Synesthesia

Have you ever asked yourself, what does the color "e" look like, or what does the word "blue" taste like? Me neither. But apparently for some people, that is a sensible question to ask due to synesthesia. Synesthesia is when the stimulation of one sensory perception triggers an involuntary reaction of another sense. This is also known as cross-sensory perception.

The most common (or maybe the most well-studied) form of this is Grapheme, which is the association of color with letters or numbers. Imagine reading text and it's like reading alphabet color magnets. The effect is typically triggered when the letters are recognized. If there is just words in their periphery, then they'll still perceive it as black and white letters, but as soon as they recognize individual letters, they'll perceive color. An upside-down "t" will look normal, but as soon as it's flipped right-side-up or it is recognized as an upside-down "t," then they'll perceive the associated color. Another grad student was telling me about a person who would omit letters or choose odd wording in her writing. This was due to not wanting to use certain letters because she perceived them as ugly colors. I guess that would suck if you perceived the letter "e" as puke green or something.

I wonder what the effect would be if someone with Grapheme could read Chinese. Do different Chinese characters have different colors, or do the components, or maybe there's no effect at all? Other forms of synesthesia include assiocating sounds or syllables with color, and words with taste. The brain is crazy. Let me know if you're a synesthete so I can put you under a microscope and study you.