what is synesthesia and its affect on daily life? what happens when you have it?
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Answer:
I know that the number four is yellow, but I have a friend who insists four is red.
She also says four has a motherly personality, but my four has no personality — none of my numbers do. But all of my numbers have colors, and so do my letters, days and months.
My friend and I both have synesthesia, a perceptual condition in which the stimulation of one sense triggers an automatic, involuntary experience in another sense.
Synesthesia can occur between just about any combination of senses or cognitive pathways
Synesthesia months of the year
Synesthetes — or people who have synesthesia — may see sounds, taste words or feel a sensation on their skin when they smell certain scents. They may also see abstract concepts like time projected in the space around them, like the image on the right.
Many synesthetes experience more than one form of the condition. For example, my friend and I both have grapheme-color synesthesia — numbers and letters trigger a color experience, even though my experience differs from hers.
Because her numbers have personalities, she also has a form of synesthesia known as ordinal-linguistic personification.
Scientists used to think synesthesia was quite rare, but they now think up to 4% of the population has some form of the condition.
What's it like?
Barack Obama makes calls to the troops on Thanksgiving Day
Even though his name isn't on the photo anywhere, this former president's name likely popped into your head.
David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and director of the Laboratory for Perception and Action at the Baylor College of Medicine, isn't a synesthete, but he often uses this analogy to explain the phenomenon.
When you see the photo above, you likely think "President Barack Obama" even though those words aren't written anywhere on the picture. Your brain automatically and involuntarily makes that connection, much like my brain makes a connection between the number four and the color yellow.
"It's not the same as a hallucination," Eagleman explains in the documentary "Red Mondays and Gemstone Jalapenos." "It's not actually interfering with their ability to see, so in that same way, you could picture a giant orange pumpkin sitting in front of you, but that doesn't prevent you from seeing through that and past that."
Synesthesia is a sensory phenomenon that's unrelated to memory, so if you're not a synesthete, you could teach yourself to associate a color with a certain number for example, but your brain wouldn't respond the same way a synesthete's would.
synesthesia number colors
Grapheme-color synesthetes associate certain colors with specific numbers.
For instance, someone without grapheme-color synesthesia would have a more difficult time picking out the black twos from the black fives in the image on the right.
However, if your numbers have colors, you'll see the triangle of twos almost instantly.
But this task may be even easier for some grapheme-color synesthetes.
Daniel Smilek, a psychology professor at the University of Waterloo, has identified two groups of synesthetes among those who associate colors with letters and numbers. There are projectors, those whose colors fill the printed letter in front of them, and associators who see the colors in their mind's eye, like I do.
Explanation:
Synesthesia is a condition in which one sense (for example, hearing) is simultaneously perceived as if by one or more additional senses such as sight. Another form of synesthesia joins objects such as letters, shapes, numbers or people's names with a sensory perception such as smell, color or flavor.