Synesthesia—seeing sounds, hearing colours: One of Lynne Malcolm's favourite programs
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What is synesthesia and how is it defined?
This is an ABC podcast.
I'm Eliza, I go to Saint Catharines. I'm turning twelve but eleven and I have synesthesia.
Hi, Lynn Malcolm here, bringing you one of my favourite programmes from my years as host on All in the Mind. It's from 2018 and it's about the fascinating perceptual phenomenon of synesthesia.
Some of my favourite synesthetic experiences is with music. I see the colour shooting past my head to like a point in the distance, which is really cool. It feels like it's especially in songs that I really like, sort of trying to take me to that point.
What colour is Monday for you? What about the number four? Can you taste the colour purple? And does the saxophone sound orange or blue? If those questions don't sound too strange to you. You may be a sinner's thet. Like Nina.
Everything I hear. I see in shapes and colours. Even flavors and smells I can see. I can't even imagine how it is to not see a sound. Even silence has a color. It's more w white, but it's like a void, but I can see it as a shape. always little sounds in the silence as well that I see. You know, like mini snowflakes. Every number has a colour and a shape to it and the year, the week. I can just make the list longer and longer the more I think about it. Artist
Nina Norden. Today, how synesthetes perceive the world. Associate Professor Anina Rich is the director of the Perception and Action Research Centre at Macquarie University, where she heads up synesthesia research.
The word synesthesia actually comes from the Greek syn meaning together and aesthesis meaning of the senses. And so people have often described it as a mixing of the senses. In fact, it's an umbrella term that can encompass a lot of different types of experiences that all fit within a sense of having an extraordinary response to a very ordinary stimulus. So, for example, people who have auditory visual synesthesia have sounds of different types, it could be voices, it could be musical notes, it could be musical genres, evoking very specific and consistent experiences in the visual domain. So it might be moving pictures, it might be particular objects that have a colour and a form and a location that they see every time they hear that particular sound.
perhaps the most common form is where people have vivid experiences of colour in response to letters, numbers and words, whether they see them, hear them or even think about them. So that's the most common mode. Yes, although the estimating the prevalence of any types of synesthesia is quite tricky because it's not a disorder. And so lots of people have synesthesia and don't realise it. So with any of these are approximates, but certainly grapheme colour synesthesia, where people have letters and numbers evoking colour experiences, very common. Also, types of auditory visual synesthesia seem to be relatively common. There's also some other forms which relate to how we might perceive. touch. So if you are seeing somebody being touched, people with mirror touch synesthesia actually experience a sense of touch themselves.
And there are some estimates that suggest that that may be actually the most common, but we don't know yet how closely that's related to the colour forms.
And some people also not only do they see colour in relation to letters and numbers, but they also see shape.
That's right. So quite often we study the colour aspect because that's the bit that's maybe easiest to get a handle on. But in one of our studies we looked at the types of experiences evoked by just single tones on different instruments. And what we found was that far from just being colour, they were essentially geometric objects. So for instance, one sinestheta low note on the piano was a big round ball. that she could see low down in space. Whereas a high note on the same instrument on the piano was much smaller and kind of sparkly and and a a brighter colour. And by studying people's experiences and getting them to really illustrate those complexities, we can start to get a sense of what the underlying patterns are.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is synesthesia and how is it defined?
0:02–6:33
2
How do researchers study the different types of synesthetic perception?
6:33–12:16
3
What does Eliza’s personal experience reveal about seeing sounds and colors?
12:16–19:48
4
How does Eliza describe auras and personalities for people, numbers, and letters?
19:48–25:48
5
Can synesthetic colors help or hinder learning mathematics?
25:48–31:47
6
What is the coloured‑calculator project and how does it work for synesthetes?
31:47–37:07
7
How does playing the saxophone translate into visual colours for Eliza?
37:07–43:40
8
Why is synesthesia important for understanding perception, cognition, and philosophy?
43:40–50:36