We're All a Little Synaesthetic: How Practice Shapes the Way You See the World

We tend to think of synaesthesia as a rare wiring quirk. Someone hears a piano note and sees a colour. Someone reads the number seven and it's always red. It sounds like a neurological curiosity - something that happens to a small percentage of people, and not to the rest of us.

The more interesting version of the idea, and the one I think is actually true, is that synaesthesia isn't really an exception. It's a spectrum, and most of us sit on it somewhere without noticing.

A spectrum, not an exception

There's a TEDx talk by Jamie Ward, who researches synaesthesia at the University of Sussex, that puts this well: The Curious World of Synaesthesia. The strong, involuntary forms - tasting shapes, seeing sound as colour - are genuinely rare. But milder cross-sensory associations turn out to be almost universal. Most people, asked to match a spiky shape or a round shape to a made-up word, will agree on which one is "kiki" and which one is "bouba," without being able to explain why. Somewhere underneath conscious thought, sound, shape and feeling are already talking to each other.

What interests me isn't the rare, dramatic version. It's the ordinary one. What we do with our attention, hour after hour, year after year, doesn't just sharpen a skill. It builds a lens. And once that lens is built, we don't only use it for the activity we built it for. We start seeing the whole world through it.

Learning to see through a field

Someone drawn to visual art, presumably by some natural gift for seeing, spends years looking closely at colour, composition and light. Over time they don't just get better at painting. They start understanding the whole world through sight - a face, a room, a piece of news, all read first through how it looks.

Someone who spends a career in finance starts to perceive the world as numbers, and as the movement of energy and money through systems. Ask them about a company, a relationship between two countries, even a family, and there's a good chance the first thing they reach for is the flow of value between the parts.

Many of us now spend hours a day in front of a screen: a flat, three-dimensional world rendered inside a box. That shapes something too, quietly, in how we come to expect the world outside the box to behave and be navigated.

None of this is really a choice we made once. It's built out of repetition, the same way any prediction the brain relies on gets built - through hours spent, not through a decision made.

My own language is movement

I notice this most clearly in myself through dance. The more hours I've spent moving, the more I've started to experience the world as movement. I understand other people through the way they embody themselves. Sounds have a particular movement or bodily feel to them. When I learn a new concept, I don't just think it - I feel it as movement in space, with a particular quality and shape of its own. For me, synaesthesia is a kind of connection and immediacy: eyes, ears, nose, mouth, the internal feel of the body, all moving together at once rather than arriving as separate reports.

This comes alive especially when I'm creating a performance somewhere new.

There's a piece I did on a bridge in Leipzig, the Sachsenbrücke, largely improvised. I'd never met or worked with the musicians before. I hadn't set foot on that bridge before that day. What moved me was the whole scene: the spring trees lining the river, cyclists passing through the middle of the bridge, dried branches left over from winter that I ended up picking up and using in the piece itself.

I danced for thirty minutes and went somewhere with it - taking in all these flavours of sensory experience and translating them directly into movement, under the title "The Birth of the Universe." The musicians were experimental, full of screeches, bangs and dissonant sound, in keeping with the Butoh style the piece leaned into, and that sound shaped the performance as deeply as anything I brought to it myself. People watching were mostly shocked by how raw it was; some were clearly moved. One clip of it ended up going properly viral - over a million views - which still surprises me more than it probably should.

None of that came from deciding, in advance, "I will now interpret this bridge as dance." It came from years of hours spent letting movement become the way I metabolise experience, until a bridge, some trees, a stranger's cymbal crash and a pile of dead branches simply arrived as movement, unbidden.

This isn't fixed

The important thing about all of this is that it isn't fixed. It's not that some people are born seeing the world as colour, or numbers, or movement, while the rest of us are stuck with whatever we started with. This is something we can actively cultivate.

If you go to dance or movement classes and keep returning your attention there, you start living more and more inside that way of perceiving. The same is true of any field practised with real hours behind it. What we do, over and over, is quietly voting on which lens gets stronger. If you're curious why repetition changes perception this reliably, and not just skill, I've written more about the mechanism behind it here - it's really the same process, just running on a different kind of practice.

Choosing the lens

This is where it gets interesting for meditation, and for Vipassana specifically.

Most of the examples above are lenses we built without choosing to. Nobody decides at nineteen, "I will now perceive everything through finance." It happens through hours, the way any deeply worn habit happens. What Vipassana practice adds isn't another lens to stack on top of the others. It's the capacity to notice that you're seeing through a lens at all - and, having noticed it, the freedom to loosen your grip on it or set it down for a while.

That's close to what the tradition means by sensory clarity and equanimity: clarity lets you actually see the lens you're using rather than mistaking it for reality itself, and equanimity is what lets you hold it lightly instead of needing it to be the only true way of seeing. Practised this way, meditation doesn't compete with dance, or art, or any other way of metabolising the world. It sits underneath all of them, as the thing that notices they're there and gives you some say in when to use which one. It's part of what I mean when I talk about there being no single, fixed vantage point running the show - more of us is built out of these moving parts than we tend to assume.

What has your practice already built

So the real question probably isn't whether you have synaesthesia. In the broad sense, you do - everyone does, to some degree.

The more useful question is what you've already spent thousands of hours doing, without ever asking what it was quietly teaching you to see. And whether, now that you can see the lens is there, you'd like a say in choosing it.