Synesthesia

Synesthesia is a rare condition where some people may be able to taste colors, hear visual material, or associate color with numbers and letters. The reason this disorder exists is because the brain was somehow rewired wrong. The senses cross wired and now combine with each other to form a new way of seeing things. There are many variations of this disorder and is still being studied today. This phenomenon is very interesting and got me thinking about how I see things.

I remember being physically nauseous whenever I saw the color sea green in my crayon box at school. Something about that color just didn't sit right with me. After reading about this condition I began to wonder if it was possible to have a mild version of synesthesia.

If we look at the definition of synesthesia is would seem that there is no such thing as mild synesthesia and that only those who were born with the cross wiring of senses had it. However, there is something that some call “multimodal processing”, which may explain my experience with the sea green color crayon.

This multimodal process is a voluntary function where we associate different senses so that we are able to process an experience better. I guess that combination of the smell of crayons, the name of the color, and my uneasy feeling of being on a boat may have contributed to me feeling “sea sick”. I associated the color to the actual sea and my experience of being on a boat.

People with synesthesia do not experience the same thing. The experiences happen within the individual without any ability to control what they experience mentally. They will see, hear, smell, etc. what everyone else does but will have a “feeling” of it being of another sense. For example, They can see a black letter like other may but get this feeling that the letter's personality is giving off a sense of "blue"  I like to think of this phenomenon has kind of resembling how some people claim to see different shades of people’s Auras. It is an essence that comes off of objects or sounds that synesthetes experience. 

Check out this guys experience with synesthesia.