Synaesthesia: Research

Discovering the Instagram account of @Olgashevchenko33 was very useful as her designs based on synaesthesia helped me to finalise the definitions of the different types that I had found. The artworks also helped to further illustrate each of the meanings to ensure of my own understanding. 




Final definitions:

Synaesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads too automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

In auditory-tactile synaesthesia, certain sounds can induce sensations in parts of the body. For example, someone with auditory-tactile synaesthesia may experience that hearing a specific word feels like touch in one specific part of the body or may experience that certain sounds can create a sensation in the skin without being touched. It is one of the least common forms of synaesthesia.

Mirror touch is a rare form of synaesthesia where individuals feel the same sensation that another person feels (such as touch). A synaesthete may witness someone being tapped on the shoulder and the synaesthete involuntarily feels a tap on their own shoulder as well.

Spatial sequence synaesthesia causes a numerical sequence to be seen as points in space, such as the number 1 being far away and the number 2 being closer.

Ordinal-linguistic personification

This type is known as ordinal-linguistic personification or OLP. The individual will associate ordered sequences with various personalities. Ordered sequences may include numbers, letters, months etc. For example, someone may look at the letter ‘A’ and think in his mind that ‘A’ is a rude letter.

Lexical-Gustatory 

This one of the rarer synaesthesia types and those who experience this kind of synaesthesia evoke different kinds of tastes when they hear certain words or phonemes. Research has shown that associations between the words and what a synaesthete is able to taste are constrained by tastes he or she has experienced early in life. 

Grapheme-to-colour

Associating/seeing individual letters or numbers with a specific colour. Usually, two people do not associate the same colours, apart from the letter A which has commonly been reported to be red.

Sound-to-colour

Sound triggers the visualisation of coloured, generic shapes. For certain people, the stimuli are limited, and only a few types of sounds will trigger a perception. Usually, the perceived colours appear in generic shapes such as squares, circles and triangle.

Number-form

A number form is a mental map that consists of numbers. When a person with number-form synaesthesia thinks about numbers, a number map is involuntarily visualised.