UK -How we all could benefit from synaesthesia

[edgarshade]

The Observer

Helen Massy-Beresford
Saturday 26 April 2014 19.27 BST

With reader comments

Synaesthesia, the neurological condition that causes a blending of the senses – colours can be connected to letters and numbers, smells and tastes to music or touch to vision – has long been linked to creativity: famous synaesthetes include Sibelius and more recently Pharrell Williams and Lady Gaga. But among the wider population it has remained a mysterious condition, although it is known to affect at least 4.4% of adults across its many forms.

Developing the mysterious condition in the 96% of people who do not have it may help to improve learning skills, aid recovery from brain injury and guard against mental decline in old age. Scientists know that balance can be tipped by hypnosis or drugs: LSD, for example, produces a synaesthesia-like experience but more research is needed into other ways to change it. "Using brain imaging, we can identify which areas are related to synaesthesia, but we can't tell what is causal. To do this, we need to modulate the relevant part of the brain and see what effect this has on generating synaesthetic experiences," Banissy says. While the researchers are coming from different scientific backgrounds and investigating the condition from different angles, a common thread is exploring how synaesthetic techniques can be applied more broadly. "Synaesthesia is obviously useful to synaesthetes in some ways," says Jonas. "It would be really nice if we could find a way to give the useful bits of synaesthesia to people who don't have it."

More...
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2014/apr/27/benefit-synaesthesia-brain-injury-mental-decline

 

[edgarshade]

Not directly about drugs, but maybe of interest in that it is a common part of the psychedelic experience.

 

[BlueBull]

Check this out, I think you'll find this interesting:


I find it weird they did not mention this guy in the article. He is about the best example you can give concerning productive synesthesia...

 

[Captain.Heroin]

Paresthesia is also cool IMO

 

[ro4eva]

Check this out, I think you'll find this interesting:


I find it weird they did not mention this guy in the article. He is about the best example you can give concerning productive synesthesia...

Wow, that was a unique, but interesting video. Thank you for sharing.

I think this article as well as your video are both great examples of how complex the human brain really is, and, as a result, how differently we may experience a sound, sight, taste, smell, pain, pleasure, and so forth.

 

[psood0nym]

Anybody interested in Tammet should check out his book "Thinking in Numbers." It's more about the "art" of mathematical thinking than synesthesia, but synesthesia of course has radically informed his perspective. He's a human calculator and the way he accomplishes the calculations is by "seeing" shapes that represent the numerical answers (it's part of his adaptive unconscious output more than an overtly logical crunching of numbers). He sees a unique shape for every number up to 10,000, IIRC. He also holds the record for the longest recitation of pi, during which he used his synesthesia as a memory aid.

For a proper academic understanding of synesthesia the research of Vilayanur Ramachandran is a good place to start. Interestingly, in one of his articles he mentions that only a certain percentage of psychedelics users report synesthesia, and suggests some threshold degree of of innate synesthesia may be necessary. It's been argued that everybody experiences it to some degree, as the fact that 95 to 98 percent of people choose to assign the names "bouba" and "kiki" to the same shape in this image when given the two choices:

The finding is unsurprising when we consider that synesthesia is theorized to be an "incomplete" lack of synaptic pruning as we age, leaving synesthetes brains "over connected" (and indeed, it's more common in childhood and often fades as individuals age).