Synesthesia is a phenomenon that involves feeling, through the perception of a visual, tactile or auditory stimulus, a perceptual sensation that accompanies it, for example, one of the most common forms of synesthes is to associate numbers, days of the week or months. with a certain color The person perceives them accompanied by a color, always the same for each number or day.
Not many people do, but it’s more common than we think. In fact, many people are unaware that their way of perceiving certain stimuli is different from that of others, until when they talk to someone they realize that it is not the “normal”.
- This phenomenon is not lived as unpleasant.
- Even the kinesthetics do not imagine the world without perceiving it in this way.
- For all of them it would seem very poor.
- In this way we are not talking about a pathology.
- But in a different and richer way of perceiving the world.
There are many forms of synesthesia. For example, there are people who, when they listen to music, perceive colors even if it is not a hallucination, it is not that they see colors and believe that they are part of reality, but that when they listen to a song, they are flooded with a stream of colors, each color is associated with a specific musical note.
A scientist, Jamie Ward, says that kinesthesia experiences the world in an extraordinary way, has an extra sense of the stimuli that surround them, can words evoke flavors, each number a certain color, pain can also be accompanied by a taste or color Does touching a surface evoke a sensation?In this way, there are different ways to feel this feeling.
Perceiving the world around you in such a rich way can foster creativity, it is beneficial for those engaged in art, because they can express through their works how the world presents themselves to them.
A New York artist, Carol Steen, uses this condition to inspire her creations. This woman says she can observe the color, taste and smell of pain. As inspiration, he uses acupuncture to awaken and impress these sensations in his works of art.
Is there evidence of famous synesthetics like the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who claimed that for him the combination of letters?NZSPYGV?formed the rainbow. Other examples include physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feyman and philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Synesthesia is now known to have a biological and genetic component, although the genes in question have not yet been able to be explained. Between parents and children, it is possible to inherit synesthesia, but sensations do not necessarily have to be the condition is inherited, but not the way of living it.
At this point that among twins it has been proven that their experiences are not the same and even that one of the brothers can be synesthetic and the other does not, we can also mention the case of parents who do not feel this sensation, even if they carry the gene, but the child expresses it.
Synesthetic children often discover their status in adolescence: when they talk about a sound or a number, they realize that not everyone sees them. For example, according to Ward, a child described the sounds through colors, saying that frogs used to croak brown. , but that by day sounded blue, referring to the sound of that highest day.
There is one area in our brain that handles color perception: V4. Julia Nunn, in an experiment with 12 people, observed by MRI that this part of the cerebral cortex was activated when synesthetic people heard a blindfolded speech, thus demonstrating the perception of one stimulus (sound) that automatically evoked another. (color)).
In addition, evoking one sensation through another is almost instantaneous and is always experienced in the same way. Some see it on paper where they read the number or word, although they know the sheet is blank. Others say they see it as some kind of?Indoor screen?or who sees it as floating.
In general, synesthesia can be said to be
This phenomenon occurs in people who perceive their environment in a particular way, from birth and probably because of the genetic inheritance involved, but that is not the only way to experience it, it is also possible to have a similar experience through the consumption of LSD.
It can be expressed even after acquiring blindness. People who have gone blind, for example, can feel visual images mentally through hearing, even if it happens in people who previously had synesthesia and who could see before. Therefore, synesthesia is a phenomenon that still arouses the curiosity of many scientists and raises many riddles about how we perceive the world.