Pain, Olfaction, Pheromones, and Synesthesia

While reading up on our 5 senses I looked into something called synesthesia. This interested me so much, mostly because it’s so unbelievable and strange. Synesthesia is an experience some people have where stimulation of one sense evokes a perception of another one also. In layman’s terms, you may smell an apple and say that smell is bright pink, or someone might say that the taste of potatoes is kind of like the color orange. As weird as this sounds it’s actually something people experience. People with synesthesia have increase amounts of gray matter in certain brain areas and altered connections to other areas. This response occurs in the cerebral cortex and not in the receptors. The idea of a word triggers that synesthetic experience before they have even thought of the word itself. For example, I read about a man who has color vision and reports synethetic colors that he doesn’t see in real life. His brain can see all the colors, but his cones cannot send the messages. A hypothesis for this is that some of the axons from one cortical area branch into another cortical area. This isn’t the case for all but it can be for some. There are also various types of synesthesia. There’s color graphemic synesthesia where letters or colors appear to be colored. Also, there’s spatial-sequence where numbers, months, or days of the week have precise locations in space (1950 may be “farther away” than 1977), or may have a 3D view of a year as a map. There’s also ordinal-linguistic personification, where numbers, days, months, and even letters are associated with different personalities. For example, a synesthetic I read about said, “4 is honest, but 3 I cannot trust…9 is dark, a gentleman, tall, and graceful. I is a bit of a worrier at times although easy-going; J is male and K is female. Over 60 types of synethesia have been reported, but only small amounts have been evaluated by scientific research. This just seems so interesting to me and I would love to actually meet someone who has this. I’ll probably do more research on this topic in the future.

This video is so interesting and I particularly chose this one because it shows how people with synesthesia are completely normal and are happy that they have this type of experience with letters and numbers. This just seems so interesting to me especially the part where the letter in their names had the same colors.