Synesthesia

One of the cooler things that's studied in neuroscience is synesthesia. Synesthesia is the blending of two or more senses together for some rather surprising results. People who experience these blendings are called synesthetes and the most common forms of synesthesia are association of a color with numbers and letters, or visualization of a number line.

Association of a color with a letter is kind of a strange concept. Whenever the person with this form of synesthesia sees a certain letter, it is always the same color. Different people associate different colors with different letters, but a person always associates the same color with each letter for the duration of their life. For some, instead of letters, numbers are colored with the same principles in mind.

For the most part, color-text synesthesias are neither helpful nor harmful, unless you're trying to remember a specific shade of a particular color. A more useful form of synesthesia is the visualization of a number line. The people that see number lines, from what I can gather, see numbers arranged in front of them in rows that are at angles to each other. Apparently these number lines help with mathematical calculations. I've never cared much for number lines because they just display something that I already know and I don't like to be dependent on things, but I can see the benefit they have for those with this ability. Oddly, these number lines are also colored by tens or something like that.

Other types of less common synesthesias also exist. Some people see a particular color when they hear a particular pitch. Supposedly there are several artist and musicians that have had that one, but I don't remember any of the particulars about it. In addition, there's another one that is particularly strange, association of tastes with words. Imagine tasting something very specific such as a particular brand of candy when you hear a name. It can be rather difficult to deal with, especially for the more unsavory flavors known to man.

These associations that synesthetes have are probably formed at an early age, since that's when the brain is developing most quickly and has the most fluidity. Evidence of this can be found in word-taste synesthetes that don't have any words for flavors that they experienced later in life such as if they had never tasted curry until college or something of that nature. The connections synesthetes make between the senses often have little logical basis unless viewed very carefully and analyzing the childhood of the individuals. There is also a genetic component involved because many synesthetes have family members with the same sense linkage, though still with different associations within those senses.

An exciting application of the ideas of synesthesia is for studying the production of language. Relation between a sound and an image of the sound, however vague, probably helped with the primordial formation of our languages. For instance, if I used the nonsense words 'bubu' and 'kiki,' what do you picture, if just picturing some vague kind of shape? Odds are, the images you see are very different and have similar characteristics between most people. This concept also explains similarities between basic words of completely unrelated languages. Though it may sound like an obvious concept, it really is something exciting.