Synesthesia is a condition in which a typical sensory experience is stimulated and accompanied by an additional sensory experience. Over sixty variations of the condition are documented, with an estimated 4.4% of the population experiencing at least one form of it. Each person’s sensory associations are unique, even within one type of synesthesia, and the associations are typically stable through time (Dutton, 2015). The most common type of synesthesia is known as grapheme-color synesthesia, in which people report seeing certain letters and numbers as certain colors (Dutton, 2015). People acquire this variation of the condition after mastering the basics of reading (Ruiz & Hupé, 2015). Some can even trace their letter-color associations back …show more content…
In particular, mirror-touch synesthesia causes discomfort to one who sees another being injured. Conversely, some individuals with chromesthesia report enjoying the colors they see as part of their musical experiences (Dutton, 2015). According to Ásgeirsson et al. (2015), synesthesia in general is associated with advantages is memory and creativity. However, there is a lack of evidence of any qualitative differences in cognitive functioning between individuals with synesthesia and the population in general. Researchers have documented modest memory advantages, however, which may be due to the retrieval cues synesthesia can create (Ásgeirsson et al., …show more content…
Synesthesia is therefore a perceptual condition because an additional experience accompanies the typical experience upon stimulation. Receptors are what is being stimulated, causing action potentials to message the brain about the experience, so maybe something at the neuro-cognitive level is causing these action potentials to send messages to the wrong part of the brain. In class we talked about the relationship between perception and context. For example, if two vertical lines are on the board after the letters “b” and “a,” we tend to read “ball” and see the lines as letters. But if the same lines come after the numbers “9” and “10,” we assume it is the number 11. Context is also important for synesthetic experiences. In the case study by Weaver and Hawco (2015), the subject would similarly only see “ll” as blue only if it was in a word, and never if used as a number. Ásgeirsson et al. (2015) differentiated between processing capacity and perceptual load when discussing visual attention for their study about grapheme-color synesthesia. In class, we learned that processing capacity is the amount of information someone can handle at once, while perceptual load refers to how difficult a task is. A difficult task is a high-load task, while an easy task is a low-load task. Tasks that are automatic after practice, such as reading or driving, are low-load
The human brain is capable of perceiving and interpreting information or stimuli received through the sense organs (i.e., eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and skin) (Weiten, 1998). This ability to perceive and interpret stimulus allows the human being to make meaningful sense of the world and environment around them. However, even as the human being is able to perceive and interpret stimuli information through all sense organs, stimuli is most often or primarily interpreted using the visual (eyes) and auditory (ears) sense organs (Anderson, 2009). However, for the purpose of this paper, the visual information process will be examined.
For example, a person may hear a sound but experience it as colour, i.e. they will “hear” the colour red.
In another study, five experiments were conducted to determine if coloring a single Stroop element reduced automaticity or slowed the processing of a color. The results demonstrated that indeed it slowed processing of congruent and neutral stimuli more than it slows processing of incongruent stimuli (Monahan, 2001).
Research by medical scientists shows that synesthetes have high intelligence and are frequently psychics. Psychics in the military related instances where they went through periods of synesthesia during extreme exercises designed in
The Stroop (1935) effect is the inability to ignore a color word when the task is to report the ink color of that word (i.e., to say "green" to the word RED in green ink). The present study investigated whether object-based processing contributes to the Stroop effect. According to this view, observers are unable to ignore irrelevant features of an attended object (Kahneman & Henik, 1981). In three experiments, participants had to name the color of one of two superimposed rectangles and to ignore words that appeared in the relevant object, in the irrelevant object, or in the background. The words were congruent,
Synesthesia is when any two or more senses of the human body or perceptual pathways are linked. When one sense is activated so is another. So when you are eating, you may feel as if you are tasting a color instead, or when you see a color you may think of a shape. It affects 1 out of 2,000 peopled believed to be genetic, it is demonstrated more commonly in females and individuals who are left handed. Synesthesia is not diagnosed as a disease, those affected usually have average intelligence and no greater risk of mental disorders.
The term sensation is used when referencing the process of sensing the environment through taste, touch, sound, smell, and sight (Goldstein, 2014). Moreover, it is the process that occurs once the sensory receptor experiences stimulation, which in turn produces nerve impulses that are sent to the brain to be processed in its raw form, then perception comes into play (Goldstein, 2014). Perception is used to describe the way people interpret these sensations and tries to make sense of everything around them on a daily basis. Perception is the occurrences of the brain
28. Synesthesia is a literary term used to describe a word using senses. For example, some people describe art to be “loud” or “quite” .
For example, someone with synesthesia might be able to "see" a letter as a color, or hear a word that makes you taste a certain flavor. Stewart elaborates on her source of inspiration saying it comes from her love for the book Color Me
In the first phase of this study that was based around recognising global features, the letters used were large H’s or S’s. In the second phase, global letters of H, S and O were used and were made up of smaller H’s or S’s, the local characters. These make up the 3 stimulus types: congruent, neutral and conflicting. The large and small letters could be combined to create 3 types of displays: 1) Consistent, where the large and small letters were the same (H printed from small H’s, or S made of small S’s). 2) Conflicting (H made of small S’s, S made of small H’s), and 3) Neutral (H made of O’s, S made of
Study examined the Stroop effect in words which are not colours, but represent related object connected to certain colours and whether that would yield similar or the same effect as the classic Stroop study. Previous studies such as Stroop's (1935) found out a clash between controlled and automatic processing, which resulted in delayed answering. This experiment was conducted for 20 participants of both sexes and various age categories. They were given two lists consisting each of 30 coloured words. One half of these words were colour-neutral and other colour-relevant. As was expected, the colour-neutral were processed much faster. It is therefore
While these different sensations and perceptions are different many of them do go together, this is called intermodal perception. This type of perception is the integration of two or more senses at one time. An example of this would be infant’s reaction to sound. When an infant hears a noise they turn their head and look in the general direction of the sound. Typically this integration of different perceptions is seen the most after the first six months of