Synesthesia - when one sense comes through another

Feeling what you see – Colours

Hearing colours, tasting sounds and seeing emotions

by Stefanie Thaller

Can you see sounds or taste words? What colour is the letter B or what shape is next week? You might not only see the colour blue, but you can hear it or even smell it. If you can relate to these experiences you might view the world like 1 in every 2,000 people with synesthesia.

People with synesthesia experience the ordinary in quite extraordinary ways. Syenesthesia’s etymological root is the ancient Greek word ‘syn’, which means ‘together’ and ‘aesthesis’ which translates to ‘sensation’. It essentially means that two or more senses are experienced simultaneously. It’s a neurological condition where people with synesthesia may experience a variety of sensations, such as seeing colours when they hear music, tasting shapes, or feeling a physical sensation when they see a certain colour. Synesthesia is a rare condition, and it is estimated that only 1 in every 2,000 people have it. Synesthesia is thought to be caused by a cross-wiring of the brain, where the neurons responsible for one sense are connected to the neurons responsible for another. This means that when one sense is stimulated, the other sense is also stimulated.

The genetic component plays a major role in this neurological phenomenon. Synesthesia runs in families. If one person has it, it is very likely that another person in their family has it too. People with synesthesia tend to think in vivid visual images. Every synesthete experiences it differently. Among famous people with synesthesia are some artists like the musicians Billie Eilish and her brother FINNEAS, Billie Joel, Jimmy Hendrix and Kanye West. Another famous synesthete is the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. He even published some texts about his experiences. One of his most famous paintings was created after a concert by the composer Arnold Schönberg in 1911. Kandinsky created a painting based on what he saw when listening to the concert.

Composition VII

© Wassily Kandinsky

Synesthesia is a phenomenon that people are born with, it’s not a disorder but rather a trait like having blue eyes. In fact, research confirms that synesthesia often enhances one’s memory. Although synesthesia is congenital, people have acquired it through strokes, tumours or brain injuries. Science is still in its infancy in that research field but it could give us important insights into how our brains work.

The most common form of synesthesia is colour-sequence synesthesia. Here, letters of the alphabet or numbers are associated with vivid experiences of colour. The perception is different from synesthete to synesthete. One might argue that the letter c is yellow or the number 6 is red while another might disagree completely. Other forms of synesthesia are lexical-gustatory synesthesia in which people experience phantom tastes of food when they think of words. Mirror touch synesthesia causes people to feel a similar sensation in the same part or opposite part of the body that another person feels. With ideasthesia a letter or a number can have a gender or a personality. Time-space synesthetes can experience time as a spatial construct, like seeing the yearly calendar projected into the real world. Overall, there are dozens of different forms of synesthesia.

Colour-sequence synesthesia

© Safran & Sanda (2015)

Synesthesia is still a blind spot in research. Still, it is much better studied in western countries and cultures. We know little to nothing about how synesthesia manifests itself in other areas around the globe. This lack of research is a huge research bias because it completely takes out all the cultural variation. Many concepts about time – and therefore also timespace synesthesia – do not make sense in other regions of the world. Our language, with its grammatical structures, rules, and conventions, affects not only how we perceive space but also how we perceive time. How would you put childhood photographs into order? As an English speaker, you would probably start arranging the images on the left and sort them chronologically by age on the right. In languages that are written from right to left like Hebrew or Arabic, it would be the other way around. Therefore, the experience of time-space synaesthesia of a person speaking Hebrew or Arabic will be completely different from a person thinking in a language written from left to right.

The perception of time

© James Hughes et al. (2019)

A particularly impressive case with regard to the perception of space and time are the Thaayorre people in northern Australia. They define time as moving in an east-to-west direction. This concept is written into the grammar of their language. Time is thus said to flow from left to right when the speaker is facing south, and from right to left when the speaker is facing north. Time moves in the direction of the body if the speaker is looking east. If west, time is thought to be moving away from the topic. Time moves in Thaayorre from east to west. Thus a Thaayorre would order their childhood pictures from right to left if the subject was facing north. They would also sort them the other way around if they turned the other way. Only through comparison does it become clear with which worldview we grew up (Kübra Gümsüay „Language and Being“ 2020). The perception and experience of a Thaayorre synesthete is probably very unique compared to a synesthete in Europe for instance. A scientific exploration of that would be of enormous value.