How it worksAll about synesthesia: People who smell letters and hear colors

From the world of famous

There are many celebrities among people who have or have had co-perception.
Mostly creative people are susceptible to this phenomenon: writers, artists, actors, musicians. Synesthetes are Vladimir Nabokov, Wassily Kandinsky, Ida Maria, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. However, among these people there are also those who are far from art, for example, Nikola Tesla.

The fame and success of artists, musicians and scientists endowed with the phenomenon of co-sensations indicates that synesthesia is not something dangerous or interfering with a person’s daily life. The inner world of a synesthete is much richer than the inner world of ordinary people.

Synesthesia (from the Greek synáisthesis - feeling, simultaneous sensation, antonym to the concept of "anesthesia" - absence of any sensations) is a feature of human perception, characterized by the fact that the response of the senses to a stimulus is accompanied by other, additional sensations or images. One example of manifestation is sound associations when perceiving a color. This phenomenon is not so rare, but often the same tonality can evoke completely different color ideas in different people.

Based on the nature of the additional sensations that appear, the following types of synesthesia are distinguished:

• visual (photism);
• auditory (phonisms);
• taste;
• tactile and so on

Synesthesia can occur selectively, i.e. only to certain impressions, and extend to almost all sensations of the senses. The most relevant study of this phenomenon became at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. At that time, not only psychologists and doctors, but also people of art became interested in this phenomenon. Then the phenomenon of synesthesia forced the musician A. Scriabin to think about “synthetic art”, where each musical key would correspond to a specific color (symphonic poem “Prometheus”, 1910). At the same time, French symbolists (Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Charles Baudelaire) created famous sonnets dedicated to sounds and colors. Many writers, poets and artists can be classified as “synesthetics”, although at first glance they seem very different: V. Kandinsky and L. Tolstoy, M. Tsvetaeva and M. Gorky, V. Nabokov and K. Balmont, B. Pasternak and A. Voznesensky.

"Synesthetic" associations can sometimes be very unpredictable and fantastic, and sometimes even "supernatural". Thus, people, who at first glance are no different from others, sometimes categorically assert that individual words, letters and numbers have their own innate colors, and often even many years are not able to change this opinion.

In 1996, Simon Baron-Cohen, together with other employees at the University of Cambridge, found that approximately one person in two thousand has such “hard” associations, and most likely this can be transmitted genetically, by inheritance. However, other data claim that 1 person out of 25 thousand has such features. By the way, there are much more women synesthetes than men: in the USA 3 times, and in England 8 times. Such people are mostly left-handed, or are equally good with both their right and left hands. Synesthetes are not particularly strong in mathematics, they are often absent-minded and have worse spatial orientation than others.

A new study by Megan Stephen from the University of Oxford has proven that although the role of genes in synesthesia remains the leading one, this phenomenon cannot be determined by genetics alone. Stephen and her colleagues examined 6 synesthetic people who became blind in adulthood and found that three of them developed such abilities after they were completely blind. Thus, one of them, after losing his sight, began to consider all days, months, letters and sounds to be “colored” in certain colors, and the other began to see various images in front of him with sounds and smells.

Baron-Cohen agrees that the formation of this phenomenon is influenced not only by genes, but also by the situation and environment. But he believes that we still need to learn to distinguish true from false. So, for example, one should not consider the colors of a patient who went blind for 5 days to be synesthesia, because they resemble this phenomenon only externally.

Synesthesia

Vera Vinnichenko “Quantik” No. 3, 2020

Russian artist Wassily Kandinsky had an amazing ability to see sounds. Having heard the music of the Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg at a concert, he returned home and, impressed, painted the painting “Impression III” in just two days. Later in his diary, he described the birth of visual images as follows: “Violins, basses, wind instruments embodied in my perception all the power of the early evening hour, in my mind I saw all my colors, they stood before my eyes. Crazy, almost insane lines were drawn in front of me.”

Rice. 1.

Wassily Kandinsky. Impression III. 1911

Similar quirks have been found in many famous people. Composer Ludwig van Beethoven called the key of D major "orange". Japanese pianist Hiromi Uehara never spoke in musical terms, she explained to her students in colors: “Play red” when you need to play brightly, “Play blue” when you need to show sadness. Physicist Richard Feynman saw his formulas in color. Patricia Lynn Duffy, who wrote a book about synesthesia, told her father as a child: “I realized that to make an ‘R’, I first need to write a ‘P’ and then draw a line down from the loop. I was so surprised that I could turn a yellow letter into an orange one just by adding a dash.” The famous perfumer Frederic Malle always felt the color of the scent he created. Perfumers also often describe fragrances in terms of sound (“it has a piercing sound”), geometry (“it has a round shape”), taste (“sweet aroma”), texture (“soft aroma”).

These oddities had to be called some kind of scientific word so that it would not be embarrassing to study them. Therefore, scientists have proposed a serious term - synesthesia.

(from Ancient Greek
syn
- 'together' and
aesthesis
'sensation'): this is the phenomenon in which the activation of one perceptual system (for example, auditory) leads to a response from another perceptual system (for example, visual). Scientists have suggested that the brains of geniuses work in a special way, establishing connections between unexpected events and phenomena. They began to actively study the phenomenon of synesthesia. It turned out that this phenomenon occurs not only among geniuses.

According to recent research by British psychologist Jamie Ward, about 4% of adults are synesthetes

.
The most common synesthesia is grapheme-color (when letters evoke color sensations in people, for example, the letter A
is red,
B
is gray, etc.). Synesthesia is also quite common, when people see days of the week, numbers, and seasons in color. Rarer forms of synesthesia are when letters or words evoke taste or tactile sensations. For example, one synesthete tastes bread dipped in tomato soup when he hears the word “it.”

How to distinguish a synesthete from a dreamer? The most common method is that scientists ask subjects to match colors to letters (days of the week), and they themselves record how much time a person takes. Synesthetes only need a couple of seconds. People without synesthesia refuse to complete a task or take a long time to complete it. In addition, scientists repeat the experiment after a week, a month, a year. Adults with synesthesia choose the same colors, adults without synesthesia choose different colors each time. Identifying a synesthetic child is not so easy. In 2013, scientists found that only 35% of letters in six-year-old synesthetes have constant colors. And only by the age of 11 does the correspondence between letters and colors become stable.

