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An Introduction to Synesthesia



Synesthesia is pretty close to a superpower. Think about sense. How we process the world impacts the way life itself can feel. Go to a concert with a blind person, deaf, and normal person, and they'll all give you wildly different accounts of what they went to do. That goes for just about anything. Sight, hearing, taste, smell, touch.

Our senses can work together to paint a vivid picture of the world, but for most people, this is superficial. Food will taste better if you can smell it. You can predict how some texture will feel by sight alone. If you're in the wild, you'll rely on your sense of hearing because, by the time you actually see a predator, it'll be too late. We have more than those, of course, but today we're focusing on people who have a deep synergy between them.

Imagine running your hand over this bad boy

This is a tough one to diagnose, mostly because it's not a condition which gets in your way that much, and you could not even realize you have it until you realize that other people don't. Since it's something that always happens to you, then it never really seems off. Though some think of it as some sort of handicap, the truth is that synesthetes see it as a better way to perceive the world and even use it in organizational or creative endeavors.

There are two main forms of synesthesia. Projective synesthesia means that you see actual colors and forms when stimulated, and associative synesthesia you have a strong connection between the stimulus and whatever sense it triggers.




Seeing a letter or a number with a specific color or shade is the most well-known display of synesthesia, but there can be other variations. You can associate color with sound, for example, or you can see music projected on a "screen" in front of you, and even have a preference for a certain shape. Some see numbers as a point in space so 5 can be further than 8, but that'll be closer than 2. One of the least common forms of this condition is actually getting physical sensations that come from sound.

One of the more interesting ones has to do with sequences. You can associate a certain day of the week with one form of personality, some number might be a tranquil old man, some letter might be an irritating woman, but it's not been studied much.



A particularly strange one could be called an intense case of empathy if I've ever heard of one. Imagine that when you see somebody being tapped on the shoulder, you'll feel just as if they were tapping you. I wasn't kidding about the empathy either, it's been found to have a high correlation with this sort of synesthesia.

There are many more, at least 80 forms, if current research is to be believed, so it's likely that most of the population does have some variation of this, albeit one that's unknown or not highly researched. If you ever find yourself associating sights and sounds, numbers and colors, touch and shapes, or anything that isn't actually related, then pay attention, you might have some form of synesthesia.

Further reading

Wednesday is Indigo Blue

Psychology Today

Synesthesia’s mysterious ‘mingling of the senses’ may result from hyperconnected neurons
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