Seeing Sounds...

You know when I was a kid growing up, we used to love playing outside, riding bikes, it was the 80's, record heat waves, I mean people were like dying on the side of the road getting heat stokes, only thing you could do, was go in the house and you know take a shower couple times a day, so....I'll never forget I was like 7 years old, I closed my eyes and thats when it started, I started seeing sounds.....Woah! -N.E.R.D.-

Seeing Sounds? I know a lot of you are wondering...Is that possible? Well, the answer is...yezzir! It is known as a neurological phenomenon known as synesthesia, which is, the mixing of sensory modalities.

Synesthesia can involve any of the senses. The most common form, colored letters and numbers, occurs when someone always sees a certain color in response to a certain letter of the alphabet or number. For example, a synesthete (a person with synesthesia) might see the word "plane" as mint green or the number "4" as dark brown. There are also synesthetes who hear sounds in response to smell, who smell in response to touch, or who feel something in response to sight. Just about any combination of the senses is possible. There are some people who possess synesthesia involving three or even more senses, but this is extremely rare.

Synesthetic perceptions are specific to each person. For example,



Julian Asher, genetics researcher and amateur photographer, can see colors in response to sounds.

Synesthetic perceptions are:

Involuntary: synesthetes do not actively think about their perceptions; they just happen.

Projected: rather than experiencing something in the "mind's eye," as might happen when you are asked to imagine a color, a synesthete often actually sees a color projected outside of the body.

Durable and generic: the perception must be the same every time; for example, if you taste chocolate when you hear Beethoven's Violin Concerto, you must always taste chocolate when you hear it; also, the perception must be generic -- that is, you may see colors or lines or shapes in response to a certain smell, but you would not see something complex such as a room with people and furniture and pictures on the wall.

Memorable: often, the secondary synesthetic perception is remembered better than the primary perception; for example, a synesthete who always associates the color purple with the name "Laura" will often remember that a woman's name is purple rather than actually remembering "Laura."

Emotional: the perceptions may cause emotional reactions such as pleasurable feelings.

Estimates for the number of people with synesthesia range from 1 in 200 to 1 in 100,000.

Synesthetes tend to be:

Women: in the U.S., studies show that three times as many women as men have synesthesia; in the U.K., eight times as many women have been reported to have it. The reason for this difference is not known.

Left-handed: synesthetes are more likely to be left-handed than the general population.

Neurologically normal: synesthetes are of normal (or possibly above average) intelligence, and standard neurological exams are normal.

In the same family: synesthesia appears to be inherited in some fashion; it seems to be a dominant trait and it may be on the X-chromosome.

Determining synesthesia from the historical record is fraught with error unless (auto)biographical sources explicitly give convincing details.

Famous synesthetes include David Hockney, who perceives music as color, shape, and configuration, and who uses these perceptions when painting opera stage sets but not while creating his other artworks. Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky combined four senses: color, hearing, touch, and smell. Vladimir Nabokov describes his grapheme-color synesthesia at length in his autobiography, Speak Memory, and portrays it in some of his characters. Composers include Duke Ellington, Franz Liszt, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and Olivier Messiaen, whose three types of complex colors are rendered explicitly in musical chord structures that he invented. Physicist Richard Feynman describes his colored equations in his autobiography, What Do You Care What Other People Think? Other notable synesthetes include musicians John Mayer and Patrick Stump; actress Stephanie Carswell; electronic musician Aphex Twin (who claims to be inspired by lucid dreams as well as music); and classical pianist Hélène Grimaud.

Now that you've read this post, what are your thoughts? Would you like to have a synesthesia experience? I know I would...matter of fact, I'm anticipating that in the near future I will. My synesthesia experience: I'll perform wonders in medicine w/out even thinking about it. How crazy would that be? lol