Synæsthesia
“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.”
– Synesthetic subject report
- From the Greek σύν (syn), “with,” and αἴσθησις (aisthēsis), “sensation.”
- Synesthesia is when a sensation experienced by means of one sense translates itself as also being experienced through another sense.
- Examples: Grapheme → color synesthesia is the phenomenon in which one sees letters and numbers as being inherently colored.
- Ordinal linguistic personification is a form of synesthesia in which numbers, days of the week and months “evoke personailities.”
- With spatial-sequence synesthesia, numbers and such are seen at different locations in space or distances from the person perceiving them.
- One with lexical → gustatory synesthesia tastes a taste when hearing certain sounds.
- Visual motion → sound synesthesia is a form in which one hears sounds when seeing visual motion.
- Last example: In sound → color synesthesia, people see color when they hear sound. Different notes and pitches evoke different colors.
- About 1 in 23 people have these cross-sensory experiences.
- Usually, synestheisa is passed on genetically, but people who have taken drugs, are blind, are deaf, are epileptic or have suffered a stroke sometimes experience it as well. In the latter cases, it is called “adventitious synesthesia.”
Someone was talking about synesthesia the other day. Was it Will? Craig? I remember them describing the way synesthetes see numbers.
- For all the varieties of synesthesia one may experience, there are some overarching similarities:
- It is an automatic, involuntary response.
- It involves much affect and is memorable.
- The images have a definite “location,” though recent research has found that sometimes the experiences are just “known” as opposed to seen or felt or heard every single time.
- Synesthetes aren’t necessarily very imaginitive people, they are “generic” and “consistent.”
- Apparently Pharrell Williams and John Mayer have it. Nabokov did as well.
- Synesthesia, despite being, technically, a neurological thing, is not linked to other psychiatric or neurological abnormalities. Neurological here just means “of the brain” as opposed to having the negative connotations it often does.
- The experiences are rarely less than pleasant or neutral.
- To my understanding, synesthesia does not encompass more than 2 senses at a time.
- Grapheme → color and days of the week → color are the most common.
While we’re on the subject of neurology, let me just share this story that’s finally losing the spot it held this week as “The most important/ exciting thing that’s happened to me this year.” My hand’s been asleep for a couple of weeks and so I went to the neurologist to see what might be the cause. The doctor put metal on my hands and arms and gave me electric shocks! Can you believe it? I do because I was there, but I still can’t get over it.