One hypothesis is that synesthesia is an association (from the Latin associare

- 'to connect'). Nathan Withoft and his colleagues found that synesthetes born between 1970 and 1985 tended to choose very specific letter colors. These colors matched the set of children's magnetic letters first released in 1966. In other words, in childhood, when the sensations were especially vivid, the subjects played with colored magnet letters. And when they became adults, every time the subjects saw a letter, its color was involuntarily reproduced in their memory.

Rice. 2.

Nathan Wiethoft's experiment.
On the left
is a set of Fisher-Price letters,
on the right
are color associations of 400 synesthetes born in 1970–1985. Photo: PLOS One

No offense to Dr. Witthoft, the principle of association was formulated by Aristotle, who lived in 384–322 BC. e. Aristotle believed that if sensations A

and
B
coincide in time, then subsequently one will involuntarily recall the other. So it is unlikely that Aristotle would have been surprised to meet a synesthete.

Why is synesthesia needed? Some researchers believe it may make it easier to recognize similar characters. For example, the task is to find twos among fives as quickly as possible. The synesthetist copes with the task faster.

Rice. 3.

Test for identifying synesthesia. Photo: Edhubbard (en.wikipedia.org)

Dr. Nair and Dr. Brang suggested that synesthesia exists latently in all people. In 2020, they induced synaesthetic experiences in non-synaesthetes using a simple procedure. They forced their subjects to sit in pitch darkness and made sounds at different intervals. If the subject felt some kind of light, he had to press a button. In 24% of subjects, sounds in the dark caused the sensation of flashes of light, the appearance of gray-blue inclusions, disappearing white color, etc.

The author of this article has long believed that all people on Earth are synesthetes. As a child, my brother and I had a big fight because he insisted that the letter “A” was blue, although it was obvious to me that it was red. Mom’s letter “A” was also red, and dad authoritatively declared that the letter “A” has no color, but smells like a peach.

Artist Ekaterina Ladatko

Types of synesthesia

With synesthesia syndrome, there is a fusion of sensations

of various types. When one sensory system is irritated, another is also irritated, which normally should not respond to this stimulus. For example, a synesthete, hearing a melody, can see geometric figures of various colors in front of him (sound is perceived not only through hearing, but also through vision).

Synesthesia is a mixed perception
when several different sensations are simultaneously born in the mind.

Man has five senses

, through which he perceives the world and the corresponding
sensations:

• visual,
• auditory,
• taste,
• olfactory,
• tactile.

A synesthete usually has two

of five types of sensations.
On this basis, it is customary to distinguish several types of synesthesia:

1. The confusion of visual perception of letters, numbers, words (graphemes) with the perception of color is called grapheme-color synesthesia
   . This is one of the most common types of synesthesia, often combined with phenomenal memory, because the color associations that arise when perceiving a grapheme allow the synesthete to remember it quickly and for a long time.
2. Chromostesia
   , which is also called “color hearing,” is a mixture of color and sound, when, while hearing a sound, a person simultaneously sees a color. Many prominent composers and musicians have had chromostesia.
3. In kinesthetic-auditory
   synesthesia, people hear certain sounds when they watch an object move. And these are not sounds that can be a consequence of movement, these are associative sounds.
4. Synesthetes with gustatory synesthesia
   can, during auditory and visual perception of an object, also feel its taste.
5. If sound causes certain tactile sensations (touch), acoustic-tactile
   .
6. Localization of sequences
   is called synesthesia, in which a person observes a numerical sequence in the form of points in space.
7. A very unusual and rare type of synesthesia is touch empathy
   . A synesthete physically feels the same thing that another person who is next to him feels.

Science also knows many other amazing and amazing types of synesthesia, and their number is increasing every day.
There are examples when a person mixed not two, but three, four, and even all five types of sensations at once.

Such a person lived in the Russian Empire (later the USSR) and his name was Solomon Shereshevsky (1886-1958). This amazing man had a phenomenal memory, and it was this gift that introduced him to the outstanding Russian psychologist Alexander Luria (1902-1977). Luria's research showed that Shereshevsky's phenomenal memory was due to nothing more than synesthesia, which unites all five senses at once.

Recognition of synesthesia and its varieties

The term itself appeared relatively recently. But one should not assume that the phenomenon itself has only begun to appear now. Its existence has been known since ancient times. Primitive people did not separate colors and sounds when performing their special ritual dances. And at the end of the nineteenth century, the syndrome described in this article became quite popular in the cultural sphere.

People who were gifted were able to combine sounds and colors, as well as combine visual and taste sensations. Thus, artists could receive inspiration in simple situations, synthesizing the received impressions and sensations into subsequent creations.

But synesthesia was popular not only among artists. She was actively interested in doctors who really saw the importance of researching this unique syndrome. Modern medicine has divided synesthetic impulses into several types:

1. Color hearing . This type of synesthesia can manifest itself in composers or musicians. Their ability lies in the fact that they can easily “color” sounds in certain colors;
2. Auditory synesthesia . People belonging to this category of synesthetes have a very interesting ability to imagine sounds at the moment of contemplation of an object;
3. Gustatory synesthesia . A unique person with this type of synesthesia is able to sense the taste of an object through vision or hearing. An example is the sensation of taste when listening to a melody;
4. Projective synthesis , as well as associative synesthesia . Projection synesthesia is an interesting phenomenon in which its owner is simply unable to associate sensory sensations with emerging objects. That is, for example, contemplation of cold water can evoke absolutely any images in them. Associative synesthesia is the opposite of what was stated earlier. When seeing a certain object, the owner of associative synesthesia will have a corresponding impression that leaves an imprint on the individual’s subconscious. For example, these unique individuals will associate the same cold water with the color blue.

How to develop synesthesia Where to start

There are special exercises for the development of synesthesia that include and involve the senses in the work of perception. This works great for children. It is quite natural for them to describe the color of letters or the taste of the days of the week or the sound of the months.

