Hearing colors, tasting shapes

Scientific American (May):52-59 (2003)
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Abstract

Jones and Coleman are among a handful of otherwise normal as a child and the number 5 was red and 6 was green. This the- people who have synesthesia. They experience the ordinary ory does not answer why only some people retain such vivid world in extraordinary ways and seem to inhabit a mysterious sensory memories, however. You might _think _of cold when you no-man’s-land between fantasy and reality. For them the sens- look at a picture of an ice cube, but you probably do not feel es—touch, taste, hearing, vision and smell—get mixed up in- cold, no matter how many encounters you may have had with stead of remaining separate. ice and snow during your youth. Modern scientists have known about synesthesia since Another prevalent idea is that synesthetes are merely being 1880, when Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin, pub- metaphorical when they describe the note C flat as “red” or say lished a paper in _Nature _on the phenomenon. But most have that chicken tastes “pointy”—just as you and I might speak of brushed it aside as fakery, an artifact of drug use (LSD and a “loud” shirt or “sharp” cheddar cheese. Our ordinary lan- mescaline can produce similar effects) or a mere curiosity. guage is replete with such sense-related metaphors, and perhaps About four years ago, however, we and others began to un- synesthetes are just especially gifted in this regard. cover brain processes that could account for synesthesia. Along We began trying to find out whether synesthesia is a gen- the way, we also found new clues to some of the most mysteri- uine sensory experience in 1999. This deceptively simple ques- ous aspects of the human mind, such as the emergence of ab- tion had plagued researchers in this field for decades. One nat- stract thought, metaphor and perhaps even language. ural approach is to start by asking the subjects outright: “Is this A common explanation of synesthesia is that the affected just a memory, or do you actually see the color as if it were right people are simply experiencing childhood memories and asso- in front of you?” When we tried asking this question, we did ciations..

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Citations of this work

A Simulation Theory of Musical Expressivity.Tom Cochrane - 2010 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 88 (2):191-207.
How automatic are crossmodal correspondences?Charles Spence & Ophelia Deroy - 2013 - Consciousness and Cognition 22 (1):245-260.
Synesthesia vs. crossmodal illusions.Casey O'Callaghan - 2017 - In Ophelia Deroy (ed.), Sensory Blendings: New Essays on Synaesthesia. Oxford University Press. pp. 45-58.
Higher Order Thought and the Problem of Radical Confabulation.Timothy Lane & Caleb Liang - 2008 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 46 (1):69-98.

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