This summer, while drinking beers at a folk festival, I had a super interesting conversation with my brother-in-law, Peter, and a musician friend of his. It was sooo neat. Basically, I was told that some people experience things in the world through other senses. For example, a person can taste a word or see shapes to music. Weird? I thought so. But the conversation kept going on and had so many different imaginative scenarios. Since then I've thought about it a few times and wondered what it would be like.
Well, here I am, researching how to make dog biscuits and I heard on the radio about this condition. It has a name! I really had no idea about this. So neat!
Synesthesia (found on wikipedia)
Synesthesia is a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. In one common form of synesthesia, known as
grapheme → color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia,
letters or
numbers are perceived as inherently colored, while in
ordinal linguistic personification, numbers, days of the week and months of the year evoke personalities. In spatial-sequence, or
number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be "farther away" than 1990), or may have a (three-dimensional) view of a year as a map (clockwise or counterclockwise). Yet another recently identified type, visual motion → sound synesthesia, involves hearing sounds in response to visual motion and flicker. While cross-sensory
metaphors (e.g., "loud shirt," "bitter wind" or "prickly laugh") are sometimes described as "synesthetic," true neurological synesthesia is involuntary. It is estimated that synesthesia could possibly be as prevalent as 1 in 23 persons across its range of variants. Synesthesia runs strongly in families, but the precise mode of inheritance has yet to be ascertained. Synesthesia is also sometimes reported by individuals under the influence of
psychedelic drugs, after a
stroke, during a
temporal lobe epilepsy seizure, or as a consequence of
blindness or
deafness. Synesthesia that arises from such non-genetic events is referred to as "adventitious synesthesia" to distinguish it from the more common congenital forms of synesthesia. Adventitious synesthesia involving drugs or stroke (but not blindness or deafness) apparently only involves sensory linkings such as sound → vision or touch → hearing; there are few, if any, reported cases involving culture-based, learned sets such as
graphemes,
lexemes, days of the week, or months of the year.
Although synesthesia was the topic of intensive scientific investigation in the late 1800s and early 1900s, it was largely abandoned by scientific research in the mid-20th century, and has only recently been rediscovered by modern researchers.
Psychological research has demonstrated that synesthetic experiences can have measurable behavioral consequences, while
functional neuroimaging studies have identified differences in patterns of brain activation (for recent reviews see). Many people with synesthesia use their experiences to aid in their creative process, and many non-synesthetes have attempted to create works of art that may capture what it is like to experience synesthesia. Psychologists and neuroscientists study synesthesia not only for its inherent interest, but also for the insights it may give into cognitive and perceptual processes that occur in synesthetes and non-synesthetes alike.
I blatently plagerized this from Wikipedia so if you want to look more of this up or quote it, don't start here.
