The Portland Synesthete Association

The PSA aims to give persons with synesthesia in the Portland metro area a chance to meet each other, discuss their experiences and interests, and perhaps create new opportunities to understand or articulate synaesthetic experience.
While it’s meant for persons with consistent synaesthetia which constitutes a significant part of their sensory experience, the secondary aim of PSA is to host events which will create dialogue between its members and the public. We will also attempt to collect resources and literature concerning synaesthetia and synesthetes.

How to apply

Send a brief email to portland.synesthete@gmail.com, no more than 1000 words, telling us a bit about yourself and explaining why you want to join. Please be specific about your sensory overlaps? (Copy this unicode arrow “→” if you want to use the standard “originating sense → synesthetic sense” notation. Otherwise just use a “>”).

Advice on Applying

One of the main ideas behind PSA is to create a context where synesthetes can discuss their experiences in greater depth and detail than in daily conversation. As in any circumstance where people are encouraged to talk about themselves, it is just as important to listen to others as it is to be honest about yourself. If this was easy stuff to discuss, I wouldn’t be trying to organize a group for it. So a certain amount of defensiveness and anxiety is understandable, but you may not be right or ready for PSA if you cannot, for whatever reason, speak openly about yourself without embellishing for effect or listen to others with a reasonable and fair combination of trust and cricitcal inquiry. Don’t worry, we’re nice people.

You don’t have to dress, act, or look a certain way to join, nor does it matter how old you are, if you are religious or not, or if you have never talked about your synesthesia before. (I don’t consider synesthesia a new-age or expressly spiritual concept, for what it’s worth. -- nw)

PSA is meant to be primarily social with an secondary interest in making serious inquiry into synesthesia. Because of this, applications will be considered on an individual basis by all members of PSA. We aim to be welcoming, but we all have to get along as well. If your application sounds good, we’ll all go out for a drink, and if we’re all still friends at the end of it, you’re in.

How to “qualify”

PSA is intended for those of us who have had consistent synaesthetic experiences for most of our lives and at least a basic ability to articulate them. It is especially interested in providing a comfortable forum to those of us whose synesthesia has significantly disrupted their lives at one time or another.

Synesthesia has only recently been widely-accepted by western medicine, and will probably remain poorly-understood for a long time. Not only does it vary greatly in intensity, but its combinations and individual manifestations seem to be without limit. Tests for certain types exist, but msot of them must be administered over a long period of time, and they’re too impersonal for this kind of thing. Like so many terms describing the brain and the senses, we use the word “synesthesia” to refer to a spectrum rather than a discreet state. Like those other terms, such as OCD, AD/HD, or Aspergers, it gets thrown around a lot and has acquired a popular meaning. Those of us who know (or are) people who have a diagnosable manifestation of any of these terms know that the difference between, say, AD/HD and restlessness is that restlessness is a malleable personality trait, but AD/HD exists, to some degree, beyond the influence of a person’s desires and rational mind.

The most common fault in discussions using these terms is to give the curious or romantic qualities of their manifestation more attention than the very real challenges they create, as if they were plot devices in a romantic comedy. We have all been distracted, but we do not all have AD/HD. (Most of us can also agree that a large number of the people who are told that they have AD/HD probably do not.) Similarly, most of us have experiences which relate one sensation to another, but this does not alone make us all synesthetes (though, conversely, there are probably more of us out there than we think.) That said, PSA aims to be open-minded and friendly, so if any of this resonates with you, please do get in touch.

Our members

So far, just me. My name’s Ním Wunnan, and I’m the “founder” of PSA. (I’ll take the quotes off when PSA has more than one member.) I am:

spacial → tactile
grapheme → color
visual → tactile
visual → auditory and auditory → tactile
(which usually takes the form of visual → auditory → tactile).

You can find out more about me at my website, www.wunnan.com.

“ Children of her type contrive the purest philosophies. Ada had worked out her own little system. Hardly a week had eleapsed since Van’s arrival when he was found worthy of being intiated in her web of wisdom. An individual’s life consisted of certain classified things: “real things” which were unfrequent and priceless, simply “things” which formed the routine stuff of life, and “ghost things,” also called “fogs,” such as fever, toothache, dreadful disappointments, and death. Three or more things occuring at the same time formed a “tower”, or if they came in immedite succession, they made a “bridge.” “Real towers” and “real bridges” were the joys of life, and when the towers came in a series, one experienced supreme ratpure; it almsot never happned, though. In some circumstances, a certain light, a neutral “thing” might look or actually become “real” or else, converwsely, it might coagulage int a fetid “fog”. When the joy and the joyless happened to be intermixed, simoultaneously or along the ramp of duration, one was confronted with “ruined towers” and “broken bridges.”

The pictorial and architectural details of her metaphysics made her nights easeir than Van’s, and that morning -- as on most mornings -- he had the sensation of returing from a much more remote and grim country than she and her sunlight had come from.

Nabokov, V. Ada, or Ardor (New York: McGraw-Hill)