Synesthesia is a neurological condition where one of the subject’s (known as an synesthete) sensory or cognitive pathway is stimulated leading to an automatic, involuntary experience in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. Research has been performed that synesthesia could be hereditary and can run strongly in families but no real conclusions have been made yet as to narrowing a specific gene or element leading to this suggestion
Synesthetes are in some sense, people of the future. Some features of human evolution can be deduced from 'synesthesia-phenomena' directed studies, and considering we only use about 12% of our full brain capacity, it can be suggested that synesthetes can access a larger portion of their brain without even fully understanding or realising it.
Experiences with Synesthesia
Synesthetes often report that they were unaware their experiences were unusual until they realised other people did not have them. A lot of cases have been reported that the person would describe certain examples with total different examples, such as describing music with shapes and colours. E.g “The guitar on that track is really red sounding” or “That song feels very angular”. People could have colours for numbers, letters, days of the week and months, musica notations such as how a guitar sounds or how the drums feels, or intellectuals using places or images to remember complex mathematical equations. It could also be very obscure definments such as using a golden fork to describe loyalty (this was used by the Russian novelist Vladimir Nabokov to describe his experience with synesthesia).
Testing for Synesthesia.
To test synesthesia, Rama and collaborators designed an experiment where they could measure the vividness of the colours associated with the numbers 2 and 5. They chose those because you can make them look almost identical, although reversed, by choosing a boxy font. Then they made up a picture of mostly fives, with a few twos scattered within there. Then they asked people to pick out the twos. Most ordinary folks could do it within about twenty seconds or so.
But true synesthetes could do it immediately. That’s because to them, the twos popped out as a brightly colored triangle. This established beyond much doubt that synesthesia was “real,” and more particularly that was a measurable phenomenon with real consequences.
This, in turn, strengthened the hypothesis that the origin of synesthesia was to be found in the structure of the brain. Indeed, it turns out that the region of the brain responsible for processing graphemes lies adjacent to the region responsible for processing colours.
Synesthesia in Art
The phrase synesthesia in art has historically referred to a wide variety of artistic experiments that have explored the cooperation of the senses.
Visual music and art- Starting in the late 1950's, electronic music and electronic visual art have co-existed in the same digital medium. The interaction of art and synesthesia and the computer design has increased tremendously. Nowadays, students of art and music have digital software at their disposal that uses both musical and visual imagery. Given the capability of the Internet to publish and share digital productions, this has led to an enormous avalanche of synesthesia-inspired art on the internet.
Forms of Synesthesia in Art
- Synesthetic art: a cross-sensory perception evocated by the experience of an artwork
- Synesthetic images: images that accumulate striking metaphorical resonance
- Literary synesthesia: a poetic expression or metaphorical articulation of a sensorial correspondence
- Synesthetic metaphor: a metaphor that exploits a similarity between experiences in different sense modalities
- Poetic synesthesia: a semantic metaphoric fusion, to create a virtual image
- Kinetic synesthesia: experiencing dance in multimedia scenographies
- Synesthetic canvas: an electronic screen
- Conceptual synesthesia: elicited from time, graph, grapheme, written word, personality, or thought/memory
- Synesthetic cinema: translating consciousness and perception into sound and moving images
- Tele-synesthesia: a synesthetic experience evoked by a telematic use of new media; the 'travelling' senses
