Language as Synesthesia
Primordial mushrooms aside, what I find most creditable in McKenna’s hypothesis is the idea that language was born of synesthesia. Synesthesia, you’ll recall, is the conjoining of sensations; where words produce flavors, or musical notes make visual color. While many people experience this phenomena naturally, it can likewise be activated by psychedelic substances.
I really only came across the idea of synesthesia giving rise to language, like, yesterday so I am late to this conversation and hardly understand its full implications. But the idea, as I see it, is that not only does language develop from synesthesia, but that language is itself an attenuated form of synesthesia. McKenna spoke of primordial synesthesia in the 90s, a time in which the phenomena was ignored, if not derided by the scientific community. Now it appears to be the soup du jour, if my cursory research is any indication: a recent science paper claims that synesthesia supports learning and the BBC has a similar report on how synesthetes have an easier time learning a second language; yet another paper claims that language and synesthesia are intimately related.
Suffice to say that, to stick with the Freudian maneuver, any theory regarding language acquisition at the dawn of time, should apply equally well to the child entering language today. This after all is the first and oldest conversion and one that happens all the time—the profound transition from being infans, and totally without language, to being immersed in words to the point where there is, as they say, nothing outside of the text. As it turns out recent research has shown that babies are universally born into a state of high synesthesia due to the underdeveloped partitions between brain functions; this chromatic symphony can last for up to the first six to eight months and sometimes much longer. It is in this special state that mother brings the first words to baby.
A year ago I had imagined that baby’s psyche emerged from out of rainbows. This vision may not be that far from the truth…
