Synesthesia--
a condition by which a stimulus can be perceived to be dipped into a melting pot of sensory triggers.
Or, as more formally defined by Eagleman and Goodale (in press), it is a "perceptual phenomenon in which stimuli can trigger experiences in non-stimulated sensory dimensions" (p.1).
Basically, the stimulus not only plugs into its respective sense receptor (e.g. color and vision), but also triggers other senses (e.g. color and taste).
There are several types of synesthesia (after all, there are a number of ways to mix and match our different sense receptors), but according to Eagleman and Goodale (in press), color synesthesia accounts for up to 95% of reported synesthesia experiences. I guess the color-related synesthete experiences are also better known because they are easier or more believably expressed in media. It might be because we can 'see' what they see thus making it more accessible and popular.
I first encountered this term when I read A Mango-Shaped Space by Wendy Mass back in junior high. It's about a girl named Mia Winchell, who is a synesthete. The opening pages set up her dilemma--her unusual perception of colors had caused her to be labeled as a freak. Below are Mia's first thoughts when she found out that not everyone could see the colors like she did.
How was this possible? Was everyone playing a trick on me? Of course numbers had colors. Were they also going to tell me that letters and sounds didn't have colors? That letter a wasn't yellow like a faded sunflower and screeching chalk didn't make red jagged lines in the air? (Mass, 2003, p. 3)
Even though she was labeled a freak, I seriously wanted to have synesthesia after reading that book.
Please don't take drugs to simulate a synesthetic experience!!!!
Mia's synesthesia is what is called a grapheme-color synesthesia wherein words and numbers are associated with colors and these color perceptions are called photisms according to Flournoy (1893, as cited by Hupé, Bordier, & Dojat, 2011).
According to previous studies and neuroimaging, when synesthetes see colors, the same area in the brain for color perception of non-synesthetes lights up. However, a study on 10 synesthetes by Hupé, Bordier, & Dojat (2011) has found that colors arising from a synesthetic experience do not light up this color area of the brain cortex that perceiving "real" colors does. The researchers give caution though, not to discount potential commonality between synesthetic colors and real colors that may be due to individual differences of the synesthetes or to the limited capability of the measuring instruments that are available.
So, does that mean that synesthetic colors cannot be the same as real colors?
Well, not really.
Weiss, Kalckert, and Fink conducted a study back in 2008 to test whether colors might trigger grapheme perception in grapheme-color synesthetes. After a careful selection process of words, the researchers asked the synesthetes to color the capital letters of the common high and low frequency words as well as other 'distractor letters' to closely match their respective synesthetic colors. They also colored each letter of the alphabet in the same manner. Each color-letter pair was then confirmed by the participant to be accurate.
In the task, a word fragment was presented which could either be completed by a letter for a high frequency word or that of a low frequency word. When the block for the missing letter was colored for the low frequency letter, synesthetes reported low-frequency words more than the high-frequency words, which would be expected if color was irrelevant. (This is the case of the non-synesthete control group).
This study shows that the triggers for a synesthetic experience might be interchanged, emphasizing 'bidirectionality'. Of course, because the study was limited to a small sample of grapheme-color synesthetes, generalizability could be an issue.
Nevertheless, isn't it interesting how colors could possibly talk? Imagine a synesthete going up to a painting and literally reading it (if by any chance it is coherent).
"Bright Picture" by Wassily Kandinsky (1913)
