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Analysts typically instruct novice analysands—and frequently must remind professionals—to free-associate. By this it is meant that the patient should be encouraged to allow one idea, thought, feeling, or perception to lead to another and that this second link in the chain should be verbalized. By following the chain wherever it leads, it is hoped that the outlines of unconscious beliefs, fears, and fantasies may become visible and eventually allow the patient greater control over his/her mind, and ostensibly greater happiness. Of course, free association is something of a holy grail: aimed for, but rarely achieved. The conventional interpretation of failures of free association is that the patient—who, for example, demonstrates a dearth of connected ideas—is inhibiting or repressing or voluntarily filtering his/her associated ideas. Dynamic interpretations of failures of association are therefore possible.
In contrast, it is not at all conventional to suggest that patients may differ in their capacity for association as a function of wiring differences in their brains. Synesthesia—a phenomenologically defined neurological disorder in which sensory qualities from one domain are associated with sensations in another, or with thoughts or perceptions—may offer something of a challenge to this view. In synesthesia, a patient may automatically “see” a particular color with certain numbers. For example, Daniel Tammet, who can recite the first 22,500 decimal places of pi from memory, does so by simply seeing colors and shapes associated with each number unfold in his mind's eye, and he then simply calls out the number associated with each; what for others would be an impossible feat is for him as simple as watching a movie.
In their recent study, Rouw and Scholte shed light on the neural basis for this capacity. They used diffusion tensor imaging to visualize differences in the white matter of 18 subjects with word-color synesthesia versus 18 age-matched controls. Diffusion t