If you are a parent and do not have synesthetic perception, but want to develop these abilities in your child (and maybe at the same time in yourself!), you have to do some preparatory work.

Make lists:

• colors (not the usual 7 colors of the rainbow, but at least at least 30 shades (Google to the rescue!)
• -textural, tactile sensations (temperature, smoothness - roughness..., softness - hardness, flexibility, plasticity, etc.)
• Sounds
• Flavors
• Smells
• Emotions
• Events
• Characters
• I hope everyone knows the alphabet
• Actions
• Geometric shapes. Etc.

This will not only help enrich the sphere of sensations, but will also expand the child’s vocabulary.

Why lists? Because what does not have a name does not exist.

Make it a habit to expand your perception - constantly ask yourself and your child questions:

What might (could, could) this sound like?

What does it taste like?

What colour?

What does it feel like?

What could it smell like?

What color is the smell? What does sound taste like? What does the color feel like?

Yogis have an exercise called “color breathing.” Colors and sounds heal.

Go beyond the boundaries of the usual, permitted and ordinary. Start creating a fairy tale with your child. And you will see the world completely different. Magical and unusual.

Train each organ separately and all at once, do this constantly and new neural circuits will constantly form in your brain. This is the key to a long, happy life without sclerosis and insanity. This is the development of eidetic, figurative and emotional memory. This is the development of empathy - understanding and accepting the emotional state of another person.

Focus on the shades and nuances of feelings. Listen, look closely, sniff…. "The world is full of complicity

Nature is an indissoluble unity. The star roads of the Universe make up one poem. Life is a complex, fused vision. And since life is a dream, and in a dream colors freely flow into sounds, and a thought, barely thought, turns into action, the concept of Light and Sound is not an arbitrary phrase, but an exact statement of reality taking place in the worlds.” (K. Balmont)

“The world is full of complicity. Nature is an indissoluble unity. The star roads of the Universe make up one poem. Life is a complex, fused vision. And since life is a dream, and in a dream colors freely flow into sounds, and a thought, barely thought, turns into action, the concept of Light and Sound is not an arbitrary phrase, but an exact statement of reality taking place in the worlds.” (K. Balmont)

For deep learning:

Musical and color associations:
“Harmony of sound and color.
Composition “Flower” for children from 10 to 14 years old

To be continued.

In everyday life, we constantly use our senses - we inhale the smell of fresh bread, admire the beauty of nature, listen to the masterpieces of classical composers, enjoy the taste of ice cream, and touch soft silk with pleasure. Using one of the senses to study any subject is a normal human condition. Yes, we can see bread, smell it, touch and taste it, but who would think to think about what fresh bread sounds like? It turns out that some people are able to use all five senses at once to study a subject. This phenomenon is called synesthesia.

Synesthesia as a stylistic device in Russian and English artistic discourse

It is known that the five senses are responsible for receiving information about the world around us, on the basis of which we build ideas about objects and phenomena. Each of them represents a certain area of ​​sensitivity - vision, hearing, smell, touch and taste. For a long time it was believed that they all worked independently of each other. However, due to certain perceptual mechanisms, information coming from different senses can interact and intertwine. One of the forms of such interaction, in which the modalities of sensations “work together”, complementing each other, is called synesthesia

.
Synesthesia (from the Greek synaisthesis
- “mixed sensation”) is “a fusion of the qualities of different spheres of sensitivity, in which the qualities of one modality are transferred to another, heterogeneous one, for example, with color hearing, the qualities of the visual sphere - to the auditory one” [6, p. . 593].

Despite the fact that synesthesia was originally a psychophysiological phenomenon, since the 80s. In the 19th century, linguistics was also actively interested in it. This article will examine the mechanisms of the functioning of synesthesia in language, as well as examples of its use. In the context of linguistics, the term “synesthesia” refers to both the process of intersensory associations and its results” [3], that is, lexical or phraseological units built on the transfer of designations of sensations from one sense organ to another.

Many scientists, in particular E.V. Klyuev, classify synesthesia as a metaphorical type of tropes. However, synesthesia stands out from other tropes built on associations by similarity (for example, allegory, oxymoron, metaphor and others), in that it is a linguistic phenomenon that involves “... several areas of the senses at once - say, vision and hearing or taste, smell or touch, plus other various combinations” [4, p. 189].

Why is synesthesia so interesting for linguists? American linguist Benjamin Whorf believed that “synesthesia, or the ability to perceive through the organs of one sense, phenomena related to the field of another, for example, the perception of color or light through sounds, and vice versa, should be made more conscious thanks to linguistic metaphorical system that conveys a non-spatial representation using spatial terms” [10, p. 163]. Thus, thoughts, feelings or sounds, for which the sphere of non-spatial perception is responsible, are transmitted using lexemes denoting elements of the spatial, thereby, as it were, attributing to our thoughts, feelings, sound sensations properties that were not originally inherent in them - color, shape, contours, structure. It is impossible not to agree with the author that this property of synesthetic metaphor has played a huge role in art.

On the other hand, “synesthesia is a kind of stylistic marker that reveals to the reader the specifics of the worldview and attitude of the writer and poet, his vision of the surrounding reality” [9, p. 102]. The use of synesthetic metaphors allows us to understand “the inner world of the poet, the peculiarities of his thinking, his passions, inclinations” [8]. The importance of synesthesia for literature is obvious, because this trope helps to create especially vivid images and convey even the most complex feelings, and also gives the reader an idea of ​​the author’s worldview. Synaesthetic metaphors often contain rather “unexpected” combinations and thus “expand the possibilities of the text and the boundaries of its perception” [7, p. 392].

