Synesthesia - Typical Traits, Causes, and Types

What Is Synesthesia?

Synesthesia is a strange neurological phenomenon. People who have it experience the ordinary world in quite extraordinary ways. The word synesthesia means ‘joined perceptions.’ This means that more than one sense perceives a sensation, be it sight, sound, taste, smell, or touch. For instance, every word might have distinct colors. Some may perceive a particular taste with a word. For some, listening to music is not just a listening experience. It is more of a kaleidoscopic world of vision and movement and flashes of lights. A person who has synesthetic qualities is called a synesthete.

What Are the Special Features of Synesthesia?

Synesthesia comes with a number of traits. These experiences do not occur spontaneously; they are triggered by some stimulation. It may be music, language, or other things. Also, these perceptions are totally involuntary, meaning a synesthete cannot choose to turn these perceptions on and off. They just appear on their own. And such individuals have strong perceptual qualities with seeing, hearing, and feeling things with the help of these illusionary sensory experiences.

Following are some of the special features of a synesthete.

• One may attach a day in the week to color. Usually, one may have colors for each letter. Each synesthete has a particular palate of color that they associate with letters. Although studies have shown similarities to these imaginations, they have something to do with the shapes of the letters.

• For some, music is a visual experience. They experience not just colors but movements and shapes in a three-dimensional landscape. A series of notes on a piano might be like an ascending staircase from a low pitch to a high pitch. A violin note may be perceived as a long-sustained shape. A drum beat may be a small spherical shape. Each of these notes will change dynamically over time. So, a synesthete may experience a five-minute piece of music perceived as a landscape of musical experience. Interestingly, they can remember this particular pattern and will be able to reproduce it as well.

• For some people with synesthesia, the words may be associated with a perception of different flavors and tastes. It is felt as a flow of tastes in the mouth. When one is speaking, a synesthete feels each word on the tongue in different temperatures and textures too. Some may associate certain places with different tastes.

• In the same way, emotions are also perceived as colors or tastes. For instance, feelings like love, joy, sadness, fear, etc., bring about a perception of colored patterns in the mind or certain tastes in the mouth.

What Is the Cause Behind Synesthesia?

Synesthesia starts early in life. One may have it from infancy. Hence the memory of perceiving everything differently starts from as long as one can remember. The color scheme associated with letters will not fade when one reaches old age. In fact, the perceptions remain that way till death for a synesthete. And the general understanding is that the parts of the brain concerned with senses are wired differently in those with synesthesia. While the eyes and the ears continuously perceive stimuli from everything around us, it is the brain that creates the ultimate sense of reality.

What Is the Possible Brain Mechanism Behind This?

Studies have found synesthesia traits running in families, which says there is a genetic component that determines this condition. How the genes actually work to cause synesthesia is still unknown. Scientists believe it is due to the way one’s brain is wired. For instance, the part where colors are identified in the brain lies close to the part which helps in recognizing letters and numbers. And the brain forms an extraordinary connection by forming neural pathways (a sequence of signals passed among the nerve cells). This affects the perception of letters and numbers in certain colors. The same applies to the centers that identify words and tastes.

How Common Is Synesthesia in the General Population?

Synesthesia is rare but not extremely uncommon in the general population. Studies show that roughly four people in a hundred may have synthetic qualities. And the type of perceptions varies from one synthetic person to another. Studies also prove that women show synesthetic traits more than men. And at the infant stage, everybody has multiple perceptions of each stimulus, but it vanishes as one grows.

What Are the Different Types of Synesthesia?

There are at least sixty types of synesthesias discovered so far, and maybe there are more. Some of the common types are:

1. Grapheme Color Synesthesia - This is seeing every number or letter in specific colors. This is a commonly seen type of synesthesia.

2. Lexical Gustatory Synesthesia - This is a very rare type where people associate words with tastes. Hearing words evoke a particular taste, texture, or temperature in the mouth.

3. Auditory Tactile Synesthesia - When a particular sound produces a touch, tingling, itching, pain, heat, cold, or vibration response in some part of the body.

4. Mirror Touch Synesthesia - This is about mirroring the perception of another individual. For instance, if the person standing next is in pain, the synesthete can perceive that pain in them. This is a highly prevalent synesthetic trait one may come across. And it has a lot to do with the feeling of empathy.

5. Misophonia - This is perceiving strong emotions with certain sounds. For instance, loud noises may evoke anger and disgust.

6. Ordinal Linguistic Personification - Assigning personalities with different characters and appearances to inanimate things like letters, days of the week, or numbers.

7. Number Form Synesthesia - Having individualized patterns to how numbers appear in the mind. Each number has a special spatial arrangement in the synesthete's mind.

8. Chromesthesia - This is the type of synesthesia involved with perceiving every word, place, or music as colorful projections in front of the eyes.

Who Else Gets Synesthesia Experience?

There are several other groups of people who have synesthesia traits. They can be:

• Synesthesia may be found in those affected with autism. Autistic people are found to have different patterns of neural connections in the brain, which makes them different from neurotypical individuals. And some of them have synesthesia features.

• People who go blind at some point in their life switch their perception patterns, and some of them develop synesthesia. The normal visual pathways in the brain stay inactive in them. However, when they listen to music, they may have visual experiences. It is a change the brain acquires after going blind. Here, the brain reorganizes its neural pathways to bring about visual experiences to what one listens to. Some extra pathways are created to make this happen.

• Those who indulge in recreational drugs such as hallucinogens like LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) or Psilocybin can also trigger synthetic experiences as a part of their hallucinations, even though there are no genetic components in such people.

• One may be able to associate a color to the letter by constant training, but this memory gets lost after a while, unlike a real synesthete.

Conclusion:

A synesthete cannot imagine what it is like to read a book without all the letters appearing in different colors. Same way, they cannot imagine what it will be like to just listen to music without visualizing the colors and shapes that come along with it. But it is their own private reality, which is so different from the others in the population. They tend to think differently than others in the population too. They have vivid visual images and other sensations for everything more strongly than the average person. For instance, if they remember a childhood holiday, they associate it with the smells and sounds of that particular holiday. It is neither a disability nor a superpower, just one of the ways the brain works.