Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a change in perception that comes from the Greek words syn (together) and aisthēsis (perception), meaning unified sense. In a healthy human body, eyes are for seeing, ears for hearing, noses are for smelling, mouths are for tasting, and our skin is for touching. In people suffering from synesthesia, this process is much more complex and challenging compared to a healthy person. It is a neurological condition that causes a fusion of normal unrelated senses. Namely, stimulation of one sense leads to an unintended response in one or more of the other senses. For example, a specific sound, such as a car exhaust, may produce a cheese flavor, or hearing the sound of rain produces a purple color experience. This rare condition affects about 4% of the world’s population. It is estimated that there are over 100 ways to experience it, but very few people in the world are aware that they are experiencing it.

There are many different ways of synesthesia, and it all depends on one’s perception. Some people can see and experience colors when they hear any kind of music, while others read words and may taste an unrelated food in their mouths. Another part of people may hear sounds when they look at colors or watch objects.

When you see a green car, the color you see is just a certain part of the sunlight from the car reflected in your eye. This allows your eyes to send an electrical signal called an impulse to your brain, like a current running through an electrical wire. You perceive the color green only when this signal reaches the part of your brain called the occipital cortex, which is responsible for visual stimuli. So the greenery you see isn’t actually something in the car, it’s something in your brain. This is a sense that occurs when you activate a certain part of your brain. The same process applies to the perception of other sense organs. While scientists have known about synesthesia for 200 years, researchers in psychology, neuroscience, and psycholinguistics have only recently been able to focus their attention on what impact the condition has on synesthesia’s broader cognitive function, and most importantly, what synesthesia may be. It is thought to be a result of the interaction between areas of the brain that do not interact under normal conditions. This interaction between brain regions is thought to result either from the failure of connections that normally need to be eliminated during brain development or from the disinhibition of pathways that are inhibited in the normal adult brain. According to a different study, people with temporal lobe epilepsy or who have had a head injury may develop synesthesia.

Grapheme — color synesthesia

Grapheme-color synesthesia or colored grapheme synesthesia is a form of synesthesia in which one’s perception of numbers and letters is related to the experience of color. Graphene-color synesthetes have been found to have more gray matter in their brains. Synestheticists often do not realize that their experience is unusual until they realize that other people do not have such experiences.

As does filmmaker Stephanie Morgenstern:

“A few years ago, I mentioned to a friend that I remembered phone numbers by their color. He said “So you’re a synesthete!” I hadn’t heard of synesthesia (which means something close to ‘sense-fusion’) — I only knew that numbers seemed naturally to have colors: five is blue, two is green, three is red… And music has colors too: the key of C# minor is a sharp, tangy yellow, F major is a warm brown…”

The Nobel Prize winning physicist, Richard Feynman reports:

When I see equations, I see the letters in colors — I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Emde’s book, with light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.”

Chromesthesia

Chromesthesia is another type of synesthesia in which sound involuntarily evokes an experience of color, shape, and movement. Perceiving colors while listening to music, synesthetes experience colors in addition to their normal auditory sensations. Chromesthesia can be triggered by different auditory experiences such as music, phonemes, speech and/or everyday sounds. Individuals with synesthesia have unique color pairings. However, studies to date have reported that both synesthetes and non-synesthetics associate high-pitched sounds with lighter or brighter colors and low-pitched sounds with darker colors. Individuals with chromesthesia tend to play musical instruments and tend to be more artistic than other people. For example, Franz Liszt is a musician with chromesthesia. He was telling his orchestra to play the music in “Blue Fashion”. Since chromesthesia was not a common term in Liszt’s time, people thought he was making fun of them when he referred to a color instead of a musical term.

Although synesthesia is often seen as a disease, synesthetes do not see it as a handicap. Some even see it as a height of perception, and think that this feature makes them special.

 

Sources;

Discover Your Synesthesia – What Is Synaesthesia? (2018, August 10). Synesthesia Meditation. https://synesthesia.com/blog/what-is-synesthesia/

My grapheme-color synaesthesia. (2017, August 15). Reddit. https://www.reddit.com/r/Synesthesia/comments/6twc1e/my_graphemecolor_synesthesia/

Hsy, J. (2021, June 6). Synaesthesia is not a metaphor. In the Middle. https://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2012/09/synaesthesia-is-not-metaphor.html

Simner, J. (2021, May 11). Curious Kids: Why do people with synaesthesia link senses, and how does it work? The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-why-do-people-with-synaesthesia-link-senses-and-how-does-it-work-160565

Giles, C. (2017, October 17). What it’s like to have synaesthesia: Meet the man who can taste sounds. The Independent. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/long_reads/synaesthesia-sound-taste-health-science-brain-a7996766.html

Chromesthesia. (n.d.). Vvikipedla. Retrieved June 6, 2021, from https://en.vvikipedla.com/wiki/Chromesthesia

Wikipedia contributors. (2020, December 10). Grapheme–color synaesthesia. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme%E2%80%93color_synesthesia