Let's look at examples from fiction. Russian poetry of the Silver Age is rich in synesthetic metaphors. For example, in S. Yesenin’s poem “Autumn” you can find the following combination: “ the blue clang of her horseshoes is heard

", K. Balmont - "
the sound of the flute is dawn, blue
."
In A. Blok’s words, “ a ringing blue hour poured out
.”
Famous lines by V. Mayakovsky “ I will sew myself black pants from my velvet voice!”
"also contain a synesthetic metaphor, as well as a fragment from A. Akhmatova's poem "Listening to Singing": "
A woman's voice, like the wind, rushes / It seems black, wet, night... / Fills it with a diamond shine, / Somewhere “It turns silver for a moment
.” Such an abundance of synaesthetic metaphors in the works of Silver Age poets can be explained primarily by the fact that they were also representatives of symbolism, for whom “the fusion of feelings was reduced to the search for specific, deliberately detailed correspondences” [11, p. 127]. “Synesthesia and specifically “color hearing” were presented by the symbolists as a sign of high artistry, elitism, and esotericism, […] embodying the principles of the unity of art and panmusicality that are essential to symbolism” [2]. By the way, the active use of synesthesia to achieve artistic goals is characteristic not only of Russian symbolists, but also of the French A. Rimbaud, whose sonnet “Vowels,” published in 1871, created a real sensation and is a classic example of the use of synesthesia.

According to many authors, the English language is less rich in means of conveying emotional states; according to A. Verzhbitskaya, “the Russian language pays much more attention to emotions than English, and has a much richer repertoire of lexical and grammatical expressions for distinguishing them” [1, p. 121]. Despite this, examples of the use of synesthesia can also be found in English-language authors.

An example of the use of synesthesia in English literature can be considered the tragedy of William Shakespeare “Othello”: Oh, beware, my lord, of jealousy! / It is the green-eyed monster that doth mock / The meat it feeds on

.
Comparing jealousy with a green-eyed monster ,
the author builds an association between feeling and color - a product of visual perception.
P.B. Shelley also resorted to synesthesia in “The Sensitive Plant”: And the hyacinth purple, and white, and blue, / Which flung from its bells a sweet peal anew / Of music so delicate, so soft, and intense , / It felt like an odour within the sense.
The poet creates the image of a flower using intersensory transference, comparing its aroma with gentle music.
Finally, Oscar Wilde also used a synesthetic metaphor. Salome, the heroine of the tragedy of the same name, says the following words: “ Speak again , Jokanaan . “Thy voice is wine to me ”
– the author uses lexemes that convey taste sensations to describe the sound of the voice.
And in the play “An Ideal Husband,” the author uses color to describe music: “ I have promised to look in at the Hartlocks .” I believe they have got a mauve Hungarian band that plays mauve Hungarian music
.
The author uses the color lilac ( mauve )
, one of the shades of purple, rather faded, lacking intensity and expressiveness, and it can be assumed that it is with the help of this synesthetic comparison that he manages to convey the attitude towards the orchestra itself and the music that the musicians perform.

On the other hand, synesthesia as a stylistic device can be found not only in literature. Every day we ourselves unconsciously use synaesthetic combinations, firmly entrenched in our vocabulary, to describe the surrounding reality, for example: flashy colors, low / high voice, warm / cold color, sharp sound,

etc.
An interesting idea is expressed in his article “Synesthesia and the features of its manifestation” by M.N. Mileeva and T.Yu. Dudkova: they call synesthesia a “psychic fossil,” an inheritance inherited from ancestors who perceived the world around us completely differently than we do. To prove this hypothesis, the article suggests that the words “Sunday” and “Monday” will evoke different color associations in people. Thus, Monday, according to the authors, will be associated with dark colors - black, brown, while Sunday - exclusively with light colors (white, yellow, pink). The authors consider “synesthetic atavism” to be the fact that in English the very names of the days of the week often contain synesthetic associations: in the word Sunday
the sun component conveys an association with something bright, warm and pleasant, like the sun, while in the word
Monday
there is an association with the moon, twilight, which in turn are often associated with sadness and melancholy [5, p. 300].

To summarize the above, we can say that the importance of synesthesia as a linguistic means lies mainly in the fact that it allows native speakers to consolidate in speech abstract concepts that are the result of the interaction of sensations and information received from various senses, a product of the mental and emotional sphere, which are otherwise not directly observable.

Detection of synesthesia:

The child himself often shows his unusualness only in adulthood. After all, in childhood it seems to us that everyone sees and perceives the world exactly the way we do. And, of course, the letter “Z” is always orange, and the number “7” cannot be anything other than purple (an example of the feeling of a grapheme synesthete), whole words and people’s names are also colored. In fact, people have had synesthesia for as long as they can remember. The sensations practically do not change over time. More often, a child makes a discovery about his peculiarity by accident. For example, in a conversation about a certain name, he says that he doesn’t really like it because it’s “green.” After surprising others, it turns out that only the baby considers him “green”; no one else sees him in color. It's funny that synesthetes of the same species have very few overlapping associations. If one person’s number 4 is blue, another’s is brown, and another’s is red. Everyone is sure that its color is the only correct one and there cannot be another color assigned to this particular number.

Synesthesia in psychology: meaning and application of the term

The world is full of unknown secrets. One of the phenomena that is not fully understood is synesthesia. Find out what it is - maybe you too have this unusual ability.

Many people think outside the box and experience the world differently. This means that for them, letters can smell, music can have a shape, and someone's name can be associated with a taste or color. Many compare this to psychic abilities, but synesthesia has completely different mechanisms of action.

What is synesthesia

In a simplified version, synesthesia is an unusual neurological change in perception in which an external influence on one perceptual system causes another system to work. For example, listening to music evokes certain taste or visual sensations. This is not a mental disorder, as scientists have found. This is a simple phenomenon, the mechanism of action of which is clear, but the cause of its occurrence is unknown.

There are many types of synesthesia, as well as people who have it. Such people are called synesthetes. Many scientists have identified an interesting trend - people more often “suffer” from this phenomenon if they are creative individuals. In what direction this works is not entirely clear. Perhaps the phenomenon contributes to the development of creative abilities, or perhaps, on the contrary, creative people have such a predisposition from childhood. As proof, we can cite a huge number of talented and world-famous artists, composers and writers who admitted their ability to perceive the world in several “dimensions” at once.

Among the famous people who had synesthesia, one can highlight the most prominent personalities of their eras: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikola Tesla, Salvador Dali.

Applications of synesthesia

This perceptual confusion helps people develop creative skills. The fact is that it is very useful for artists and musicians to feel familiar things on different levels. It helps to experience the world in a different light, to share with people an alternative view of what they can only perceive and see from one angle.

They tried to study synesthesia in the 18th and 19th centuries, but this did not produce any results, and interest in this phenomenon sharply disappeared. The Synaesthete Society has sparked renewed interest. Even ordinary people with normal perceptions became curious again about how such mechanisms work.

Over the past few decades of studying the phenomenon, scientists have found that:

• Synesthesia is involuntary. It cannot be suspended, cured, changed, muffled;
• Such people are absolutely not dangerous. They can drive a car, work in any field without any restrictions;
• the process is accompanied by emotional outbursts and changes in the functioning of internal organs.

According to statistics, there are about 0.005% of people in the world who feel something differently, that is, they have synesthetic principles. Many scientists are confident that this percentage is much higher - it’s just that a large number of such people do not understand that they have unusual perceptions. There have been studies that have led scientists to the conclusion that the phenomenon may occur in autism, because many autistic people are synesthetes.

Scientists have also found that synesthesia is passed on to future generations in the same way as hair or eye color. This is a self-sufficient phenomenon that is genetically inherent in people. Some experts are inclined to believe that a person can develop the ability for synesthesia, but this still will not help even remotely know how those with an innate ability feel.

Science cannot explain many of the mysteries of human thinking, including déjà vu. In any case, all this is tied to the work of the brain. Experts in the field of studying such phenomena are almost one hundred percent confident that synesthetes have much greater creative and intellectual potential than ordinary people. Good luck and don't forget to press the buttons and

Always the most interesting articles on this topic. Necessarily

09.11.2018 06:34

Heavy inheritance

The search for the genetic determinants of synesthesia is a very long detective story, with intrigue and many exciting twists. Back in the mid-90s, when analyzing a sample of synesthetes (by the way, it was small - only 28 people), it turned out that the ratio of men to women in it was 1:6. Reflecting on this strange gender injustice, the authors dug deep into the pedigree of the subjects.

What they learned led them to propose that synesthesia may be determined by a single dominant gene located on the sex X chromosome, and that the enormous gender imbalance may be explained by its potential lethality in males. Without going into the possible mechanisms of this, it is worth saying that cases of such slightly exotic inheritance are known, so the idea seemed quite realistic.

However, later work allowed the male synaesthetes, who were worried about their fate, to breathe out. They are a not-so-rare and miraculously surviving exception to the rule: in the larger sample, the gender disparity was reduced to a modest 2:1 in favor of women, rejecting suggestions that the hypothetical X-linked gene would be highly lethal for men. Instead, the authors suggested that proud (or shy) 46 XY karyotype owners were less likely to respond to researchers' advertisements looking for subjects, preferring to keep their synesthesia to themselves.

And finally, in a very recent article, researchers announced that they had found a whole bunch of candidate genes for the title of the synesthesia gene. Modern DNA sequencing technologies work wonders: during the genetic analysis of 43 families of synesthetes, more than a hundred exomes (collections of genome sequences from which RNA is read) were read. Their analysis made it possible to identify 37 genes, individual variants of which correlate with color-sound synesthesia. Six of them raised the greatest hopes - those associated with the process of axonogenesis

in the visual and auditory areas of the cerebral cortex.

Axonogenesis is a process that occurs during the formation of the brain, during which immature neurons form processes called axons. Attracted by various signaling substances, axons grow into other areas of the brain, connecting them with each other. Most likely, rare variants of the genes mentioned above, characteristic of synesthetes, enhance axonogenesis between the visual and auditory cortex. As a result, signals from the auditory cortex cross-activate the visual cortex, giving rise to visual sensations.

It can be said that the idea of ​​a single X-linked allele for synesthesia failed, but the concept of cross-activation has found excellent support from molecular genetics. However, one should not think that the situation with the mechanism of synesthesia has become clearer. To understand how far we are all from understanding this phenomenon, let's look at alternative concepts that are also not without convincing evidence.

Study of synesthesia by psychologists

Medicine has been and is studying such a phenomenon as synesthesia. Experts clearly define individuals who are able to connect images or objects through several senses at once. It was mentioned above that synesthetes include creative individuals. But this is an optional point. Artists and musicians may not always be synesthetes, but among these people there are sometimes real unique ones.

Synesthesia sometimes gives some of its owners phenomenal memory. Proof of this interesting point was obtained by specialists after conducting a series of experiments, which were able to demonstrate that in some cases synesthetes actually have this quality.

For example, consider a study in which the subject was a woman. She was shown matrices, each of which contained 50 digits. She reviewed the proposed data and then copied it onto a piece of paper. Two days later, the same test was repeated. The results were similar. According to psychologists, the woman was able to demonstrate such results due to the fact that when contemplating the numbers, corresponding associations appeared in her head.

Famous synesthetes

How many of us have thought about the fact that some people perceive the phrase “I’m purple” not as an abstract expression established in speech, but as a real feeling?

After reading the introduction, one can falsely assume that all great creators - writers, poets, composers, artists - are synesthetes. But this is not true. Many studies have concluded that ordinary people and people with synesthesia have the same creative tendencies. In addition, the palette of sensations of a synesthete is individual: the poet Balmont compared the sound of a violin to the shine of a diamond, and the artist Kandinsky compared it to the color green.

In general, synesthetes have the same level of intelligence and creativity as other people. Taking an IQ test showed that they were worse at math and spatial awareness than others. This is partly due to the fact that some numbers, such as 6 and 8, have the same color, so synesthetes confuse them. But their memory is more developed. They tend to remember the arrangement of things, and some even develop a manic obsession with order.

As we have already seen, some famous people were synesthetes. Here are some more examples:

W. Mozart

- Austrian composer. He had an ear for color and said that the B-flat minor scale was black, and the D major scale was warm orange.

F. Liszt

- Hungarian composer. While working as a conductor in Vienna, he once surprised the orchestra by asking them to play the key “a little blue.”

M. Monroe

– actress, singer, fashion model. Her biographer and niece claim that Marilyn was able to "see the vibration" of sound.

M. Gagne

- cartoonist, artist. Creator of synesthetic taste sequences in Disney and Pixar works.

R. Feynman

– physicist, Nobel laureate. Grapheme-color synesthesia.

A. d'Abadie

– geographer, ethnologist, linguist. A rare form of synesthesia - I saw the numbers I was thinking about in surrounding things - trees, houses, household items.

Examples of synesthetic works are the novel “The Gift” by V.V. Nabokov, the poems of A. Rimbaud, the symphonic poem “Prometheus” by A.N. Scriabin, and the paintings of contemporary American artist C. Steen.

Finally, a poem by A. Rimbaud, in which he described “his” ideas about the colors of letters:

• A – black; white – E; I – red; U – green.
• O - blue: I will tell their secret in turn,
• A – velvet corset on the body of insects,
• Which buzz above the stench of sewage.

• E – whiteness of canvases, tents and fog.
• The sparkle of mountain springs and fragile fans!
• And - purple blood, oozing wound
• Or scarlet lips amidst anger and praise.

• U - tremulous ripples of wide green waves,
• Calm meadows, peace of deep wrinkles
• On the laboring brow of gray-haired alchemists.
• Oh - the ringing roar of a trumpet, piercing and strange,
• Flights of angels in the silence of the vast heavens -
• Oh - her marvelous eyes are the lilac rays.

How to develop synesthesia. Exercises

It is not difficult to guess that synesthetes, who have a unique natural gift, do not just understand the world around them differently. They can feel it more strongly, while experiencing such unusual sensations that many have never dreamed of. There are a lot of advantages from this. You can, for example, develop your creative abilities more fully, solve problems that other people (with a “given mindset”) cannot solve in any case - they don’t even realize that it is possible to understand the problem facing them differently, that it is possible to approach its solution with the other, more advantageous side. But a synesthetic person can handle all the tasks. Synesthesia is not a stigma for him, but his best assistant.

Here are some exercises on how to develop and tame perceptual synesthesia. They are quite simple, but the result is extraordinary:

1. Try, while studying a certain subject, to generate in yourself such associations that are completely unusual for it. Fantasize to your heart's content! You can, for example, give the most ordinary music a form or fill it with color. Don't try to define the object you are working with as something that belongs to a specific category of things already known. The trick is to successfully slip outside the boundaries of ordinary perception. In a word, use those feelings that are “asleep” under similar conditions. Let the colors sing, the music from your headphones or repeater become delicious, and the smells can be felt. As a result of such an exercise, over time you will learn not only to “feel the imperceptible”, but to generate new ideas, new approaches, new solutions.

2. But when performing this task you will have to seriously rack your brains. You will have to learn to think differently - not at all the way you were used to before. Here you will need to give free rein to your unbridled imagination. Imagine what would happen if many people you know suddenly changed their lifestyle or field of activity. Imagine what kind of music the Beatles would write if they were born in Chechnya. What would Alla Pugacheva's election campaign be like if she decided to become president of Russia? This exercise perfectly develops the ability to think atypically through vivid associative connections.

3. Combined breathing and visual practice. In order to impart visual images with odors, first train on objects with a strong odor. With your eyes closed, begin to bring strong-smelling objects to your nose. Let them be rose petals and grapefruit peels, a bottle of perfume and old socks, chopped onions or a spoonful of vegetable soup. Try to give all these smells different tactile and visual characteristics. Feel like a perfumer from the novel of the same name by Patrick Suskind, a true masterpiece of synesthetic art.

4. A selection of easily differentiated objects can be used to develop your tactile senses. When touching them, try to evoke a variety of associations. An ordinary cookbook with pictures will allow you to feel “on your tongue” many of the dishes presented in it - you just need to spend a minimum of effort or skip lunch;)

5. To become a true synesthete, in any situation, try to look deeper than your own feelings allow you. Usually a person perceives sound as a given - half-heartedly, without really listening and not paying attention to its many shades and halftones. But in reality, even the silence of an empty room is not as simple as it might seem at first glance

It can be black, or sweet, like cotton candy... We perceive sound too roughly, without focusing on the shades. Even the silence in the apartment is heterogeneous, it is filled with the maximum number of subtler and unnoticeable shades

Try to distinguish them, distinguish them from others.

Practice developing your synesthetic abilities whenever you have free time: at home, at work, during your lunch break, on the bus or subway. The world around you can be explored and experienced in new ways using the same five senses. A lot of amazing discoveries and revelations await you, for which you will not need to buy an expensive ticket to the other side of the world.

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Alternative view

God is organic. Yes. And the man?

And the person must be limited.

—

© I. A. Brodsky

It has been established that the human brain is able to perceive information about the world around us using six main senses. We see, hear, taste, smell, feel with our skin and can maintain balance by “regulating” the position of the body in space. Our ears do not see, our skin does not smell. However, this does not mean that the senses are completely independent of each other.

Partial replacement

Despite the apparent “autonomy,” the perception of each sense organ is closely interconnected with the others. This allows us to get a more complete picture of the world around us, like a puzzle in which all the details, individually representing a riddle with an incomprehensible result, are in their places.

All the more interesting is the work of the senses in a situation where one of them, for some reason, is not able to provide a full analysis of the environment and the transmission of this information to the brain.
At such moments, the “musketeer mode” turns on, when one for all, and all for one. The functions of the dysfunctional organ are redistributed to the rest, but this does not mean that the blind will begin to see with their ears, and the deaf will begin to hear with their nose. It is well known that the former have better developed tactile sensations and hearing, while the latter perfectly read lips and gesture, having developed motor skills several times better than those of an ordinary person. However, there are exceptions to every rule - for example, synesthesia. Promotional Video:
Alternative Feeling

Traditional excerpt from the dictionary:

Synesthesia (ancient Greek “together”, “sensation”) is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation in one sensory or cognitive system leads to an automatic, involuntary response in another sensory system. A person who experiences such an experience is a synesthete.

