Synesthesia

Have you ever looked at a word and had it smell like something in particular? If you have the rare disease synesthesia then you probably have. The definition of the disease is “The production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.” But it’s so much more than that. It’s a psychological as well as neurological disease. The lives of the people who have it are drastically different than the average person. Normally if you were to look at a word or number, that’s all you would do, you would just see it with your eyes. With synesthesia two of your senses combine together, such as sight and taste, or touch and smell, or even sight and touch. There are many combination possibilities that people could have.

The cause of synesthesia has been proven to be genetic, the slightly different genes of someone with synesthesia appear to cause adjacent areas of the brain to cross-wire. A theory also suggest that it’s the result of not enough inhibition in the neonatal stage, which is when the brain is rearranged. They believe that everybody is born with some form of synesthesia and with some people it happens to stay. There are many different categories of the disease. Some people see letters and numbers as a certain color or a certain gender. For other people concepts of time such as a day or a year are mentally seen as a three dimensional shape. The most artistic form is when music is seen as colors and different forms or is accompanied by a taste or a certain sensation. Thee most common type would be letter-color, about 1 in 500 people have that. The least common type would be sound-odor, only 1 in 25,000 have that.

A bigger interest has been shown on this disease in the past few years. It never used to get shown much attention, people just brushed it off as a mental illness, or that people with the disease were just on drugs, or they just had a big imagination. Now scientists have proven that it is an involuntary action that happens in people minds that they cannot turn off. It has been observed that “Recent studies showed an activation of the left human brain area V4 responsible for colors” (Beeli, Esslen, & Jancke, 2008; Parslow, et al., 2002). The activation of this was not shown in people without the disease, proving it is not in their imagination, it is legitimate. About a decade ago the public thought that it was a rare and very uncommon disease. Now studies are showing that between 5-10% of people can posses this condition.

Many people are not aware that they have synesthesia. Some remember having some episodes of it but have not had any more as an adult. Some scientists think that awareness has an influence on how people perceive their synesthesia. If people are aware of the disease and notice the things that they see they can figure out if they have it, some just think it’s normal and never verbally express to anyone what they see. Scientists consider that the greater the neuronal connections the stronger affect it has on the person. For example even the common person has some type of synesthesia, such as when you smell a certain food you can somewhat taste it, or when you see a picture of something you can smell or taste it. People with synesthesia have that kind of experience but it’s just intensified. This is why some people aren’t aware that they have it.

Currently there is still research being done on synesthesia to get a better idea of how it works inside the brain.  They do know that just because a person has synesthesia it does not mean they have a better memory than people who don’t have it. At first they believed they did have a better memory because they could associate certain things with colors or sounds etc. But after researching they found out that it could possibly even make their memory worse because the colors distract the person and make it harder to memorize. For a select few people, depending on their type of synesthesia it does make things easier to memorize, it just depends on the type that you have. A large percentage of synesthetic have a career that involves creativity, such as an artist or a music writer. This is because they have the ability to see colors when listening to music or when they look at a painting they can sense certain feelings. It’s all a very fascinating topic that isn’t a very popular one discussed worldwide. Every year scientist keep finding out more and more about it and it will be interesting to read about the new things they discover.

 

 

Is the percentage of synesthetic people going to increase in the next 10 years?

How exactly does having synesthesia affect daily life?

Can a person have more than two senses being connected?

 

 

https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-28/february-2015/surprising-world-synaesthesia

http://www.uksynaesthesia.com/2012synaesthesia.html

http://synaesthesia.com/media/uploads/Synaesthesia_Learning.pdf

http://www.youramazingbrain.org.uk/brainchanges/synesthesia.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/hearingcolours.shtml

http://synaesthesia.com/en/Information/einfuhrung/

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