WHAT color is the letter A? It’s a query Nicholas Root typically asks the volunteers he has recruited for his analysis. Most give him the identical response. “They are saying the duty is silly and that letters don’t have a color,” says Root.
However they do for folks with letter-colour synaesthesia, through which letters and phrases are related to specific colors. That features Jennifer Mankin, now a synaesthesia researcher herself, who remembers complicated her schoolmates in her teenagers by saying one in all them had an orange title. “It turned clear to me, in that second, that my notion of the world was basically totally different than most different folks,” she says.
Scientists have identified about synaesthesia for greater than 200 years, however for a lot of that point it has been unclear why some folks mix sensory info – why they affiliate phrases with flavours or sounds with textures, for instance. Nowadays, there’s a consensus that some types of synaesthesia, notably letter-colour synaesthesia, are intently tied with studying. The revelation is pushing researchers like Mankin to transcend asking why synaesthesia exists and discover what it reveals about how the mind features.
This work has already proven how tradition influences the best way we be taught and the way our considering is formed in numerous methods relying on which language we converse and write. The most recent discoveries might show much more vital: we have now seen tantalising indicators that many individuals with out synaesthesia unknowingly mix sensory info, which means that what we’re studying in regards to the trait would possibly even inform us one thing extra far-reaching about human consciousness.
The primary convincing description of synaesthesia was …