What is Synaesthesia (Synesthesia)?
What is the color of the letter M, the number 6, or a prelude in E-minor? How do red circles taste or sound? If you know the answer to one of these questions you probably have synesthesia. Most of us, however, do not!
"Synesthesia (Greek, syn = together + aisthesis = perception) is the involuntary physical experience of a cross-modal association. That is, the stimulation of one sensory modality reliably causes a perception in one or more different senses. Its phenomenology clearly distinguishes it from metaphor, literary tropes, sound symbolism, and deliberate artistic contrivances that sometimes employ the term "synesthesia" to describe their multisensory joinings" (Cytowic, R.E., 1995. Synesthesia: Phenomenology and Neuropsychology. Psyche, vol. 2).
Once thought to be relatively rare, the condition affects around 4% of the populations (types involving some sort of sensory experience - e.g., colour, taste, etc). Some synesthesia variants may involve experiences that are not strictly sensory (e.g., number forms - where number concepts are mapped into locations in space) are even more common (e.g., 12% for number forms).
Is synesthesia an abnormality or does it reflect cognitive and neural mechanisms common to us all? To learn more about this and some of our recent work , please see this review.
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