ETHOS • FALL 2020
this rare beauty of a phenomenon, as well as share the incredible initiative ACS Athens is on to support young learners who are gifted with Synaesthesia! What is Synaesthesia Synaesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. The term Synaesthesia is derived from the Greek syn =union and aesthesia = sensation, and refers to the capacity of conjoining two sensory experiences while one sense is stimulated, e.g. hearing colours, or feeling sounds etc. It is a neurological condition whereby stimulation of one sense automatically evokes a perception in an unstimulated sense. For example, the sound of a ringing bell may trigger seeing the colour pink or seeing an oval shape. You might see colours when reading numbers and letters or experience tastes in the mouth when hearing sounds. A beautiful blending of powers!
Synaesthesia: A New Welcoming Adventure In The American Community Schools Of Athens by Effie Zografou - Elgabry Fellow, The Institute of ACS Athens
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lending of powers! The sweet smell of Red!
Imagine a child in class who doesn’t like to talk because of the bad taste of his voice or another child who loves a certain teacher because her voice is violet and smells good. Imagine that the wind tastes like sugar cane. Imagine that you could smell distances. Imagine the voices of people that surround you to feel like coloured fireworks, or imagine that time has shapes and that words have personalities. Well, you can let your imagination fly, because guess what? This magical world is not imaginary; it is a very real phenomenon called Synaesthesia that allows you to taste words, see and smell sounds, and hear colours. Monday might be an angry or depressed young man wearing a white shirt; the number three might be blue and moody; February can be brown, and the letter “S” can be golden yellow. Welcome to the world of Synaesthesia! I hope to enlighten readers young and old about
There are multiple types of Synaesthesia. For instance, Grapheme-Colour Synaesthesia blends the words with colours while Sound-Colour Synaesthesia blends the sounds with colours. Mirror-Touch, on the other hand, is the tendency for an individual to react in a mirror-like movement of another person. Chromesthesia or Sound-to-colour-Synaesthesia is when sound involuntary evokes an experience of colour, and Spatial Sequence Synaesthesia is when ordinal sequences, such as months, numbers or the letters of the alphabet are experienced as specific forms and volumes in space. Other types include Grapheme-Personification, Touch-Temperatures, Smell-Emotion, Smell-Taste, Sound-Touch, Vision- Touch, and a whole lot more that brings a total of 80 registered types of Synaesthesia! Famous Synesthetes include novelist Vladimir Nabokov (Grapheme-Colour), who saw each letter in a different hue; musician Duke Ellington, who interpreted notes as colours; painter Joan Mitchell, who associated colours with letters, sounds and personalities; or scientists Nikola Tesla and Richard Feynman, as well as Academy Award winning actor Geoffrey Rush (Grapheme-Colour and Spatial Sequence Synaesthesia SSS), and iconic pianist-composer Franz Liszt (Chromesthesia), and last but not least, Vincent van Gogh (Chromesthesia) among others, are also thought to have had Synaesthesia. The Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras, who himself displayed signs of the remarkable trait, produced the first known description of Synaesthesia around 500 B.C., but the first known reference to Synaesthesia in scientific writing dates to 1690, from John Locke’s account of a blind man who described the colour scarlet as “the sound of a trumpet”. Similar isolated case-studies continued for some time, and it was described in detail by Francis Galton at UCL in 1883. It is only recently, however, that we have grown accustomed to Synaesthesia, now included in the syllabus of psychology as we continue to learn about this incredible phenomenon. Only 4% of the total population is reportedly synesthetic; well,
