to have written more Chinese characters than any other author, over sixty million of them. From the first manuscript he submitted in Hong Kong at seventeen, he was never once rejected. While he was writing the Wisely novels he could finish a book in a day, at an astonishing pace. The reason is that when he reads a novel, a screen appears in his mind and the characters and story described in the text play out on it like a film. The reverse holds too: once a drama begins playing in his mind, he only has to pick up a pen and write the plot down as it unfolds, which is how he could write a book in a day, with no need to spend time inventing the story at all. He took this to mean that his stories were downloaded by his third eye from another world. He once told me that Jin Yong's early martial arts novels read better after they were revised, whereas the rest of us tend to feel the revisions disturbed our memory of the originals and made them worse. This is because in those early years Jin Yong was racing to file installments for the daily Ming Pao, and many scenes and plot points went unchecked and ended up contradicting one another; once those contradictions were corrected, the film in Ni Kuang's mind ran far more smoothly, and made far more sense.
(2) Sound turning into pictures
The second person with synesthesia was a student in my class.
I stepped down as President of National Taiwan University in June 2013, and with the pressure gone I decided to turn thirty years of research into qigong and exceptional human functions into a course that interested students could take.
After more than two years of planning, in 2016 I opened a course in the Department of Electrical Engineering and its graduate institute: "Topics in Human Potential". Because it involved experiments in telepathy and clairvoyance, the space available limited each semester to 36 students. In the first two years several hundred students pre-registered whenever enrollment opened, and the course caused quite a stir, though very few could actually get a place.
In 2017 a graduate student in electrical engineering, Miss Lin, joined the course. From the first experiments she showed remarkable ability. Her accuracy in the telepathy trials was very high, and it was from her written assignments that I discovered she had synesthesia: she too would hear music and see a screen appear in her mind, on which a film began to play. The film changed with the music, endlessly varied. She had taken a music appreciation course in the past, and the depth and delicacy of her analysis of how a piece works on the mind had astonished her teacher there. She had assumed everyone was like her; only after taking my course did she realize how unusual her synesthesia is, and how different from everyone else.
In the telepathy experiments she did in class, everyone sat quietly and emptied their mind for a minute while a partner drew one of five cards at random — ESP cards, showing a circle, a cross, a square, a star and waves — and sent her the signal. Over 100 trials across the semester she was right 49 times, where the class average was one in five, or 20. Her statistical significance was over seven standard deviations, which led me to conclude that she has some form of telepathic sensitivity reaching across space and time. That same ability meant that when she read history or classical Chinese, she could judge from fragments of dialogue and a description of a scene alone exactly what those historical figures were thinking, what they might have been feeling and how they were likely to act — and her readings matched the way the history then unfolded. Her Chinese teachers were especially fond of her analyses of classical texts: beyond explaining the meaning, she could explain the author's state of mind and the situation he was writing in, which they found a pleasure to read.
Because of her synesthesia, Miss Lin reads people keenly, so in a debate or a negotiation she knows at once what the other side means, what they are thinking, and what they will say next. Sometimes she predicts outright what they will save for their closing argument or hold back as a bargaining chip, and then goes straight for the weak point. Whatever the setting, she is the one put forward to speak, or to serve as the deputy who provides the analysis and sets the strategy. I believe synesthesia is a gift, and used well it will carry a person far.
