What we heard/saw/smelled about synesthesia
Synesthesia is that odd blending-together of senses. Those of us who don’t have it would probably pay to “taste” shapes or “hear” colors, at least temporarily. A new form of synesthesia has been discovered: “hearing-motion.” Cal Tech researchers set out to create a task in which synesthetes would have the advantage.
The researchers presented four self-professed synesthetes and 10 nonsynesthetes with 100 pairs of Morse code–like rhythmic sequences, each composed of either auditory beeps or flashes of white on a black background. The participants judged whether the two sequences in each pair were the same or different.
Both groups judged auditory patterns accurately about 85 percent of the time, the researchers report in the August 5 issue of Current Biology. On the visual trials, nonsynesthetes’ judgments fell to nearly chance levels, a result that corroborates other research showing that most people are better at judging auditory patterns than assessing visual patterns. In contrast, synesthetes—who reported hearing sounds such as beeps or taps in time with the visual signals—distinguished matching from nonmatching rhythms 75 percent of the time.
The writer’s assignment is to invent a job in which synesthesia would be a requirement.
[Story: Scientific American; image: Charkrem]
August 5th, 2008 at 7:12 pm
My goodness, I thought this was a phenomenon only associated with some mental disorders. Color me enlightened. Thanks for this post!
August 6th, 2008 at 8:35 am
Glad you liked it, Heather. It does seem to be associated with the arts, for whatever that’s worth. Nabokov talked about experiencing it, and he seemed to like it.