Epilepsy Talk

What Do Billy Joel, Frankenstein, Itzhak Perlman and David Hockney Have In Common?  | April 15, 2025

The all have synesthesia…

The famous artist David Hockney, perceives music as color, shape, and configuration and uses these perceptions when painting opera stage sets.

Russian painter Kandinsky combines color, hearing, touch, and smell.

In her book Frankenstein, Mary Shelley reports:  A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time…” 

In fact, people from all walks of the art world have synesthesia.

When a friend of mine with TLE, told me he had synesthesia, I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about.

And so, I set out to find exactly what this mysterious sounding condition was…

What is Synesthesia?

First of all, Epileptic Synesthesia is pretty rare.

It occurs in 4% of temporal lobe seizures and is theoretically caused by the actual electric discharge or abnormal stimulation of the brain in a seizure.

Sight, sound, touch, taste (and, much less often, your sense of smell) sensations can occur simultaneously and also involve involuntary movement.

An example is the sensation of flashing lights, a taste, a feeling of heat rising, and a high-pitched whine.

Here are three other (rather alarming) examples:

You might taste bile, along with tingling in the left wrist, twitching of the left corner of the mouth, and muscular contractions on the left side of the body…

Or you could feel like you have a lump in your the throat, accompanied by mouth and tongue movements, flashing lights in the right upper fields and a bitter taste…

Hearing the word “five,” you might see the number “5” projected on a gray background. Letters turn into colors…colors turn into light.

It’s sort of like a bad acid (LSD) trip. Or more simply, it can feel like a cascade of different auras occurring in tandem, just before a seizure.

However, it’s important to note that just as few people with epilepsy have synesthesia, many people with synesthesia do NOT have epilepsy.

Although medicine has known of synesthesia for almost three hundred years, after interest peaked between 1860 and 1930, it was forgotten, remaining unexplained not for lack of trying, but simply because psychology and neurology were premature sciences.

Now, after decades of neglect, it’s a hot topic of interest.

And neuroscience is particularly interested in synesthesia because it might lead to a better understanding of consciousness, the nature of reality, and the relationship between reason and emotion.

But it’s still a mystery to many.

In closing, I’d like to write down some thoughts that my friend with TLE Synesthesia wrote:

“To explain seems senseless, but I was able to feel the sounds, the senses are so ENHANCED that the waves became focused confusion.

The edge is an odd place. A date, time, SURE, will say goodbye and check in no sweat and lol at ‘IT’ But the unknown is my demon now…

Losing time in large blocks is something we joke with UNTIL it happens. It’s like having a stroke but then recovering 100′s of times.”

— Rick Wichitarick

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Resources:

https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/24995-synesthesia

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/synesthesia

https://www.webmd.com/brain/what-is-synesthesia

https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar01/synesthesia

https://www.healthline.com/health/synesthesia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia_in_literature

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia#Synthetic_synesthesia

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