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Re: Musical Offering / synesthesia



Jim Morrison wrote:

Elmer/Bob makes it sound to me like Gould had the condition as well, but I
don't remember it coming up in Ostwald's or Friedrich's bios on Gould.  So
Bob, how about some clarification, did you mean to imply that Gould had
synesthesia? or perhaps someone else on the list knows more about this than
I do can respond?

<giggle> someone is feeding me hints and answers off-list ... specifically that GG detested the color red. This has a synesthetic feel to it ... everyone has likes and dislikes among the colors, but when a color has the ability to cause deep discomfort or pain in an individual ...

I think it's nearly certain that the sense we know best of Gould's, the sense with which we nearly entirely associate him, sound, was just the tip of his sensory iceberg, the sense he chose and disciplined himself to be his artistic passport to others. Early on, he probably sensed it was best to limit his artistic endeavors and communications with others of his species to one single, simple sense that already had a long tradition of accepted, familiar conventions: classical music, the piano. But I've always sensed that everything that Gould did and said seemed to have deeper and somewhat concealed sensory dimensions for him.

A phrase keeps popping up in my head. I've been reading lately about the self-taught Indian mathematical semimystical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan (1887-1920). His Cambridge colleague Littlewood once remarked that "every positive integer was one of his personal friends." I sense deeply that every component of music which most of us ordinarily think of as technical or mechanical likewise elicited strong personal feelings from and vivid relationships with Gould.

Thanks for the MIT synesthesia link, Jim!

Elmer