What is Synesthesia?
Imagine you are listening to music and you can see colors. This would be so cool! Right? Well this is called synesthesia. Not many people know what synesthesia really is or the types and did you know it is often used in literature. Well you are about to get an inside look at these three points. Prepare to be educated in synesthesia.
Synesthesia is considered a neurological condition that involves the body’s senses being linked. Our senses such as sight, hearing, taste, touch, pressure and so on (Hiskey, 2010). For individuals with this condition they involuntary identify one sense with another. For example take sight and sound, a person with synesthesia could hear a word or phrase and identify it with maybe a color or letter. This is the same when you think of taste or touch (Grossenbacher, n.d)
There are many different types of synesthesia. Some of these types are called grapheme-color, sound-to-color, number-form, ordinal-linguistic personification and lexical-gustatory synesthesia. Most common out of the various types is grapheme-color synesthesia. This is where a letter or number is related to a color. Sound-to-color is where sound is related to shapes. Number-form is like a map in the mind of the individual full of numbers. Imagine each personality related to a letter this is called ordinal-linguistic personification. Individuals with lexical-gustatory synesthesia relate a word or phrase to a certain taste (Types of Synesthesia, n.d.).
Now we know that synesthesia is a medical condition that links the senses. It is also used in literature.
