A Mind Is a Beautiful Thing to Waste

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Human beings are, it is generally agreed, absolutely insufferable. If you’ve spent any time around us, well, you know. We suck. A great classical sage once enumerated the flaws in our behavior: There’s definitely, definitely, definitely no logic; we’re terribly, terribly, terribly moody; there’s no map, and a compass wouldn’t help anyway, so get ready to be confused. As a human being myself, I am not exempt from these judgments: I can be angry and crabby one day, thoughtful and optimistic the next, and just weird most of the time. Also annoying. And pretentious.

But at least I don’t have fucking synesthesia.

Synesthesia, if you’ve somehow been lucky enough to escape the credulous coverage that it regularly earns in the press, is a neurological condition in which people have their senses crossed in unusual ways. They experience the letter A as red, for example, or “taste” the Beatles song “Yesterday” as a peach-like flavor, or “hear” a salty whiff of ocean breeze as a C major chord. There seems to be a genetic basis for synesthesia, so it’s not the kind of thing you’ll get from a righteous bonk on the head, which is what I want to do to people who talk about synesthesia.

There’s a ton of really cool research into synesthesia, actually: I like the idea of “cross-activation theory,” which posits that some people just have too many “wires” in their brains, connecting what for most people are unrelated, or only loosely related, areas. You see something, and your taste pathways happen to be activated along with your visual ones. It reminds me a little of a theory that says déjà vu occurs when our brains accidentally “write” an incident into both our short-term memory and our long-term memory at the same time, tricking us into thinking what we’re experiencing now we’ve experienced before. Brains are fascinating organs; you should count yourself lucky if you have one.

What bothers me about synesthesia—or, really, synesthesics—is the inconsistency of their experiences. Because it’s not like they all experience the letter A as red. Some see it as blue, or mauve, or polkadot or whatever. The Beatles might be just peachy, but so might the Rolling Stones. There’s definitely, definitely, definitely no logic here, just the unique cross-sensory experiences of unique individuals who share a particular neurological condition. Which is disappointing! Because if they were consistent, if they all saw A as green, then that might tell the rest of us something about how the sensory elements we all experience are connected. I would love to know that A was, objectively, green and salty and velvet-fuzzy. Instead, it’s green and salty and velvet-fuzzy to, like, one dude. So who cares?

Press accounts care. They routinely describe synesthesia as “a superpower” and fawn over those who experience it, as if there were some profundity attached to their irreproducible sensory connections. Probably, reporters are just happy to recite the names of the many artists and musicians who have synesthesia of one form or another: David Hockney, Franz Liszt, Tori Amos, Beyoncé, Charli XCX, Nikola Tesla, Vladimir Nabokov, Marilyn Monroe. No doubt synesthesia informs or informed those artists’ work in myriad ways, but my theory is that synesthesics become artists because only other artists would put up with their bloviating about synesthesia.

After the ad—which you should definitely click—I’m going to do that thing where I introduce a seemingly unrelated topic, complain about that for several paragraphs, and then bring it back in touch with the original one. After the jump!

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The Afterlife? Oh, Please.

It’s very easy to make this all sound silly, so I’ll try to be simple and direct: For almost 60 years now, the University of Virginia’s medical school has had a Department of Perceptual Studies, whose faculty—actual doctors—study the prospect of life after death. Or as the New York Times story a week ago put it, “the survival of consciousness after death.” This could mean a “ghost” somehow communicating to the living the combination to a lock left in a desk drawer, as the department’s late founder hoped to be able to do. Or it could mean reincarnation, and the chance that we, the living, might be able to recall the details of a previous existence.

I’m sure you can sense my skepticism already. (Does it taste green? Does it smell like the number 17?) As we all know, I’m a well-established unbeliever.

Which is why I appreciate the rigor with which the scientists seem to be going about their work. They themselves seem doubtful of children who’ve grown up in cultures where reincarnation is a tenet of religious belief, and their data-gathering appears to be meticulous. The former head of the department built a database of 2,500 cases, says the Times:

And:

The researchers are very careful to note that none of this is necessarily proof of anything at all—merely evidence that, well, there’s more worth looking into. Their goal doesn’t seem to be the kind of hard, “Yes, Virginia, there is an afterlife” answer that some might yearn for. As one of the doctors puts it, he’s hoping the research, if not the proof, will “impact how people view their lives.”

Again, I’m trying not to pooh-pooh all of this. If belief in reincarnation helps you get through this life a little more comfortably, then who am I to tell you you’re wrong? Just don’t ask me to believe likewise.

My problem with this research is simple: It’s boring. That is, it takes something grand and mysterious and magical—the afterlife! an afterlife! a potentially endless cycle of rebirth!—and through careful, diligent scientific effort transforms it into the palest, blandest encapsulation of the human experience.

To imagine that there is an afterlife is to imagine that there are forces guiding our existence, enabling us to remain somehow ourselves even after the meat sacks fail and rot. Are those forces God in the Judeo-Christian-Muslim sense? A universal directive of the Buddhist variety? The malicious whims of multidimensional beings? Whatever they are, I’d like to think the afterlife they’re creating for us is more than just a ghost communicating a lock’s combination or the weird, fast-fading “memories” of a chatty kindergartner. Those expressions of “life after death” feel so dull, so predictable—well beneath the powers of a Supreme Being—and this kind of research robs us of our capacity for wonder, for acknowledging that some things might remain beyond what we can ever comprehend, and replaces that soul-dazzling experience with mere comfort. If I were a believer, I would hope my god had a better afterlife in store than to plunk my author bio into the brain of a kid who needs to be toilet trained.

And so it goes with synesthesia as well: The gawky focus on the outward manifestation distracts us from the magnificent workings of the brain itself—the way it can work around errors, alterations, and simple differences to produce new connections and experiences. So much of how we see the world happens not [waves hands around] out there but [points at wrinkling, balding skull] in here, and the investigation into how consciousness happens, and why we think the way we do, only deepens the mystery.

I may be a skeptic, an atheist, an over-analytical dweeb, but I still want to maintain a sense of wonder at what we know, what we don’t know, and what we can never truly understand. I want to be amazed. What color is that feeling? 🪨🪨🪨

It’s Good and I Like It: The Good Place

The Good Place debuted about eight years ago, and it’s still the best sitcom ever made about the afterlife, moral philosophy, and frozen yogurt. The gist: Eleanor Shellstrop (Kristen Bell) dies and wakes up in what she’s told is “the Good Place,” a wonderful world for those who’ve led wonderful lives. Thing is, Eleanor quickly realizes there’s been a mixup—she’s a terrible person, a self-described “Arizona trash bag,” and if she’s caught, she might get sent to “the Bad Place.” The show’s four seasons cover an incredible amount of ground, from Heaven to Hell, from Australia to IHOP, and the series manages to bring itself to an ending that is simultaneously life-affirming, death-affirming, and brilliantly hilarious. Take it sleazy, my friends.

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