“I must say a word of warning against the too-frequent tendency to assume that the minds of every other sane and healthy person must be like one’s own. Here is how Sir Francis Galton first reported his findings of number-form synesthesia in 1881: The graphics are by motion graphics designer Esteban Diácono, and the music is “Slowly” by composer Ólafur Arnalds: Here is a beautiful video that explores the connection between music and colour. Some only get the chromesthesia for spoken words, which are influenced by the voice’s accent, pitch and intonation others just for music. Some of those with chromesthesia find the colours are projected into space in front of them others see it in their ‘mind’s eye’. The variety that’s been found even within this one type of synesthesia is mind-boggling. It’s no more unsettling than having a particular song remind you of a place you used to live, perhaps less so. To someone who doesn’t experience this, it sounds weird or distracting, that you’d suddenly start seeing colours while listening to music, but to synesthetes who have grown up with this, it’s just their normal, everyday, experience. People with chromesthesia hear sounds and these automatically and unintentionally make them experience colours. Here is one of his paintings, called “Yellow, Red and Blue”: Types of synesthesia: chromesthesiaĬhromesthesia is sound-to-colour synesthesia, the kind which most intrigued the artist Wassily Kandinsky, and which many of his paintings attempt to evoke. (I don’t know how this fits with the figure of 4% experiencing synesthesia, but it probably depends on where you draw the line.) 6. It’s thought that as much as 20% of the population may have number-form synesthesia or related experiences which mean that days, months or the alphabet takes on a spatial form in the mind. This type of synesthesia may result partly from the fact that the areas of the brain for processing numbers and that for spatial representations are relatively close to each other. Usually these maps are individual to the particular synesthete. Here’s a representation of how it might be experienced: Number-form synesthesiaįirst documented by the polymath Sir Francis Galton more than a century ago, this is where numbers automatically appear in the mind as mental maps. Monday might be an angry kind of depressed young guy wearing a red shirt, while Tuesday might be an outgoing older woman who talks too much, and so on… 5. This is where ordered sequences, like numbers, days of the week or letters all have particular personalities, and even appearances. It’s extremely rare and may be caused by problematic connections between the auditory cortex and the limbic system.Ĭommonly reported amongst misophones are strong adverse feelings in response to the sounds of other people eating and breathing. Misophonia - literally “hatred of sound” - is a condition in which sounds trigger strong negative emotions like disgust and anger. While many forms of synesthesia are harmless and some consider it enhances their life, not all forms are beneficial. This may be a heightened version of at least part of the process involved in how we empathise with others. The prevalence for this type of synesthesia is relatively high at around 1.6%.Įven amongst non-synesthetes, around 30% of people have a sort of mild form of this in that they experience pain when they see someone else being hurt. This is mirror-touch synesthesia: when you feel the same sensation another person feels. Imagine you watch me reach up and touch my own chin, but that you experience a touch on your own chin. One synesthete who has been tested finds the word ‘jail’, for example, tastes of cold, hard bacon. Not only can taste be involved, but so can temperature, texture and even the location on the tongue. One of the rarest types of synesthesia, in which people have associations between words and tastes.Įxperienced by less than 0.2% of the population, people with this may find conversations cause a flow of tastes across their tongue.
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