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from the Let-me-put-my-glasses-on-so-I-can-hear-you-better dept.
[Editor's note: Synesthesia is "a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway."]
Nothing could be more intensely subjective or taken-for-granted than the ineffable way that each of us perceives the world. This is why many synaesthetes go through a lifetime without realising that their everyday sense experience is exceptional or strange. Those who do, report a moment of startled self-awareness when friends respond with an uncomprehending: ‘What do you mean, my name tastes of split-pea soup?’ Such eureka moments have grown increasingly common since the 1980s, when cognitive tests were first developed to judge the authenticity of the reports through to the mid-1990s, when brain scans and brain-wave measurements began tracking the physiology of synaesthesia’s various forms.
Writing in The Oxford Handbook of Synesthesia in 2013, Richard Cytowic, a neurologist and synaesthesia researcher at George Washington University, describes the ‘astonishment and enthusiasm’ reported by synaesthetes after tests validated that they weren’t ‘making it all up’.
http://aeon.co/magazine/psychology/are-we-all-born-with-synaesthesia/
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Thursday January 22 2015, @09:01AM
I suspect that, like a lot of other things, synesthesia is a spectrum and everyone is on it somewhere. Enough people are (either naturally or by societal pressure) over at one of the extremes that we can convince ourselves that it's a binary have it/ don't have it thing, and anyone who isn't at that end of pool is (a) "different" and (b) must be at the other extreme. Not so long ago autism was considered the same way, and not long before that so was sexuality.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 22 2015, @10:59AM
Well, judging from the article, it seems to me that the spectrum has synaesthesia on one end of the scale and and autism on the other, with the "normals" being somewhere in the middle.
Actually I can even imagine that synaesthesia isn't really the end of the scale, but at the end of the scale there might be something like schizophrenia (hallucinations might just be an extreme form of synaesthesia where the brain is no longer able to distinguish between the actual source and the "byproducts", and is desperately trying to make sense of the mangled sensations). But then, I'm no psychologist, so this idea is just pure speculation.