Written by Sara Bozyel
Imagine yourself sitting in your room while one of the songs from your favorite band is playing on the radio, and then suddenly you get this intimate feeling that the color orange wantonly harmonizes with the song that you are listening to, or when you meet a new person you accommodate them with the number seven and the month of July regardless of the time you meet them or their birthdate, this is called the sense of synesthesia.
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Synesthesia is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory modality causes unusual experiences in a different, unstimulated modality (5). While there are many types of synesthesia, it is often described as a phenomenon in which a person experiences a sensory stimulus, such as listening to a piece of music, and their other senses simultaneously perceive the stimulus (3). For example, music heard can trigger the perception of an orange haze. It wasn't found in animals or linked to any particular personality (3). Instead, it's all about minds and benefits people by seeing the world and your reality with a colorful unique vision. Synesthesia is loosely defined as the "combination of the senses", which is simply a translation from Greek (etymology: syn - together, aesthesia - from sensation) (2). When a particular sense or part of the sensor is activated, another unrelated sense or part of the sensor is also activated (2). For example, when a person hears a sound, they immediately see a color or shape in their "mind eye" (2). The estimated occurrence of synesthesia ranges from less than 1 in 20,000 to as common as 1 in 200 (4). People with synesthesia are called synesthetes (2).
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Synesthetes hear colors, feel sounds, and taste shapes. They report having an unusually good memory for things like phone numbers, security codes, and polysyllabic anatomical terminology because numbers, letters, and syllables come in such a unique range of colors. However, synesthetes also report making calculation errors because 6 and 8 have the same color, and they claim to be biased towards couples they meet because their first name's colors are so ugly (4). For too long, synesthetes have been dismissed for having overactive imaginations, confusing memories for perceptions, or taking figurative speech too literally (4). However, recent research has documented the reality of synesthesia and is starting to make progress toward understanding what might cause such unusual perceptions.
It has been documented that synesthetic colors are perceived in the same way that non-synesthetic individuals perceive colors (4). Thus, synaesthetic color differences may facilitate performance in tasks where color differences enable performance for non-synesthetes and may impair performance in tasks where color differences impair performance for non-synthetics (4). In such a task, people are requested –as soon as possible– to say the color of the ink a word is printed on, like "pink" or "blue." For lexical synesthetes, these words take on unique colors. Responses are fast when the synesthetic color matches the ink color. However, when the synesthetic color is incompatible with the ink color, responses are slow, possibly because subjects need to resolve the discrepancy in which color name to respond to. While such results suggest that synesthesia is automatic in the sense that they cannot turn off their synesthesia experience even when it interferes with a task, these results do not reveal whether synesthetic colors are perceptions or memories (4).
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The types of synesthesia are a wonderful reminder of the kinds of consciousness. Synesthesia is the interconnection of the brain's senses in a small proportion of the population (6). This cross-connection of the brain's senses is real and is experienced in all sorts of different ways. Estimates place the number of synesthesia variants between 50 and 150, but here are some of the most interesting ones (6). As you read this, marvel at how fundamentally our experience of the world differs between types of synesthesia, whether you are a synesthete or not.
1. Lexical-Gustatory Synesthesia:
One of the rarest types of synesthesia is when people have associations between words and tastes. As experienced by less than 0.2 percent of the population, these individuals may find that speech causes an overflow of taste in their tongues (6). It can be not just tasted but also judged by its temperature, texture, and even location on the tongue. A synesthete being tested finds the word prison," for example, the taste of cold, hard bacon.
2. Mirror-Touch Synesthesia:
Imagine watching someone reach out and touch their chin, but feeling a touch on your own. This is mirror-touch synesthesia when you feel the same feeling another person feels. The prevalence of this type of synesthesia is relatively high, at around 1.6 percent (6). Even among those without synesthesia, about 30 percent of people have some form or a mild form of it, as they feel pain when they see someone else being hurt (6). It may be an elevated version of at least part of the process of how we empathize with others.
3. Misophonia:
While many types of synesthesia are harmless, and some people think they improve their lives, not all forms are beneficial. Misophonia, literally "hatred of sound," is a condition in which sounds trigger strong negative emotions such as disgust and anger (6). It is extremely rare and can result from problematic connections between the auditory cortex and the limbic system (6). Commonly reported among microphones are strong negative feelings in response to the sounds of other people eating and breathing.
4. Personification:
It is where sequential sequences like numbers, days of the week, or letters all have certain personalities and even appearances (6). Monday may be an angry, depressed young man wearing a red shirt; Tuesday may be an extroverted older woman who talks a lot; etc.
5. Number-Form Synesthesia:
First documented more than a century ago by the wise Sir Francis Galton, this is where numbers automatically appear in the mind as mental maps. Usually, these maps are individual for specific synesthesias. This type of synesthesia may be due, in part, to the relative proximity of the brain's regions for processing numbers and spatial representations (6). It is thought that as many as 20 percent of the population may have number-form synesthesia or related experiences, meaning that days, months, or the alphabet take on a spatial form in the mind (6).
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6. Chromesthesia:
Chromesthesia is the sound-to-color synesthesia that one of the most famous artists, Wassily Kandinsky, is interested in and which many of his paintings try to evoke.
Here is one of his paintings, called “Yellow, Red and Blue”:
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People with chromaesthesia hear sounds, and these cause them to automatically and unintentionally experience colors (6). To someone who hasn't experienced it, it may seem strange or distracting that you suddenly see colors while listening to music, but for synesthetes who grew up with it, it is like an everyday experience. Some with chromesthesia find that colors are projected into the space in front of them; others see it in their minds eyes (6). Some acquire chromesthesia only for spoken words, which are influenced by the accent, pitch, and intonation of the voice; others just for music.
For psychologists, interest in synesthesia extends far beyond the study of the few individuals who experience the phenomenon. "It tells us something about the nature of perception and what makes things perceptually similar to one another. Synesthesia may help us understand how the concept of similarity is embedded within the nervous system" (1). It is not a disorder, and it is a part of nature.
References:
Carpenter, S. (2001, March). Everyday Fantasia: The world of synesthesia. https://www.apa.org. https://www.apa.org/monitor/mar01/synesthesia.
Gross, V. (n.d.). Synesthesia project | FAQ. Boston University. https://www.bu.edu/synesthesia/faq/.
Human verification. (2023, March 23). Human Verification. https://www.betterhelp.com/advice/synesthesia/the-many-types-of-synesthesia-explained/.
Neckar, M., & Bob, P. (2014, June 25). Neuroscience of synesthesia and cross-modal associations. PubMed.
Palmeri, T. J., Blake, R. B., & Marois, R. (2006, September 11). What is synesthesia? Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/what-is-synesthesia/.
Dean, J. (2023, March 9). Synesthesia: Types, examples, causes, symptoms. PsyBlog. https://www.spring.org.uk/2023/03/types-of-synesthesia.php.
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