Synesthesia: a neurological phenomenon in which one sensory response triggers another sensory response simultaneously. For example, if you were to hear a specific song it would trigger your smell sense and you would smell lavender. This isn’t simply associating two or more things together. These triggers are involuntary and only occur with specific things. Synesthesia is genetic, it is not a learned characteristic.
The perception of the different senses we have are separated within our brain. In normal development, the neural connections to each sense center are separated and not overlapping. However, in synesthesia, these neural connections do not fully separate and some overlap. Which is what causes the simultaneous senses to occur. 19 different forms of synesthesia have been discovered; sound-color synesthesia being one of the most common. It is when a person sees sounds possessing colors. Two other common forms of synesthesia are number-form synesthesia and ordinal-linguistic synesthesia.
The estimates of the amount of people that have synesthesia range from 1 in 200 to 1 in 100,000. However, it is believed that many more people have this condition but simply do not realize it. This may be because not many people know what synesthesia even is. What is interesting is that many synesthetes are artists, such as Georgia O’Keefe, Franz List, and Vladimir Nabakov. Synesthesia can be a difficult concept to grasp when one does not have the condition, but those that do see the world in a different way.
Learn more about synesthesia:
