

Have emotional reactions such as pleasurable feelings linked to their perceptions.Lexical-gustatory (LG) synesthesia is an intriguing neurological condition in which individuals experience phantom tastes when hearing, speaking, reading, or thinking about words.Remember the secondary synesthetic perception better than the primary perception.Have a perception that is generic, such as seeing a shape in response to a certain smell, but not seeing something more complex.Have a perception that is the same each time.Project sensations outside the mind, such as seeing colors floating through the air when they hear sounds.Involuntarily experience their perceptions.People with synesthesia typically do the following: There are, however, guidelines that were developed by leading synesthesia researcher Dr. There is no official method of diagnosing synesthesia. "It ranges from 0 percent to about 5 percent depending on what their language background is." Diagnosis "Groups of people with different linguistic backgrounds have different rates of synesthesia - and quite different rates," said study co-author Marcus Watson, an experimental psychologist at York University in Toronto. In a 2017 survey of 11,000 college students, researchers found that children who grew up hearing and speaking two languages starting at a very young age were more likely to have synesthesia than people who did not speak two languages starting at a very young age. Until now, it was not clear whether the source of the perceptions in people with synesthesia involved the way they associate certain sounds they hear with mental images that represent those sounds, or whether the source was something completely different, he said. Krish Sathian, a neurologist at Emory University in Atlanta, said in a statement. "There's been a debate about synesthesia," study co-author Dr. Those who use the connections are the ones who experience synesthesia, Maurer has suggested.Ī small study of 17 participants published in the European Journal of Neuroscience in 2016 found that those with synesthesia may have stronger mental associations between particular sounds and rounded or angular shapes.

In people with synesthesia, the information get jumbled, Grossenbacher has said.Īnother theory - proposed by Daphne Maurer, a psychologist at McMaster University in Ontario - is that everyone has these connections, but not everyone uses them. Ordinarily, information from multisensory areas returns only to the appropriate single-sense area.

However, Peter Grossenbacher, a psychologist at Naropa University in Colorado, thinks that rather than rearranging the architecture of the brain, synesthesia happens when single-sense areas of the brain get feedback from multisensory areas. In the brains of people with synesthesia, the walls are broken down, and there is more communication among the modules, Baron-Cohen has proposed. Usually, each of the senses is assigned to separate modules in the brain, with limited cross-communication. Since then, many neuroscientists have studied the condition, and they've proposed several competing theories about its causes, according to an article in the APA's Monitor on Psychology.įor example, research by Simon Baron-Cohen, who studies synesthesia at the University of Cambridge, has suggested that synesthesia results from an overabundance of neural connections.

Synesthesia was first studied in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, but research on the condition fell by the wayside until the 1970s.
