Synesthesia: Why Some People Can See Sound or Hear Color
What can synesthesia, the bizarre overlapping of sensations, tell us about our future evolution?
Theory: We are all born synesthetes.
Imagine living in a world where the letters of the alphabet have specific colors, the sound of music is visible, certain words have a particular taste, or colors are audible.
This is the weird world a certain group of people called synesthetes live in. Synesthetes account for about 4% of the world’s population therefore it’s fairly rare to encounter one.
The fact that synesthetes can experience the world from a different perspective grants them a significant advantage; that of enhanced creativity and other forms of intelligence, though this is not definite.
What(exactly) is synesthesia?
Synesthesia is a condition where the brain mixes up the senses— and one sensory modality causes a simultaneous stimulation of another. For example, a person with synesthesia may “hear color” or “see sound.”
Synesthesia involves any of the five senses. The most common form is that of colored letters and numbers, in which someone always sees a certain color in response to a…
