Synesthesia

Synesthesia:

What We Know and Don't Know

How many of us know what synesthesia is? What do we eat it with? How is it used or what is it used with. Well let me just tell you that synesthesia is a condition in which people have difficulty distinguishing between various sensory inputs.

Synesthesia comes from two Greek words, syn, which means together, and aesthesis, which means perception. Therefore synesthesia literally means, "Joined perception." "Synesthesia is an involuntary joining in which the real information of one sense is accompanied by a perception in another sense."(web.mit.edu) In addition to being involuntary, this additional perception is regarded by the synesthete as real, often outside the body, instead of imagined in the mind's eye. It also has some other interesting features that clearly separate it from artistic fancy or purple prose. It's reality and vividness are what make synesthesia so interesting in its violation of conventional perception. Synesthesia is also fascinating because logically it should not be a product of the human brain, where the evolutionary trend has been for increasing separation of function anatomically.

Synesthesia can also involve any of the senses. The most common form, colored letters and numbers, occurs when someone always sees a certain color in response to a certain letter of the alphabet or number. I will now give you and example: a synesthete might the word "count" and think of shoes or the number "9" and think of the color bright green. There are also synesthetes that who hear sounds in correspondence to their smell, who smell is in response to touch, or who feel something in response to sight. Oh by the way, any type of combination of the senses is possible; so don't think that there is a specific type that everyone has. There are even some synesthetes that can combine up to three of their senses, but this would be extremely rare.

Although there is no officially established method of diagnosing synesthesia, some guidelines have been developed by Richard Cytowic, MD, a leading synesthesia researcher. Not even agrees on these standards, but hey provide a starting point for diagnosis. According to Cytowic, synesthetic perceptions are:

* Involuntary: synesthetes do not actively think about their perceptions; they just happen.

* Projected: rather than experiencing something in the "mind's eye," as might happen when you are asked to imagine a color a synesthete often actually sees a color projected outside of the body.

* Durable and generic; the perception must be the same every time; for example, if you taste chocolate when you hear Beethoven's Violin Concerto, you must always taste chocolate when you hear it; also the perception must be generic--that is, you may see colors or lines or shapes in response to a certain smell, but you would not see something complex such as a room with people and furniture and pictures on the wall.

* Memorable: often, the secondary synesthetic perception is remembered better than the primary perception; for example. A synesthete who always associates the color purple with the name "Mayra" will often remember that a woman's name is purple rather than actually remembering "Mayra." (wearcam.org)

Synesthetic perceptions are specific to each person. Different people with synesthesia almost always disagree on their perceptions. For example, if one synesthete perceives that the letter "r" is colored yellow, another synesthete might see "r" as green. Well then, is just anyone that thinks they might have synesthesia have it? There are many people that have synesthesia, more like maybe 1 in 200 or 1 in 100,000, but there are many others that might have synesthesia but haven't realized it yet or don't even know what that is.

Synesthesia tends to be in: a) women, in the US, studies show that three times as many women as men have synesthesia; in the UK, eight times as many women have been reported to have it and the reason for this difference is not known yet. b) Left-handed: synesthetes are more likely to be left-handed than the general population. c) Neurologically normal: synesthetes are of normal intelligence, and standard neurological exams are normal. d) It can also run in the same family: synesthesia appears to be inherited in some fashion; it seems to be a dominant trait and it may be on the X-chromosome. But no only non-famous people have synesthesia...no also famous people have this disorder.

Famous people that we might not have heard of or might not ever seen before have synesthesia. People like Vasily Kandinsky, a painter, Oliver Messiaen, a composer, Charles Baudetaire, a poet, Franz Liszt, a composer, Arthur Rimbaud, a poet, and Richard Phillips Feynman, a physicist. Some of these artists barely even know that they have synesthesia and the reason