SYNESTHESIA: A Neurological Phenomenon

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Do you know what synesthesia is? Do you know anyone who has it? Are you a synesthete? I have synesthesia. I have had it since childhood. I have always considered it to be a fun game I could play in my mind, seeing numbers in specific colors. I can sometimes still experience a correlation between days of the week with colors and numbers,too. I never told anyone about my ability until recently. I had no idea that it was unusual, had a name or was an actual brain function that some other people experienced as well. At least one in 2,000 people have this neurological phenomenon.

synesthesia
I have synesthesia. These are the colors and numbers that automatically correlate with each other in my mind.

Wikipedia description of synesthesia
“Synesthesia (also spelled synæsthesia or synaesthesia; from the Ancient Greek σύν syn, “together”, and αἴσθησις aisthēsis, “sensation”) is a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.[1][2][3][4] People who report a lifelong history of such experiences are known as synesthetes.
In one common form of synesthesia, known as grapheme-color synesthesia or color-graphemic synesthesia, letters or numbers are perceived as inherently colored.[5][6] In spatial-sequence, or number form synesthesia, numbers, months of the year, and/or days of the week elicit precise locations in space (for example, 1980 may be “farther away” than 1990), or may appear as a three-dimensional map (clockwise or counterclockwise).[7][8] Synesthetic associations can occur in any combination and any number of senses or cognitive pathways.[9]

“Little is known about how synesthesia develops. It has been suggested that synesthesia develops during childhood when children are intensively engaged with abstract concepts for the first time.[10] This hypothesis – referred to as semantic vacuum hypothesis – explains why the most common forms of synesthesia are grapheme-color, spatial sequence and number form. These are usually the first abstract concepts that educational systems require children to learn. Only a fraction of types of synesthesia have been evaluated by scientific research.[11] Awareness of synesthetic perceptions varies from person to person.[12]”

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