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Grapheme-Color Synesthesia

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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

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