Towards a Synergistic Understanding of Synaesthesia by Daniel Smilek & Mike J. Dixon

Imagine for a moment, that every time you heard a particular sound or viewed an ordinary black digit, you experienced an accompanying perception of a highly specific colour. Although for most people such experiences are completely beyond the realm of normal, for some, such occurrences characterise their typical day-to-day experiences. The term given to these extra-ordinary experiences is synaesthesia. For some synaesthetes the stimulus and the elicited experience occur in the same modality (e.g., printed digits or letters trigger colours called photisms). For others the inducing stimulus and the elicited experience cross modalities. For example, taste can elicit tactile experiences (e.g., Cytowic, 1989; 1993), or sounds can elicit colours (e.g., Wheeler, 1920). more...