


"There's been a debate about synesthesia," study co-author Dr. Those who use the connections are the ones who experience synesthesia, Maurer has suggested.Ī small study of 17 participants published in the European Journal of Neuroscience in 2016 found that those with synesthesia may have stronger mental associations between particular sounds and rounded or angular shapes. In people with synesthesia, the information get jumbled, Grossenbacher has said.Īnother theory - proposed by Daphne Maurer, a psychologist at McMaster University in Ontario - is that everyone has these connections, but not everyone uses them. Ordinarily, information from multisensory areas returns only to the appropriate single-sense area. However, Peter Grossenbacher, a psychologist at Naropa University in Colorado, thinks that rather than rearranging the architecture of the brain, synesthesia happens when single-sense areas of the brain get feedback from multisensory areas. In the brains of people with synesthesia, the walls are broken down, and there is more communication among the modules, Baron-Cohen has proposed. Usually, each of the senses is assigned to separate modules in the brain, with limited cross-communication. Since then, many neuroscientists have studied the condition, and they've proposed several competing theories about its causes, according to an article in the APA's Monitor on Psychology.įor example, research by Simon Baron-Cohen, who studies synesthesia at the University of Cambridge, has suggested that synesthesia results from an overabundance of neural connections. Spatial sequence synesthesia involves seeing numbers or numerical sequences as points in space (e.g., close or far away).Synesthesia was first studied in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but research on the condition fell by the wayside until the 1970s.Ordinal linguistic personification is a kind of synesthesia where ordered sequences (e.g., the days of the week) are associated with personalities or genders.Number form occurs when a mental map of numbers involuntarily appears whenever someone thinks of numbers.It can be benign-such as an observed advantage in recognizing facial expressions-or burdensome, as in the case of a neurologist who felt intense pressure in his chest when he saw a patient receiving CPR. Mirror-touch synesthesia has been described as a kind of supercharged empathy: A person feels as though they’re being touched if they witness it happening to someone else.Lexical-gustatory synesthesia occurs when hearing certain words triggers distinct tastes.Grapheme-color synesthesia occurs when letters and numbers are associated with specific colors.Chromesthesia occurs when certain sounds (like a car honking) can trigger someone to see colors.Auditory-tactile synesthesia occurs when a sound prompts a specific bodily sensation (such as tingling on the back of one’s neck).While nearly any sensory combination is possible in synesthesia, here are some of the most well-known ways it manifests:
SYNTHESIA DISORDER TEST TV
Media like books, films, and TV shows often take advantage of the multimodal mental imagery associated with synesthesia (which explains the popularity of cooking and baking shows). Some synesthetes perceive texture in response to sight, hear sounds in response to smells, or associate shapes with flavors. However, not all types of synesthesia have been documented or studied, and the cause remains unclear. Since synesthesia can involve any combination of the senses, there may be as many as 60 to 80 subtypes.
