Synesthesia: I Hear Colors And See Sounds

Synesthesia means “union of sensations.” It is a phenomenon that consists of experiencing, through the perception of a visual, tactile or auditory stimulus, a perceptual sensation that accompanies it.

To understand it, let’s look at an example: one of the most common forms of synesthesia is to associate numbers, days of the week or months with a certain color. The person perceives them accompanied by a color, always the same for each number or day.

Not many people experience this, but it is more common than we think. In fact, there are many people who do not know that their way of perceiving certain stimuli is different from that of the rest until talking to someone, they realize that it is not “normal”.

This phenomenon is not experienced as something unpleasant. Even synesthetes do not imagine the world without perceiving it the way they do, it would seem too poor. So, we are not talking about a pathology, but about a different and richer way of perceiving the world.

Different forms of synesthesia

There are many different forms of synesthesia. For example, there are people who while listening to music perceive colors, although it is not a hallucination. It is not that they see colors and believe that they are part of reality, but rather that when they listen to a piece of music, a torrent of colors floods them, each color being associated with a musical note.

One scientist, Jamie Ward, claims that synesthetes experience the world in an extraordinary way, they have an extra sense of the stimuli around them. Words can evoke flavors, each number a color, pain can also be accompanied by a flavor or a color… Thus, there are different ways of experiencing it.

Synesthesia and art

Perceiving the environment in such a rich way can promote creativity. Something that is very beneficial for those who are dedicated to art, since they can express through their works how the world is presented to them.

A New York artist, Carol Steen, uses this condition to inspire her creations. This woman claims that she can observe the color, taste and smell of pain. For inspiration, he uses acupuncture to awaken these sensations and translate them into his works of art.

There is evidence about famous synesthetes such as the writer Vladimir Nabokov, who stated that, for him, the combination of the letters “NZSPYGV” formed the rainbow. Also the physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman and the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Is synesthesia hereditary?

Today it is known that synaesthesia has a biological and genetic component, although the genes involved have not yet been accurately identified. Synesthesia can be inherited between parents and children, but the sensations do not have to be the same.

The condition is inherited, but not the way to experience it. So much so that between twins it has been found that their experiences are not the same, and even that one may be synesthetic and the other may not. It can also be the case that the parents do not experience it, even if they are carriers of the gene and that the child does express it.

Synesthetic children usually discover that they are synaesthetic in adolescence : when talking about a sound or a number they realize that not everyone sees it as he does. For example, according to Ward, a child described sounds through colors saying that the croaking of frogs was usually brown, but that day it sounded blue, meaning that the sound that day was higher.

Synesthesia in the brain

There is an area in our brain that is responsible for the perception of colors: V4. Julia Nunn, in an experiment with 12 people, observed through magnetic resonance imaging that this part of the cerebral cortex was activated when synaesthetic subjects listened to a speech with their eyes covered, demonstrating that the perception of one stimulus (sound) automatically evoked another ( colour).

Furthermore, the evocation of one sensation through another is almost instantaneous and is always experienced in the same way. Some see it on the paper they read the number or word on, even though they are aware that the page is blank. Others say they see it as a kind of “inner screen” or see it as floating.

In summary, it can be said that synesthesia is :

• Stable over time, perceiving the same sensations with each stimulus (always the same color for a specific number).
• Familiar, it can be inherited.
• Specific, it always appears with the same stimuli.
• It happens quickly, as soon as you read the word, listen to a song, touch a surface or see a number, the sensation that accompanies it appears automatically.

Other forms of synesthesia

This phenomenon occurs in people who perceive the environment in a special way, from birth and probably due to the inheritance of the genes involved. But it is not the only way to experience it. A similar experience can also be lived through the consumption of LSD.

It can express itself even after becoming blind. People who have gone blind can, through hearing, experience visual images mentally, although this occurs in people who previously had synesthesia and could also see before.

In this way, synesthesia is a phenomenon that still arouses the curiosity of many scientists today and raises many enigmas about the way we perceive the world.