Another definition of synesthesia is a phenomenon of perception in which stimulation of one sense organ, along with sensations specific to it, also causes sensations corresponding to another sense organ.

Synesthesia is not a mental disorder.

It does not apply to any pathologies, quite the opposite - it greatly helps a person who, by the will of fate, has lost one of his senses. This is an incredibly interesting phenomenon, but its study has been abandoned - there are too few who have developed synesthesia and who have been lured into research labyrinths. It is believed to be present in every person and is most pronounced in infants. In adults, too, but at about six months of age, complete “separation” of the senses already occurs, and catching these sensations becomes problematic. Some researchers have dubbed this process the death of neurons responsible for the preservation of synesthetic connections. Those with synesthesia still have these neurons.

They arise associatively. A simple example is color perception. In many countries, the “official” mourning color is black, and therefore the average European involuntarily perceives it as something gloomy and depressing. And in the East, the color white is perceived in exactly the same way - it is precisely this color that is associated there with the mourning atmosphere.

If synesthesia is not very pronounced, then this contributes to better memorization of information: the associative impression is “duplicated” on several sensory organs at once. Here it would be appropriate to cite an anecdotal situation with a man who decided to remember the number of his carriage in an unusual way: “1492, the year of the discovery of America... I definitely won’t forget!”, and then ran around the station and asked passers-by if they knew when America was discovered .

Another thing is congenital synesthesia. First, an association arises, a primary synesthetic image, and only then a general impression received through the main senses. Solomon Shereshevsky, a professional mnemonist, possessed this ability.

He had a phenomenal ability to memorize series of words, tables of numbers, long meaningless formulas, phrases of an unfamiliar language. In most cases, he could accurately recall the same series of words, formulas, and phrases several years later. The limits of his memory in terms of volume and duration were not traced. Shereshevsky's memory was built primarily on spontaneous synesthetic associations. Words for him were images with the addition of various taste, visual and tactile sensations.

Shereshevsky's synesthesia was so strong that associations sometimes displaced the main feeling. He himself recalled it this way:

I approach the ice cream saleswoman and ask what varieties she has. “There’s plenty of everything!” - she answers in such a tone that a whole heap of coals and ash flies out of her mouth. People's voices are bouquets of flowers, puffs of smoke or fog. I get so carried away by looking at voices that sometimes I can’t understand what they’re talking to me about.

The memory of “ordinary” synesthetes, despite its apparent phenomenal nature, is easily influenced by chaos. If you change the places of familiar objects, it will bring confusion into their mind, so for the most part they are people who are scrupulous about order.

Combination of incongruous

Among the many varieties of synesthesia, chromesthesia, also known as acoustic-color synesthesia, or simply color hearing, stands out. Synaesthetes with this ability, when hearing a sound, as a “bonus”, perceive it not only as an ordinary sound sensation - they also add a color sensation. Modern musicians with colored hearing say that this is a poorly controlled and rather unpleasant phenomenon - there is too much noise around us.

Many have tried to draw the “spectrum-octave” analogy. The history of light music stretches back to about 1650, when the first theories on this matter appeared. They were very popular in the 17th-19th centuries, and were conventionally divided into two options:

• color music - a scale is accompanied by a certain color sequence;
• music of color - the complete absence of music, the replacement of sounds with a spectrum corresponding to the octave.

At first it was believed that each note corresponds to a certain color, but with synesthetes this is not the case - everything is purely individual. But is this a good enough reason not to try to combine the incompatible? An example of this is the “symphony of light” in “Prometheus” by A. N. Scriabin. In his score there is a line “Luce” (“Light”), written in familiar notes for an unusual instrument - a light keyboard, but there is no specific indication of the correspondence of notes and colors. This did not stop Prometheus from being staged with lighting, starting in 1915.

One of the main problems of early light music was that the idea was ahead of technical progress. There is a composition, but there is nothing to perform it on. Of course, there were tests, and quite a few, but still the process of staging a light and music work was often beyond the capabilities of ordinary musicians. Therefore, the next revolution in this direction occurred in the 70s of the last century: it can be characterized in two words, “Equipment to the masses!” This was facilitated by the development and reduction in cost of electronics, its universal distribution, and the use of high-quality lighting equipment at concerts. At the same time, rather primitive, but still performing their direct function, “home” light and music installations appeared, and research was carried out on the impact of color music on astronauts. Another decade later, many schools of color music appeared throughout Europe.

It has been established that any musical effect can be enhanced with the help of color. This principle is applied in discos, and even in cinemas - a film in a modern format is often enhanced not only by color, but also by other influences - vestibular, tactile and olfactory.

Supersense

Color hearing is the most common manifestation of synesthesia, but this does not mean that others do not occur. So, the patient of Dr. Richard Saitovich was a 12-year-old boy who took different poses depending on what word he was told. The child was convinced: each word contains a specific movement, and he simply shows which one. This phenomenon was called audiomotor synesthesia. The doctor repeated the experiment: a few years later he found an already matured patient and, without warning, said a few words to him. The young man repeated the same movements as in childhood - the synesthetic perception remained the same.

Many synesthetes “see” the colors of letters and numbers. An even greater number distinguishes the “color” of sound. Vision and hearing appear more often than other sensory organs in the “case of synaesthetes,” but there is also a tactile-gustatory combination, and a figurative one—looking at an object and feeling what it feels like to the touch.

It is impossible to accurately calculate how many types synesthesia includes. Yes, it is based on the usual organs of perception, but there are many more reactions - a synesthete rarely has only one.

Synesthesia and the world around us

So much in life depends on the question, “Do you see what I see?” This question connects people socially... But when you see something that no one around you sees, you feel something that no one feels, you are doomed to loneliness. The world around you is like a raging ocean, and your inner sensations are a tiny uninhabited island of pale yellow “Rs”, turquoise Tuesdays and wine-colored “A” notes - Patricia Duffy, synesthete.

