Synaesthesia: Symptoms

The symptoms go beyond tasting colour or smelling sound as certain senses are undifferentiated, meaning that they are intertwined for certain triggers. Studies show that only one out of two thousand people are synesthetes, being more common among females.

Irregular sensory experiences 
- a child experiencing synaesthesia will not recogise the condition, but those around him will be ale to suspect it if general expressions imply out of the ordinary sensory experiences
- an adult will be able to identitfy if they have synaesthesia because they will have the knowledge that 'eyes cannot taste' 'ears cannot see' etc. 

Consistent reactionary triggers
- the same trigger will always cause the same senses to intertwine
- test-retest is often used to test for synaesthesia because the same charactyeristics would be idenitfied twice and the results would be the same

Involuntary and automatic perception
- an obvious symptom of synaesthesia is the involuntary, automatic nature of the perceptions
- psychologists make use of tests that measure reaction timein order to determine is a person is a synesthete
- if it takes time to assign a colour to a letter for example, then this means a person is not a synesthete because this should happen automatically

Simple and objective sensations
- perceptions are 'durable and generic, never pictorial or elaborated'
- visual synesthetic sensations will consist of a geometric pattern or acolour, rather than a complex visualisation