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| | The Colors of Numbers (21st Sep 19 at 1:53pm UTC) | | Synesthesia is a neurological phenomenon in which certain sensory concepts are strongly linked to each other in seemingly random but persistent ways. Though the pairings are unique to each individual and can cover any type of sensation from sound to touch to emotion, the most commonly-reported type is grapheme-color synesthesia, or connecting letters and numbers to particular hues. A patient with synesthesia may associate the number 3 with the color blue, for example, to the degree that he or she reports seeing all 3s as blue regardless of what shade they may actually be written in.
Opponents, however, have argued that these may be nothing more than accidental mnemonics, or simple memory associations of a forgotten origin. Toddlers often play with magnetic alphabet sets, for example, and who can say whether the capricious color choices of a toy manufacturer are not really at the root of an adult who claims to see the letter A as red? Modern fMRI scans have allowed researchers to visualize the activated areas of the brain and prove the existence of synesthesia, but the expense and time for these scans is still prohibitive for large-scale studies. Instead, one of the foremost synesthesia researchers, Jamie Ward, has created a number of simple tests to quickly identify true “synesthetes,” who are now known make up a little over 1% of the population (though not all of those are of the grapheme-color variety.) | |
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