“What would be truly surprising would be to find that sound could not suggest colour, that colours could not evoke the idea of a melody, and that sound and colour were unsuitable for the translation of ideas, seeing that things have always found their expression through a system of reciprocal analogy.” Charles Baudelaire

A simple definition of synesthesia is that it is a “crosstalking” or overlapping of sensory experiences that for most people remain separate.

Researchers find a higher proportion of creative people are synesthetes.

The image is from the book “The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science.”

The publisher explains that synesthesia occurs “when two or more senses cooperate in perception. Once dismissed as imagination or delusion, metaphor or drug-induced hallucination, the experience of synesthesia has now been documented by scans of synesthetes’ brains…”

“Creativity is always collaborative, even when you’re alone.” Keith Sawyer

“Artists work best alone.” Steve Wozniak

Different kinds of creative expression have different needs in terms of solitude versus collaboration.

In my post Creative collaboration, for example, actor Keith Powell of the TV series ”30 Rock” comments about the atmosphere of the writers room for the show – a common example of collaboration in the creative development of many art and entertainment projects. Movies and TV shows involve dozens, even hundreds of people at a time.

In the same article, I note that Professor Keith Sawyer writes in his book Group Genius: The Creative Power of Collaboration that “creativity is always collaborative, even when you’re alone.”

Listening to Walter Isaacson (in his interview with Charlie Rose) about his new bio of Steve Jobs, one of his comments that caught my attention was this [paraphrased]:

“The deep emotionalism surprised me. He’d be talking and I looked up and there were tears… He was talking about the ad campaign ‘Here’s to the Crazy Ones’ and he got very emotional.”

Here is a quote from the bio, by Joe Nocera, then a writer for Esquire, describing Jobs’ intensity at a NeXT computer staff meeting:

“It’s not quite right to say that he is sitting through this staff meeting because Jobs doesn’t sit through much of anything; one of the ways he dominates is through sheer movement. One moment he’s kneeling in his chair, the next minute he’s slouching in it; the next he has leaped out of his chair entirely and is scribbling on the blackboard directly behind him. He is full of mannerisms. He bites his nails. He stares with unnerving earnestness at whoever is speaking. His hands, which are slightly and inexplicably yellow, are in constant motion.”

“Highly sensitive people are all creative by definition.”

Elaine Aron, PhD adds that it is “because we process things so thoroughly and notice so many subtleties and emotional meanings that we can easily put two unusual things together.”

Sensory sensitivity also comes into play in many creative endeavors. When Therese Borchard of Beliefnet interviewed me (her Huffington Post column has the title 5 Gifts of Being Highly Sensitive), one of the “gifts” I mentioned is the richness of sensory detail that life provides.

The subtle shades of texture in clothing, and foods when cooking, the sounds of music or even traffic or people talking, fragrances and colors of nature – all of these may be more intense for highly sensitive people.

After working for ten years as an actor, Karen Moncrieff became a screenwriter. In a Writers Guild magazine article, she notes “Writing felt so comfortable in a way that acting never really did. With writing, I was using all parts of myself, all of my skills.”

She wrote [and directed] her powerful film Blue Car in a way as “a reaction to films I had seen, like Stealing Beauty, a very idealized view of a girl’s coming of age. I wanted to get inside the woman’s experience and tell the story from her own perspective.”

But, the article notes, writing the script “became a wrenching, emotional experience for Moncrieff, who often, drained after composing a scene, would curl her head in her husband’s lap and cry.”

“Most inventors and engineers I’ve met are like me. They’re shy and they live in their heads. The very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone…” Steve Wozniak

In an earlier post – The Creative Personality: Both Extroverted and Introverted – I quoted Dr. Linda Silverman, director of the Gifted Development Center: “Introverts are wired differently from extraverts and they have different needs.

“Extraverts get their energy from interaction with people and the external world. Introverts get their energy from within themselves; too much interaction drains their energy and they need to retreat from the world to recharge their batteries.”

But creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi also says that creative people “seem to exhibit both traits simultaneously.”

Neuroscientist Rex Jung notes “Creativity is a complex concept; it’s not a single thing.”

That quote comes from a recent New York Times article, which comments that one of his studies “suggests that creativity prefers to take a slower, more meandering path than intelligence.”

“The brain appears to be an efficient superhighway that gets you from Point A to Point B” when it comes to intelligence, Dr. Jung explained.

“But in the regions of the brain related to creativity, there appears to be lots of little side roads with interesting detours, and meandering little byways.”

The article adds, “Although intelligence and skill are generally associated with the fast and efficient firing of neurons, subjects who tested high in creativity had thinner white matter and connecting axons that have the effect of slowing nerve traffic in the brain.

“This slowdown in the left frontal cortex, a region where emotional and cognitive abilities are integrated, Dr. Jung suggested, “might allow for the linkage of more disparate ideas, more novelty and more creativity.”

His film “The Tree of Life” just won the Palme d’Or, the highest prize at the Cannes Film Festival, but director Terrence Malick chose not to appear in person to accept it.

Shyness is one of a number of personal qualities that Malick shares with many other creative and gifted people.

In a recent profile article, writer Steven Zeitchik notes that friends and collaborators ‘paint a portrait of the reclusive filmmaker as a complicated and contradictory man.’

“It is also good every so often to go away and relax a little for when you come back to your work your judgment will be better, since to remain constantly at work causes you to deceive yourself.” Leonardo da Vinci

Of course, everyone can benefit from getting rest and relaxation, but one of the common personality traits for many, if not most, creative people is high sensitivity – which may require that we get even more rest and renewal.

That may be a reason that Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi noted in his list of ten traits of the creative personality, “Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest.”

He found that many creative people he studied and interviewed worked “long hours, with great concentration, while projecting an aura of freshness and enthusiasm.

In an interview when she was about 15, actor Claire Danes said, “I never thought of myself as shy, and then I realized I am kind of shy; I’ve just built defenses to hide it.” [Photo from her movie Temple Grandin.]

I have often been struck by how many apparently very self-assured performers and actors have been shy or introverted as children. Many still are, as adults.

Musician Gwen Stefani is another example. She was a “shy girl who spent most of her time in a bedroom plastered with Marilyn Monroe posters, who nevertheless assumed she was destined for greatness,” according to a UK newspaper profile.