Synesthesia
March 29, 1996
mark beaulieu Brief
Synesthesia is recognized as a neurological condition when
extreme, but also seems to be a healthy state of sensibility we
are born with and retain as we experience the world.
Richard E. Cytowic
Synesthesia (Greek, syn = together + aisthesis = perception) is
the involuntary
physical experience of a cross-modal association. That is, the
stimulation of one sensory modality
reliably causes a perception in one or more different senses. Its
phenomenology clearly
distinguishes it from metaphor, literary tropes, sound symbolism,
and deliberate artistic
contrivances that sometimes employ the term
"synesthesia" to describe their multisensory
joinings. From Synesthesia:
Phenomenology And Neuropsychology
Ernst Gombrich
What is called "synesthesia" the splashing over
of impressions from one sense modality to another, is a fact to
which all languages testify. They work both ways - from sight to
sound and from sound to sight. We speak of loud colors and bright
sounds, and everyone knows what we mean. Nor are the ear and the
eye the only snese that are thus convergin to a common center.
Theres is touch in such terms as "velvety voice" and
"a cold light," tast with "sweet harmoneis"
of colors or sound, and so on...