Synesthesia, People With The Ability To See Sounds And Taste Colors
It is quite evident that, for most people, receiving light on the retina means having a visual sensation, just as having something come into contact with our skin generates a tactile sensation or receiving sound waves on our ears. makes us hear something. However, this scheme of events is not always so simple.
There are some people who experience a phenomenon called synesthesia consisting of perceive sensations originating from various sensory channels
Where synesthesia occurs, one type of stimulation evokes the sensation of another. In this way, some synesthetic people they can see sounds, while others can taste tactile sensations, etc. For example, one of the best-known cases is that of the physicist Richard Feynman, who said to see equations in colors but the range of combinations of sensations that can occur as a form of synesthesia is actually very wide: sounds that generate flavors, numbers and letters that are perceived as colors, etc.
A large part of the community of neuroscientists in charge of studying synesthesia believe that it is caused by a kind of “crossing of wires.” Thus, they propose the explanation that at the moment in which this phenomenon occurs, vseveral neuron channels associated with different senses interfere with each other so that the information from the surrounding environment that arrives through a sensory organ reaches the brain and is transformed into another type of sensation.
Hence, people who experience this see their senses mix involuntarily and without being able to consciously regulate this transfer of information from one sensory type to the other, and hence there may also be cases in which blind synesthetic people can continue experiencing colors when touch, hear, etc.
Synesthetic people may have a somewhat unique brain
In short, the brain of people who experience synesthesia It seems to have a somewhat different architecture than the rest of the population, although that does not mean that their nervous system is damaged or that they are less capable of living a normal and autonomous life. In fact, due to the automatic and partially unconscious nature of synesthesia, it is not unusual for a person to have been mixing sensations all their life and not to have realized how peculiar what is happening to them, or to believe that it happens to everyone. world.
How widespread is synesthesia?
Synesthesia, in its different forms and types, is not something that rarely occurs in those people who experience it, and that is why it is possible that it is well assimilated and considered the normal way of perceiving reality, since it is part of everyday life. day of many people.
The fact that many people are synesthetes without being aware of it makes it difficult to calculate the percentage of the population that is, but recently there have been indications that synesthesia is surprisingly widespread It could be part of the daily life of 4 or 5 out of every 100 people, much more than was believed at the end of the 20th century, the most common type being that which consists of associate days with colors Furthermore, curiously, it is more widespread in people with autism, which in the future may provide clues to understand the origin and causes of this type of disorders.
Something to keep in mind is that there are phenomena very similar to synesthesia that are very generalized, which may mean that Almost all of us are synesthetes to a lesser or greater extent
For example, it is very normal for us to associate angular and sharp shapes with sounds like the letter “k”, while rounded contours are easier to relate to the sound of “b”, although this does not correspond to any type. of logical reasoning. This type of thinking has also been called by psychologists as cognitive biases. You can learn more about this by reading this article:
The same thing happens with many other elements of our daily life: we talk about acid humor, sharp tongues, etc. Should we hypothesize that these phenomena are mild cases of synesthesia, our way of understanding the normal functioning of sensory pathways would be revealed to be something more complex than we thought
