Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiae or synaesthesiae), from the ancient Greek σύν (syn), "together," and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), "sensation," is a neurological condition 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.
(...) 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 result ofblindness or deafness.(...)
- Grapheme-color synesthesia
- Grapheme-color synesthesia
In one of the most common forms of synesthesia, grapheme → color synesthesia, individual letters of the alphabet and numbers (collectively referred to as graphemes), are "shaded" or "tinged" with a color. While different individuals usually do not report the same colors for all letters and numbers, studies with large numbers of synesthetes find some commonalities across letters (e.g., A is likely to be red).
As a child, Pat Duffy told her father, "I realized that to make an R all I had to do was first write a P and draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line." Another grapheme synesthete says, "When I read, about five words around the exact one I'm reading are in color. It's also the only way I can spell. In elementary school I remember knowing how to spell the word 'priority' [with an "i" rather than an "e"] because ... an 'e' was out of place in that word because 'e's were yellow and didn't fit."
- Spatial Sequence synesthesia
A special form of the condition, in which people tend to see all numerical sequences they come across as points in space. For instance, the number 1 might be farther away and the number 2 might be closer. A new study shows that those with SSS have superior memories. They were able to recall past events and memories far better, and in far greater detail then those without the condition.
- Sound> Colour synesthesia
According to Richard Cytowic, sound → color synesthesia is "something like fireworks": voice, music, and assorted environmental sounds such as clattering dishes or dog barks trigger color and firework shapes that arise, move around, and then fade when the sound ends. For some, the stimulus type is limited (e.g., music only, or even just a specific musical key); for others, a wide variety of sounds triggers synesthesia.
Sound often changes the perceived hue, brightness, scintillation, and directional movement. Some individuals see music on a "screen" in front of their faces. Deni Simon, for whom music produces waving lines "like oscilloscope configurations—lines moving in color, often metallic with height, width and, most importantly, depth. My favorite music has lines that extend horizontally beyond the 'screen' area."
Individuals rarely agree on what color a given sound is (composers Liszt and Rimsky-Korsakov famously disagreed on the colors of music keys); however, synesthetes show the same trends as non-synesthetes do. For example, both groups say that loud tones are brighter than soft tones, and that lower tones are darker than higher tones. Synaesthetes nevertheless choose more precise colours than non-synesthetes and are more consistent in their choice of colours given a set of sounds of varying pitch, timbre and composition.
- Number Form Synesthesia
A number form is a mental map of numbers, which automatically and involuntarily appears whenever someone who experiences number-forms thinks of numbers. Number forms were first documented and named by Francis Galton in "The Visions of Sane Persons". Later research has identified them as a type of synesthesia.In particular, it has been suggested that number-forms are a result of "cross-activation" between regions of the parietal lobe that are involved in numerical cognition and spatial cognition. In addition to its interest as a form of synesthesia, researchers in numerical cognition have begun to explore this form of synesthesia for the insights that it may provide into the neural mechanisms of numerical-spatial associations present unconsciously in everyone.
- Personnification
Ordinal-linguistic personification (OLP, or personification for short) is a form of synesthesia in which ordered sequences, such as ordinal numbers, days, months and letters are associated with personalities.[ Although this form of synesthesia was documented as early as the 1890s modern research has, until recently,[ paid little attention to this form.
For example, one synesthete says, "T’s are generally crabbed, ungenerous creatures. U is a soulless sort of thing. 4 is honest, but… 3 I cannot trust… 9 is dark, a gentleman, tall and graceful, but politic under his suavity."Likewise, Cytowic's subject MT says, "I [is] a bit of a worrier at times, although easy-going; J [is] male; appearing jocular, but with strength of character; K [is] female; quiet, responsible....
For some people in addition to numbers and other ordinal sequences, objects are sometimes imbued with a sense of personality. Recent research has begun to show that alphanumeric personification co-varies with other forms of synesthesia, and is consistent and automatic, as required to be considered a form of synesthesia
- Lexical → Gustatory Synesthesia
In the rare lexical → gustatory synesthesia, individual words and the phonemes of spoken language evoke taste sensations in the mouth. According to James Wannerton, "Whenever I hear, read, or articulate (inner speech) words or word sounds, I experience an immediate and involuntary taste sensation on my tongue. These very specific taste associations never change and have remained the same for as long as I can remember."
Jamie Ward and Julia Simner have extensively studied this form of synesthesia, and have found that the synesthetic associations are constrained by early food experiences.For example, James Wannerton has no synesthetic experiences of coffee or curry, even though he consumes them regularly as an adult. Conversely, he tastes certain breakfast cereals and candies that are no longer sold.
Additionally, these early food experiences are often paired with tastes based on the phonemes in the name of the word (e.g., /I/, /n/ and /s/ trigger James Wannerton’s taste of mince) although others have less obvious roots (e.g., /f/ triggers sherbet). To show that phonemes, rather than graphemes are the critical triggers of tastes, Ward and Simner showed that, for James Wannerton, the taste of egg is associated to the phoneme /k/, whether spelled with a "c" (e.g., accept), "k" (e.g., York), "ck" (e.g., chuck) or "x" (e.g., fax). Another source of tastes comes from semantic influences, so that food names tend to taste of the food they match, and the word "blue" tastes "inky."
- Mirror Synesthesia
Thom Yorke, musician(Radiohead)
- Colour→ music
- A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu, voyelles,
- Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes.
- A, noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes
- Qui bombillent autour des puanteurs cruelles,
- Golfe d’ombre ; E, candeur des vapeurs et des tentes,
- Lance des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d’ombelles
- I, pourpres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles
- Dans la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes ;
- U, cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,
- Paix des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des rides
- Que l’alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux ;
- O, suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges,
- Silences traversés des Mondes et des Anges :
- — O l’Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux !
- Arthur Rimbaud
- Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia
- http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesth%C3%A9sie
- http://fr.wikisource.org/wiki/Voyelles/%C3%89dition_Vanier_1895
