Imagine this scenario, it is your second year of attending university and you
happen to come across an eye-catching poster on the back of a toilet stall. It
reads, "What Color is Monday? If you can answer that question, you might have
synesthesia." Staring in disbelief, you text one of your friends the same question
and get the response of "I have no idea what you're talking about." Suddenly, you
realize that maybe what you've been experiencing your entire life isn't
exactly the norm. This is the story of Holly Baxter, and seeing a color
associated with Monday is an ordinary part of her day. She's always known that
Thursdays are dark blue, the names Audrey and Kirsty
have the texture of folded curtains, and the word enlightenment is magenta with a
bubble like texture. Holly's condition is known as synesthesia. The word comes from
the Greek "synth" meeting together and "ethesia" meaning perception. Simply defined,
synesthesia is "a sensation produced in one modality when a stimulus is
applied to another modality," such as when the hearing of a sound induces vision of
a color or a word has a specific taste. Synesthesia
has more than 80 identifiable types. Some of the most common include
grapheme-color, where letters and numbers have their own colors ;and spatial-
sequence, where numbers, months, and days of the week are located in specific
places in space. Combining all types of synesthesia, up to four percent of the
population is affected. Interestingly, the condition is most prevalent among
artists, with an estimated 23 percent having synesthesia. This isn't surprising
when looking at notable figures who are said to have or have had the condition:
Vincent van Gogh, Kanye West, Billy Joel, Pharrell Williams,
John Mayer, and Marilyn Monroe. The majority of synesthetes have had the
condition for as long as they can remember. But, in rare circumstances,
others have acquired it, typically from neurological conditions such as multiple
sclerosis and radiologically isolated syndrome, or outside influences such as
posthypnotic suggestion and drug use. Neuroscientists aren't exactly sure what
causes synesthesia, but for innate synesthetes, evidence points to more
connections between parts of the brain responsible for sensory interpretation-
typically visual, auditory, and intraparietal networks. Essentially neurons
and synapses that should be isolated to one sensory system happened to cross
over to other sensory systems. For example, colored- hearing synesthetes have
been shown to display activity in several areas of the visual cortex
associated with processing color when they hear certain words. One hypothesis
proposes that crossed sensory connections are present in everyone at birth, but are
refined during maturation. In synesthetes, these connections remain throughout
adulthood and are not lost. Studies have shown that the condition definitely has
its advantages- syntesthetes have been proven to have better color perception,
stronger associations between sounds and shapes, and heightened creativity,
partially explaining why so many synesthetes are artists. Synesthesia can also be
conducive to learning. Synesthetes appear to be able to use their unusual
experiences as a mnemonic devices, providing useful while learning abstract
concepts. Candita Wager, a research assistant at UC Berkeley, and a synesthete
herself, says that everything she remembers "is a set of color combinations
whether it is the key that a song is in or a phone number." In addition to
neurological differences, synesthesia also appears to have a genetic component,
as it runs in families- about 40% of synesthetes have a close relative with
the condition. A 2018 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences identified 37 different genes with variants predictive of
whether a person would have synesthesia, 6 of which are related to the process of
axonogenesis, or the generation of a neuron's axon. The future of synesthesia
research looks promising. Studying the condition could be
particularly helpful in understanding how sensation and perception work in the
brain. Hopefully by discussing synesthesia, we will increase public
awareness and help to reduce any stigma surrounding the condition. So, what color
is Monday? Do you have synesthesia?
Thank you for
watching