Hearing Colors, Seeing Sounds: A Psychologist Explains ‘Synesthesia’ (2024)

FAQs

How do you explain synesthesia? ›

Synesthesia is when your brain routes sensory information through multiple unrelated senses, causing you to experience more than one sense simultaneously. Some examples include tasting words or linking colors to numbers and letters.

While synesthetes sometimes report seeing colors projected in space, they do not confuse their synesthetic colors with real colors in the external world. Rather, they report that they are simultaneously aware of the external color and also the internal, synesthetic color: As C relates ... "It is difficult to explain...

What Is Synesthesia? Synesthesia is when you hear music, but you see shapes. Or you hear a word or a name and instantly see a color. Synesthesia is a fancy name for when you experience one of your senses through another.

So, for example, people who have auditory visual synaesthesia have sounds of different types; it could be voices, it could be musical notes, it could be musical genres, evoking very specific and consistent experiences in the visual domain.

Synesthesia is a neurological condition whereby stimulation of one sense or perceptual stream results in the subjective experience of a different perceptual stream. For example, in one form of synesthesia, auditory stimulation results both in the sensation of sound and the visual sensation of a shape.

Research shows that synesthetes tend to have more vivid mental imagery than non-synesthetes. Some say this is associated with greater connectivity in the brain. Synesthetes also demonstrate more creative thinking, discovering that metaphors come easily.

Though we're no closer to discovering a true sixth sense, research suggests that synesthesia may confer some sensory enhancements. Some scientists posit, for example, that synesthetes are better at distinguishing between smells as well as between colors.

So far, we know women are between 3 and 8 times more likely to have synesthesia than men, and it is more frequent in artists and people with a great creative sense, such as musicians or painters.

For example, grapheme-color synesthetes tend to associate A with red, E with yellow or white, I with black or white, and O with white [17, 18]. An open question about color synesthesia is whether it is a form of low-level or high-level perception.

Some of the rarest are reported to be auditory–tactile, mirror-touch, and lexical–gustatory. There is research to suggest that the likelihood of having synesthesia is greater in people with autism spectrum condition.

Can synesthesia go away? ›

The physical trauma of a brain injury can reorganize neural connections in the brain. In very rare occurrences, this may cause senses to link together. Acquired synesthesia is distinct from developmental synesthesia in a few ways. For one, it may not be as consistent and may even go away over time.

The phenomenon--its name derives from the Greek, meaning "to perceive together"--comes in many varieties. Some synesthetes hear, smell, taste or feel pain in color. Others taste shapes, and still others perceive written digits, letters and words in color.

What is synesthesia? Synesthesia is a rare sensory trait shared by about 4% of the population, and it comes in many forms. People who “see” or associate letters and numbers with specific colors have grapheme-color synesthesia, and it's the most common form.

The condition occurs from increased communication between sensory regions and is involuntary, automatic, and stable over time. While synesthesia can occur in response to drugs, sensory deprivation, or brain damage, research has largely focused on heritable variants comprising roughly 4% of the general population.

Synesthesia is a phenomenon where experiencing one sense (or cognitive pathway) results in the experience of another one. So you might "see" the letter B (typically uppercase and lowercase) as red or hear a word that makes you taste a certain flavor [source: Ramachandran and Hubbard].

It has been suggested that synesthesia develops during childhood when children are intensively engaged with abstract concepts for the first time. This hypothesis—referred to as semantic vacuum hypothesis—could explain why the most common forms of synesthesia are grapheme-color, spatial sequence, and number form.

Synesthesia occurs more commonly in individuals fulfilling criteria for an autism spectrum diagnosis than in the general population. It is associated with autistic traits and autism-related perceptual processing characteristics, including a more detail-focused attentional style and altered sensory sensitivity.

In literature, synesthesia refers to an author's blending of human senses to describe an object. Phrases like a “loud dress” or a “chilly gaze” blend our sensory modalities.