I only realized I had synesthesia at the beginning of college, but I've had it my whole life. Through my time in college, I was fascinated with exploring my multiple forms of synesthesia; eventually, I got it narrowed down to a hex code color for each letter and number. For my undergraduate thesis (Capstone project), I wanted to create an exhibit to share synesthesia with the world, so that others could understand how it works and how it affects their lives.
This project is very personal to me, and is only the first installment in a lifelong pursuit of studying sense perceptions and translations. I called my project “Wired Weird” because it’s a neurological condition, and scientists are pretty sure it happens when the neurons that deal with your senses stay connected long after your brain usually prunes them away. Hence, the brains of synesthetes are wired weird. It also highlights the grapheme-color part of my synesthesia, where I read letters in color: “wired” and “weird” have the same letters in different order.
Synesthesia, which translates from Greek as “perceived together,” is a neurological condition where one sense or concept is experienced simultaneously with another. Scientists believe that areas of the brain that interpret senses are ‘cross-wired’ with increased connections. Neural pruning of unused pathways occurs when we are babies, but in the case of synesthesia, certain pathways were never disconnected.
People with synesthesia, known as synesthetes, experience it in one of two ways. It’s either associative, and is interpreted internally (in your mind’s eye), or it’s projective, and you literally see the experience in front of your eyes.
There are over 60 reported kinds, but the most common are grapheme-color (reading letters and numbers in color), chromesthesia (hearing music in color), spatial-sequence or spatio-temporal synesthesia (seeing sequences or time in space), number form (seeing numbers arranged in space), and ordinal linguistic personification (numbers having personality).
There are as many kinds of synesthesia as there are combinations of senses, so you could physically feel something you hear (auditory-tactile), taste words (lexical-gustatory), or even taste music (musical-gustatory).
Experiencing synesthesia is involuntary, automatic, and consistent. The standard way of testing for true synesthetic experience is to compare responses over time, known as consistency testing, or color congruency. The experiences are perceived unconsciously, so if you’re not focused on them, you don’t notice them. For the most part, it’s unidirectional; the letter A may be red, but red doesn’t trigger the letter A.
Between 2-4% of the population has synesthesia, or about 1 in 2,000 people. Women are three times as likely as men to have it, and because it’s genetic, there is a 40% chance that a relative also has synesthesia.
It’s difficult to tell exactly how many people have synesthesia, because it usually doesn’t negatively affect someone’s life. Commonly, synesthetes don’t know that their way of perceiving the world is different until they talk about it with other people. Sometimes, people respond negatively, and if synesthetes are ridiculed or accused of making it all up, they might never mention it again.
Synesthesia is seven time more common in artists, poets, and writers than in the general population. If you thought in color, wouldn’t you want to decorate your world with it?