Attempts to explain the synesthetic perception of the world from the point of view of habitual rationalism and logic only strengthen the wall between the owner of unusual abilities and the world around him. The very existence of synesthesia is direct proof that reality cannot be the same for everyone. But, unfortunately, what the majority is not able to realize is rejected as having no right to life. Society is too obsessed with rationalism and relies only on the six basic senses. Do synesthetes really need them? Maybe for him it’s just a symbol of obtaining information about the world around him, and not his tool?

Why is this happening

Little is known about how synesthesia develops. It is thought to develop during childhood, when children first intensively learn and engage with abstract concepts. This hypothesis, called the semantic vacuum hypothesis, explains why the most common forms of synesthesia are grapheme-color, spatial sequence, and number form. Moreover, one 2006 study documented a case of synesthesia in which synesthetic associations could be traced to colored magnets on a refrigerator. Despite the existence of this isolated case, most synesthetic associations do not seem to be driven by learning of this kind.

Theories

Several theories have been proposed to try to explain the mechanisms behind these unique sensations. The two most well-known theories are cross-activation theory and feedback theory. Both of these theories have different evidence to support their validity.

Cross activation theory

Feedback theory

Typically, input from multiple areas of the brain is sent to a multisensory processing area that links the information together. According to this theory, a neural signal entering a processing area can activate other initially unactivated areas through feedback.

For example, when viewing the grapheme stimulus “A,” signals are transmitted to the multisensory processing area, which causes activation of feedback that sends a signal to the color area responsible for the perception of red. Feedback theory suggests that in people who are not synesthetes, this feedback is also present, but is usually inhibited.

This is interesting: Hallucinations are a side effect of the brain overinterpreting information

As evidence for this theory, researchers point to the ability of drugs and medications to induce synesthetic experiences in people who are not synesthetes.

As you already understand, there is no consensus on the mechanisms underlying this phenomenon. Moreover, recently, thanks to the advent of new technologies, researchers have also been able to discover genes that are believed to contribute to synesthesia.

Genetics

Researchers have already recognized an inherited tendency for synesthesia. This observation was first noted by Francis Galton in 1883, and several studies have subsequently confirmed it. A genetic factor may explain why a person with one form of synesthesia may also have another form, since genes are expressed throughout the brain and affect multiple modalities.

Synesthesia for an hour

The use of certain drugs, mainly tryptamines, hallucinogens like LSD, which are similar in structure to the neurotransmitter serotonin

, causes synesthesia-like sensations. Given that the substances mentioned are mainly known as hallucinogens, it would be expected that their effects would relate to visual images. But it turns out that even in people who are blind from birth and have no idea of ​​visual images, LSD causes synesthetic experiences.

A curious case is described in a very, very recent publication. Born prematurely, the patient soon after birth became a victim of retinopathy of prematurity, which was notorious in the 1940s due to excess oxygen concentration in incubators. Complete blindness did not stop him from studying music, and he soon began to live the life of a wild rock musician with all the ensuing consequences. According to the blind rock star, the experience of taking LSD particularly stood out from his experiments, providing intense synesthetic experiences. Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto, against the backdrop of LSD, created for the blind musician a tactile sensation of immersion “into the most wonderful waterfall in the world.”

How do synesthetes appear?

The appearance of such a unique phenomenon caused a lot of controversy in the scientific community. This is understandable, because not every person decides to separate numbers by color or letters by tactile sensations. In the 19th century, synesthesia was considered a pathology. However, after a series of studies, scientists came to the conclusion that this phenomenon is normal, it just occurs in a small group of people. It was originally believed that only 1% of all people on Earth were synesthetes. Although today this figure has increased. Research by Jamie Ward and Julia Simner has shown that one in 100 people has some form of synesthesia. Although there is evidence that 1 in 25,000 people are true synesthetes. The difficulty lies in separating real and pseudosynesthesia. Scientists are also interested in how the phenomenon of synesthesia appeared. Some attribute it to genetic predisposition. For example, Megan Stephen, a scientist at the University of Oxford, believes that genes play an important role in obtaining synesthesia. However, his research suggests that other factors may also have an impact. Stephen conducted an experiment among synesthetes who had lost their sight. Of the 6 people, three received their feature after blindness. Moreover, the subjects demonstrated excellent types of synesthesia. One projected visual images with sound or olfactory sensations, the other began to endow letters and other objects with a certain color. Simon Baron-Cohen from the University of Cambridge believes that the environment or lifestyle contributes to the emergence of this phenomenon

It is important to distinguish between what is real synesthesia and what is associated with projections and hallucinations

How to independently develop a phenomenon

As you know, synesthetes are able to better penetrate the secrets of the space around them, feel more deeply, and sense to a degree that ordinary people are not able to achieve. This phenomenon makes it possible to solve creative problems, develop your talent and improve it.

If a person, from childhood, is able to perceive additional qualities in surrounding objects that are not associated with associations at the subconscious level, then there is a high probability that he has this phenomenon.

As you know, synesthesia in psychology is studied in sufficient detail. Numerous studies have led to an amazing discovery. It turns out, according to experts, such a quality can not only be inherited, but also developed independently. For this purpose, special trainings have even been developed, thanks to which a person can learn to receive information from additional sensitive organs that cause the specified phenomenon. Conducting such classes on your own is not difficult.

What it is

Synesthesia is a special way of perception when some states, phenomena, concepts and symbols are involuntarily endowed with additional qualities: color, smell, texture, taste, geometric shape, sound tonality or position in space.
These qualities are illusory: the sense organs usually responsible for their appearance are not involved in synesthetic perception. At the same time, the senses seem to be mixed: a person can see or touch a sound, hear a color, feel the texture or geometric shape of a melody, and so on. This “cross” perception can manifest itself in two ways. More intense - when a synesthete actually sees or feels colors, smells and other additional qualities in parallel with the usual sensations of objects. But there is also a soft option - “associative”. when a person develops strong associations to a certain stimulus, but as abstract knowledge rather than real physical sensations. The difference between such associations and ordinary imagination lies in their fixity: for example, throughout one’s life a person associates the number “7” with the color yellow, and Mozart’s music with an oval, no matter in what context he encounters them.