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Can synaesthesia be learnt?
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20140611-can-synaesthesia-be-learnt
Beyond Human | 11 June 2014
Can synaesthesia be learnt?
Frank Swain
Many people see words as colours, smells or sounds, and they swear it boosts their creativity. So could we all tweak our senses to see the world in this way?
<snip>
Colizoli, a cognitive neuroscientist, experiences synaesthesia. Some people with this condition see colours, smells or sounds when they read words. In Colizoli’s case, numbers have a certain size, shape or other physical property. For example, people’s ages are expressed as a curved line. She also happens to study synaesthesia at the University of Amsterdam, curious to know whether she was born with her condition, or whether it was partly learned.
If you could teach yourself to see the world this way, it could potentially boost your creativity. Famous synaesthetes reportedly include Pharrell Williams who sees music in colour (and who told Oprah’s O Magazine he couldn’t make music without it), and physicist Richard Feynman, who saw letters in equations as colours, and whose visualisation of quantum interactions won him the Nobel Prize.
<snip>
There’s some tantalising evidence that some aspects of synaesthesia can be learned. In a study carried out by Colizoli and her colleagues at the University of Amsterdam, non-synaesthetic people were given books to read in which the letters e, t, a and s were coloured while the rest of the text was left black. Despite reading the text as normal (and making no concerted effort to remember the colours), the participants began associating those letters with their colour.
<snip>
Natural synaesthesia does seem have an element of learning though – or at least, can sometimes be shaped by memorable experiences. Colizoli recalls a woman who identified each letter as having a distinct colour. One day she visited her elementary school classroom and discovered the brightly-coloured alphabet hanging on the wall matched how she saw letters – in learning to read and write, she may have subconsciously absorbed the colour as well as the shape of the letters. And last year, a study of 11 synaesthetes discovered that the particular colours they associated with letters were “startlingly similar” to those of a very famous Fisher Price fridge magnet alphabet set sold between 1972 and 1989. Ten of the test subjects recalled owning the set, and the 11th beat odds of a billion to one in matching 14 of their colour associations with the fridge magnets. So while these people may have been predisposed to synaesthesia via their genetics, how it manifested may well have been learned in childhood.
<snip>
Beyond Human | 11 June 2014
Can synaesthesia be learnt?
Frank Swain
Many people see words as colours, smells or sounds, and they swear it boosts their creativity. So could we all tweak our senses to see the world in this way?
<snip>
Colizoli, a cognitive neuroscientist, experiences synaesthesia. Some people with this condition see colours, smells or sounds when they read words. In Colizoli’s case, numbers have a certain size, shape or other physical property. For example, people’s ages are expressed as a curved line. She also happens to study synaesthesia at the University of Amsterdam, curious to know whether she was born with her condition, or whether it was partly learned.
If you could teach yourself to see the world this way, it could potentially boost your creativity. Famous synaesthetes reportedly include Pharrell Williams who sees music in colour (and who told Oprah’s O Magazine he couldn’t make music without it), and physicist Richard Feynman, who saw letters in equations as colours, and whose visualisation of quantum interactions won him the Nobel Prize.
<snip>
There’s some tantalising evidence that some aspects of synaesthesia can be learned. In a study carried out by Colizoli and her colleagues at the University of Amsterdam, non-synaesthetic people were given books to read in which the letters e, t, a and s were coloured while the rest of the text was left black. Despite reading the text as normal (and making no concerted effort to remember the colours), the participants began associating those letters with their colour.
<snip>
Natural synaesthesia does seem have an element of learning though – or at least, can sometimes be shaped by memorable experiences. Colizoli recalls a woman who identified each letter as having a distinct colour. One day she visited her elementary school classroom and discovered the brightly-coloured alphabet hanging on the wall matched how she saw letters – in learning to read and write, she may have subconsciously absorbed the colour as well as the shape of the letters. And last year, a study of 11 synaesthetes discovered that the particular colours they associated with letters were “startlingly similar” to those of a very famous Fisher Price fridge magnet alphabet set sold between 1972 and 1989. Ten of the test subjects recalled owning the set, and the 11th beat odds of a billion to one in matching 14 of their colour associations with the fridge magnets. So while these people may have been predisposed to synaesthesia via their genetics, how it manifested may well have been learned in childhood.
<snip>
4 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Sometimes I feel a little bit of crossover when playing music, but not when listening to it. If I get really high it is more profound, but I wish I could really have that visual. Seeing numbers in 3d space would be nice too since I suck at math 
