What is synesthesia and how to define it

What is synesthesia

SynesthesiaSynesthesia/Psychology Today is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sense organ causes sensations in another. To explain how it is, psychologists leadWhat is synesthesia? / Scientific American such examples.

Let's say you eat chicken. What does it taste like - pointed or round?

When you picture a week, does it look like a D that rolled over to the left, with the days counter-clockwise?

What color is Tuesday? What about Thursday? And the number 18?

Don't you think the "si" note is too sour?

If these questions don't sound like nonsense to you, you may be a synesthete. This is the name given to people who have synesthesia.

What is synesthesia

Various sensory combinations are possible. But most often meetSynesthesia/Psychology Today such.

• Acoustic-tactile synesthesia. This is when sounds cause certain bodily sensations. For example, while listening to music, a person feels warmth or tingling in the back of the body. neck.
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• Chromesthesia. When the heard sounds a person clearly perceives as certain colors. Let's say a car horn can have a distinct blue color. And the crow's cawing is deep black.
• Grapheme color synesthesia. With this form, the perception of graphemes - letters or numbers written or otherwise designed - is again associated with a certain color. So, the number 3 can be red or pink, 9 can be burgundy, the letter A can be yellow, and O can have a steel sheen.
• Lexico-gustatory synesthesia. This is when, when pronouncing certain words, a person has taste sensations. For example, the word "sun" can be sweet and sticky, while "tram" can be salty.
• Mirror touch synesthesia. She is described as a kind empathy, only very developed: the synesthete feels like he is being touched when he sees that this is happening to someone else.
• Number line. This is a kind of mental map with numbers that involuntarily arises in the mind of a synesthete if he thinks about dates or computing.
• Ordinal linguistic personification. In this form of synesthesia, the various sequences—for example, the days of the week, the months, the letters, the position of the fingers on the hand—are clearly associated with personalities or genders in the synesthesia's mind. "Monday is a boy, Tuesday is a blond girl Louise, Wednesday is..." - that's it.
• Synesthesia of spatial sequence. This form suggests that a person sees numbers or numerical sequences as points in space located farther or closer depending on the meaning of the number.

Many synesthetes have more than one form of synesthesia.

How common is synesthesia

There are no definitive statistics.

For some dataSynesthesia/Psychology Today, in every hundred people there are 3-5 synesthetes.

Synesthesia is more common in women than in men.

However, according to others dataWhat is synesthesia? / Scientific American, this phenomenon is much rarer: perhaps only one person out of every 200, or even out of every 20 thousand, is a synesthete.

Is synesthesia a mental disorder?

NotSynesthesia/Psychology Today. Synesthesia is not included in either the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), nor in the current International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) - because, unlike diseases and disorders, does not reduceNeurophysiology of synesthesia / Current psychiatry reports quality of life of synesthetes. Even vice versaEveryday fantasia: The world of synesthesia / American Psychological Association.

It is assumed that synesthetes feel the world more fully than ordinary people, since they can perceive any of its elements, be it sounds, drawings, surfaces, with several senses at once.

Such a feature givesWhat is synesthesia? / Scientific American some cognitive benefits. Synesthetes have a better memory, because for them numbers, phone numbers, complex terminology often have a unique palette of colors. They have sharper feelings, they more easily establish associative links between different phenomena and are able to talentedly describe what they see or feel. According to available biographical information, most likely synesthetes wereEveryday fantasia: The world of synesthesia / American Psychological Association such talented people as a writer Vladimir Nabokov, artist Vincent van Gogh, composer Olivier Messiaen, physicist Richard Feynman.

However, sometimes synesthetes lose to ordinary people in calculations. For example, because the numbers 6 and 8 for them have the same color, which is confusing.

Where does synesthesia come from?

ExistsEveryday fantasia: The world of synesthesia / American Psychological Association several theories, but none of them has yet been convincingly confirmed. So choose according to your taste.

1. Perhaps synesthesia is the result of an excess of neural connections in the brain. As expected, this may be a congenital feature that is inherited.
2. Maybe we're all born synesthetes. But most people lose this ability as they get older.
3. Synesthesia can also be the result of a brain disorder. Ordinary people have inhibition mechanisms that prevent the sensations received from one sense organ from affecting the sensations from another. In synesthetes, these mechanisms may be impaired. According to supporters of this theory, it can be confirmed by the fact that in many people the symptoms of synesthesia are manifested under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs that affect brain.

How to understand that this is synesthesia, and not fantasy

There is no clear list of diagnostic symptoms for synesthesia. If only because this condition is not a diagnosis.

But anyway existsEveryday fantasia: The world of synesthesia / American Psychological Association a couple of key points by which you can distinguish a synesthete from a dreamer.

1. The experience of synesthetes does not change over time. So, in one experiment, researchers asked synesthetes to describe the color that each of the 100 words evoked in their minds. A year later, the test was repeated without warning. It turned out that the associations between words and colors in 90% of cases were the same as originally. But people without synesthesia, who were asked to perform the same task but with a two-week interval between the two tests, were only 20% consistent.
2. Changes in their brains are visible on MRI. In particular, in synesthetes who report chromesthesia ("coloured" hearing), areas of the brain associated with vision show increased activation in response to sound. This does not apply to non-synesthetes.

For those who want to test themselves for synesthesia, Western psychologists developedA standardized test battery for the study of synesthesia / Journal of neuroscience methods special online test. It requires registration and a password to restrict access to results by unauthorized people, and includes 80 questions. Please note that this is a test in English, so you may need a translator built into your browser.

Ekaterina Komissarova