Synesthesia Totally Explained

Everything about Synesthesia totally explained

Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia, plural synesthesiae or synaesthesiae)—from the Ancient Greek In one of the most common forms of synesthesia, grapheme → color synesthesia, individual letters of the alphabet and numbers (collectively referred to as graphemes), are "shaded" or "tinged" with a color. While synesthetes do not, in general, report the same colors for all letters and numbers, studies of large numbers of synesthetes find that there are some commonalities across letters (for example, A is likely to be red) (; ).
A grapheme → color synesthete reports, "I often associate letters and numbers with colors. Every digit and every letter has a color associated with it in my head. Sometimes, when letters are written boldly on a piece of paper, that'll briefly appear to be that color if I'm not focusing on it. Some examples: 'S' is red, 'H' is orange, 'C' is yellow, 'J' is yellow-green, 'G' is green, 'E' is blue, 'X' is purple, 'I' is pale yellow, '2' is tan, '1' is white. If I write SHCJGEX it registers as a rainbow when I read over it, as does ABCPDEF."

"'Until one day,' I said to my father, 'I realized that to make an R all I'd to do was first write a P and draw a line down from its loop. And I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange letter just by adding a line'"

Another reports a similar experience. "When people ask me about the sensation, they might ask, 'so when you look at a page of text, it's a rainbow of color?' It isn't exactly like that for me. When I read words, about five words around the exact one I'm reading are in color. It's also the only way I can spell. I remember in elementary school remembering how to spell the word 'priority' because the color scheme, in general, was darker than many other words. I'd know that an 'e' was out of place in that word because e's were yellow and didn't fit."

People with synesthesia

There is a great deal of debate about whether or not synesthesia can be identified through historical sources. A small number of famous people have been labeled as synesthetes on the basis of at least two historical sources. This includes individuals of many different talents, such as artists, novelists, composers, musicians, and scientists.
   Artists with synesthesia include the painter David Hockney, who perceives music synesthetically as colors, and who used these synesthetic colors when painting stage sets, but not in creating his other artworks. Also, Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky had the same type of synesthesia (sound and color). Perhaps the most famous synesthete author was Vladimir Nabokov, who had grapheme → color synesthesia, one of the most common types, which he described at length in his autobiography, Speak Memory, and which he sometimes portrays in giving his characters synesthesia. Composers include Duke Ellington (timbre → color), Franz Liszt (music → color), Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Olivier Messiaen, who had a complex form of synesthesia in which chord structures produced synesthetic colors. Notable synesthete scientists include Richard Feynman. Feynman describes in his autobiography, What Do You Care What Other People Think?, that he'd the grapheme → color type. Other notable synesthetes include musician John Mayer; actress Stephanie Carswell; and electronic musician Aphex Twin, who borrows inspiration from lucid dreams as well as synesthesia (music → color). The classical pianist Hélène Grimaud has the condition also.
   Some of the most frequently mentioned artists in connection with synesthesia probably were not synesthetes. Despite compositions such as and Mysterium, the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin was most likely not a synesthete. He was particularly interested in the psychological effects on the audience when they experienced sound and color simultaneously. His theory was that when the correct color was perceived with the correct sound, ‘a powerful psychological resonator for the listener’ would be created. On the score of Prometheus Scriabin wrote next to the instruments separate parts for the color organ (Galeyev 2001, Gleich 1963).
   The French Romantic poets Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire wrote poems which focused on synesthetic experience, but were evidently not synesthetes themselves. Baudelaire's (1857) (full text available here

) introduced the Romantic notion that the senses can and should intermingle. Kevin Dann argues that Baudelaire probably learned of synesthesia from reading medical textbooks that were available in his home. Rimbaud, following Baudelaire, wrote Voyelles (1871) (full text available here

) which was perhaps more important than in popularizing synesthesia, although he later admitted ""J'inventais la couleur des voyelles!" [Iinvented the colors of the vowels!]. Sean A. Day

, a synesthete, and the President of the American Synesthesia Association, maintains a list of people with synesthesia, "pseudosynesthetes," and individuals who are most likely not synesthetic, but who used synesthesia in their art or music.

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